Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812. Volume 1

by A. T. Mahan

CHAPTER II[ToC]

FROM INDEPENDENCE TO JAY'S TREATY, 1794

The colonial connection between Great Britain and the thirteen communities which became the original States of the American Union was brought to a formal conclusion in 1776, by their Declaration of Independence. Substantially, however, it had already terminated in 1774. This year was marked by the passage of the Boston Port Bill, with its accessory measures, by the British Parliament, and likewise by the renewal, in the several colonies, of the retaliatory non-importation agreements of 1765. The fundamental theory of the eighteenth century concerning the relations between a mother country and her colonies, that of reciprocal exclusive benefit, had thus in practice yielded to one of mutual injury; to coercion and deprivation on the one side, and to passive resistance on the other. On September 5 the representatives of twelve colonies assembled in Philadelphia; Georgia alone sending no delegates, but pledging herself in anticipation to accept the decisions taken by the others. One of the first acts of this Congress of the Continental Colonies was to indorse the resolutions by which Massachusetts had placed herself in an attitude of contingent rebellion against the Crown, and to pledge their support to her in case of a resort to arms. These several steps were decisive and irrevocable, except by an unqualified abandonment, by one party or the other, of the principles which underlay and dictated them. The die was cast. To use words attributed to George the Third, "the colonies must now either submit or triumph."

The period which here began, viewed in the aggregate of the national life of the United States, was one of wavering transition and uncertain issue in matters political and commercial. Its ending, in these two particulars, is marked by two conspicuous events: the adoption of the Constitution and the Commercial Treaty with Great Britain. The formation of the Federal Government, 1788-90, gave to the Union a political stability it had hitherto lacked, removing elements of weakness and dissensions, and of consequent impotence in foreign relations; the manifestation of which since the acknowledgment of independence had justified alike the hopes of enemies and the forebodings of friends. Settled conditions being thus established at home, with institutions competent to regulate a national commerce, internal and external, as well as to bring the people as a whole into fixed relations with foreign communities, there was laid the foundations of a swelling prosperity to which the several parts of the country jointly contributed. The effects of these changes were soon shown in a growing readiness on the part of other nations to enter into formal compacts with us. Of this, the treaty negotiated by John Jay with Great Britain, in 1794, is the most noteworthy instance; partly because it terminated one long series of bickerings with our most dangerous neighbor, chiefly because the commercial power of the state with which it was contracted had reached a greater eminence, and exercised wider international effect, than any the modern world had then seen.

Whatever the merits of the treaty otherwise, therefore, the willingness of Great Britain to enter into it at all gave it an epochal significance. Since independence, commercial intercourse between the two peoples had rested on the strong compelling force of natural conditions and reciprocal convenience, the true foundation, doubtless, of all useful relations; but its regulation had been by municipal ordinance of either state, changeable at will, not by mutual agreement binding on both for a prescribed period. Since the separation, this condition had seemed preferable to Great Britain, which, as late as 1790, had evaded overtures towards a commercial arrangement.[54] Her consenting now to modify her position was an implicit admission that in trade, as in political existence, the former mother country recognized at last the independence of her offspring. The latter, however, was again to learn that independence, to be actual, must rest on something stronger than words, and surer than the acquiescence of others. This was to be the lesson of the years between 1794 and 1815, administered to us not only by the preponderant navy of Great Britain, but by the petty piratical fleets of the Barbary powers.

From the Boston Port Bill to Jay's Treaty was therefore a period of transition from entire colonial dependence, under complete regulation of all commercial intercourse by the mother country, to that of national commercial power, self-regulative and efficient, through the adoption of the Constitution. Upon this followed international influence, the growing importance of which Great Britain finally recognized by formal concessions, hitherto refused or evaded. During these years the policy of her government was undergoing a process of adjustment, conditioned on the one hand by the still vigorous traditional prejudices associated with the administration of dependencies, and on the other by the radical change in political relations between her remaining colonies in America and the new states which had broken from the colonial bond. This change was the more embarrassing, because the natural connection of specific mutual usefulness remained, although the tie of a common allegiance had been loosed. The old order was yielding to the new, but the process was signalized by the usual slowness of men to accept events in their full significance. Hitherto, all the western hemisphere had been under a colonial system of complete monopoly by mother countries, and had been generally excluded from direct communication with Europe, except the respective parent states. In the comprehensive provisions of the British Navigation Act, America was associated with Asia and Africa. Now had arisen there an independent state, in political standing identical with those of Europe, yet having towards colonial America geographical and commercial relations very different from theirs. Consequently there was novelty and difficulty in the question, What intercourse with the remaining British dominions, and especially with the American colonies, should be permitted to the new nation? Notwithstanding the breach lately made, it continued a controlling aim with the British people, and of the government as determined by popular pressure, to restore the supremacy of British trade, by the subjection of America, independent as well as colonial, to the welfare of British commerce. Notably this was to be so as regards the one dominant interest called Navigation, under which term was comprised everything relating to shipping,—ship-building, seafaring men, and the carrying trade. Independence had deprived Great Britain of the right she formerly had to manipulate the course of the export and import trade of the now United States. It remained to try whether there did not exist, nevertheless, the ability effectually to control it to the advantage of British navigation, as above defined. "Our remaining colonies on the Continent, and the West India Islands," it was argued, "with the favorable state of English manufactures, may still give us almost exclusively the trade of America;" provided these circumstances were suitably utilized, and their advantages rigorously enforced, where power to do so still remained, as it did in the West Indies.

Although by far the stronger and more flourishing part of her colonial dominions had been wrested from Great Britain, there yet remained to her upon the continent, in Canada and the adjacent provinces, a domain great in area, and in the West India Islands another of great productiveness. Whatever wisdom had been learned as regards the political treatment of colonies, the views as to the nature of their economical utility to the mother country, and their consequent commercial regulation, had undergone no enlargement, but rather had been intensified in narrowness and rigor by the loss of so valuable a part of the whole. No counteractive effect to this prepossession was to be found in contemporary opinion in Europe. The French Revolution itself, subversive as it was of received views in many respects, was at the first characterized rather by an exaggeration of the traditional exclusive policy of the eighteenth century relating to colonies, shipping, and commerce. In America, the unsettled commercial and financial conditions which succeeded the peace, the divergence of interests between the several new states, the feebleness of the confederate government, its incompetency to deal assuredly with external questions, and lack of all power to regulate commerce, inspired a conviction in Great Britain that the continent could not offer strong, continued resistance to commercial aggression, carried on under the peaceful form of municipal regulation. It was generally thought that the new states could never unite, but instead would drift farther apart.

The belief was perfectly reasonable; a gift of prophecy only could have foretold the happy result, of which many of the most prominent Americans for some time despaired. "It will not be an easy matter," wrote Lord Sheffield,[55] "to bring the American States to act as a nation; they are not to be feared as such by us. It must be a long time before they can engage, or will concur, in any material expense.... We might as reasonably dread the effects of combinations among the German as among the American states, and deprecate the resolves of the Diet, as those of Congress." "No treaty can be made that will be binding on the whole of them." "A decided cast has been given to public opinion here," wrote John Adams from London, in November, 1785, "by two presumptions. One is, that the American states are not, and cannot, be united."[56] Two years later Washington wrote: "The situation of the General Government, if it can be called a government, is shaken to its foundation, and liable to be overturned at every blast. In a word, it is at an end.... The primary cause of all our disorders lies in the different state governments, and in the tenacity of that power which underlies the whole of their systems. Independent sovereignty is so ardently contended for." "At present, under our existing form of confederation, it would be idle to think of making commercial regulations on our part. One state passes a prohibitory law respecting one article; another state opens wide the avenue for its admission. One assembly makes a system, another assembly unmakes it."[57]

Under such conditions it was natural that a majority of Englishmen should see power and profit for Great Britain in availing herself of the weakness of her late colonists, to enforce upon them a commercial dependence as useful as the political dependence which had passed away. Were this realized, she would enjoy the emoluments of the land without the expense of its protection. This gospel was preached at once to willing ears, and found acceptance; not by the strength of its arguments, for these, though plausible, were clearly inferior in weight to the facts copiously adduced by those familiar with conditions, but through the prejudices which the then generation had received from the three or four preceding it. The policy being adopted, the instrument at hand for enforcing it was the relation of colonies to mother countries, as then universally maintained by the governments of the day. The United States, like other independent nations, was to be excluded wholly from carrying trade with the British colonies, and as far as possible from sending them supplies. It was urged that Canada, and the adjacent British dominions, encouraged by this reservation of the West India market for their produce, would prove adequate to furnishing the provisions and lumber previously derived from the old continental colonies. The prosperity once enjoyed by the latter would be transferred, and there would be reconstituted the system of commercial intercourse, interior to the empire, which previously had commanded general admiration. The new states, acting commercially as separated communities, could oppose no successful rivalry to this combination, and would revert to isolated commercial dependence; tributary to the financial supremacy of Great Britain, as they recently had been to her political power. In debt to her for money, and drawing from her manufactures, returns for both would compel their exports to her ports chiefly, whence distribution would be, as of old, in the hands of British middlemen and navigators. Just escaped from the fetters of the carrying trade and entrepôt regulations, the twin monopolies in which consisted the value of a colonial empire, it was proposed to reduce them again under bondage by means for which the West India Islands furnished the leverage; for "the trade carried on by Great Britain with the countries now become the United States was, and still is, so connected with the trade carried on to the remaining British colonies in America, and the British islands in the West Indies, that it is impossible to form a true judgment of the past and present of the first, without taking a comprehensive view of all, as they are connected with, and influence, each other."[58]

Before the peace of 1783, the writings of Adam Smith had gravely shaken belief in the mercantile system of extraordinary trade regulation and protection as conducive to national prosperity. Though undermined, however, it had not been overthrown; and even to doubters there remained the exception, which Smith himself admitted, of the necessity to protect navigation as a nursery for the navy, and consequently as a fundamental means of national defence. Existence takes precedence of prosperity; the life is more than the meat. Commercial regulation, though unfitted to increase wealth, could be justified as a means to promote ship-building; to retain ship-builders in the country; to husband the raw materials of their work; to force the transport of merchandise in British-built ships and by British seamen; and thus to induce capital to invest, and men to embark their lives, in maritime trade, to the multiplication of ships and seamen, the chief dependence of the nation in war. "Keeping ships for freight," said Sheffield, "is not the most profitable branch of trade. It is necessary, for the sake of our marine, to force or encourage it by exclusive advantages." "Comparatively with the number of our people and the extent of our country, we are doomed almost always to wage unequal war; and as a means of raising seamen it cannot be too often repeated that it is not possible to be too jealous on the head of navigation." He proceeds then at once to draw the distinction between the protection of navigation and that of commerce generally. "This jealousy should not be confounded with that towards neighboring countries as to trade and manufactures; nor is the latter jealousy in many instances reasonable or well founded. Competition is useful, forcing our manufacturers to act fairly, and to work reasonably." Sheffield was the most conspicuous, and probably the most influential, of the controversialists on this side of the question at this period; the interest of the public is shown by his pamphlet passing through six editions in a twelvemonth. He was, however, far from singular in this view. Chalmers, a writer of much research, said likewise: "In these considerations of nautical force and public safety we discover the fundamental principle of Acts of Navigation, which, though established in opposition to domestic and foreign clamors, have produced so great an augmentation of our native shipping and sailors, and which therefore should not be sacrificed to any projects of private gain,"—that is, of commercial advantage. "There are intelligent persons who suggest that the imposing of alien duties on alien ships, rather than on alien merchandise, would augment our naval strength."[59]