The Government of the United States had not yet, in 1798, passed into the hands of men with an undue "passion for peace." Upon the unceremonious dismissal of Mr. Pinckney, not for personal objections but as rejecting any minister from America, the President had called a special meeting of Congress in May, 1797, and recommended an increase of the naval establishment. When the news of the law of January 18, 1798, reached the United States, Congress was in session. On the 28th of May an act was approved, authorizing the capture of any French armed vessel which shall, upon the coast of the United States, have committed any depredation upon her commerce. [345] On the 7th of July another act abrogated all existing treaties between the two countries; [346] and on the 9th was decreed the seizure of French armed vessels anywhere on the high seas, not only by public armed ships, but by privateers, which the President was authorized to commission. [347] Thereupon followed a period of maritime hostilities, though without a formal declaration of war, which lasted three years; the first prize being taken from the French in June, 1798, and peace being restored by a treaty, signed in Paris September 30, 1800, and ratified the following February. The small force of the United States was principally occupied in the West Indies, protecting their trade,—both by the patrol system directed against the enemy's cruisers, and by convoying bodies of merchantmen to and from the islands. As the condition of the French navy did not allow keeping large fleets afloat, the ships of the United States, though generally small, were able to hold their ground, capture many of the enemy, and preserve their own commerce from molestation. The mercantile shipping of France, however, had already been so entirely destroyed by Great Britain, that she suffered far more from the cessation of the carrying trade, which Americans had maintained for her, than from the attacks of the American navy.
The year 1798, which opened with the unlucky law of January 18, was in all respects unfortunate for France. In May Bonaparte sailed for Egypt, the country thus parting with its ablest general, with thirty-two thousand of its best troops, and its only available fleet, of thirteen sail-of-the-line, which the government with the utmost difficulty had been able to equip. On the first of August Nelson destroyed the fleet in the Battle of the Nile; and the British navy, forced to leave the Mediterranean in 1796, again asserted its preponderance throughout the whole of that sea, opposing an effectual barrier to the return of the army in Egypt. The entire face of affairs changed, not only in the East but in Europe. The Porte, at first hesitating, declared openly against France. A second coalition was formed between Great Britain, Austria, and Russia, to which Naples acceded; and the armies of the latter entered upon their campaign in November. They were, indeed, quickly overthrown; but the very march of the French troops against them left the armies in northern Italy hopelessly inferior to their opponents. The year 1799 was full of reverses. In Germany and in Italy the French were steadily driven back; in Switzerland only did they, under Masséna, hold their ground. The British indeed were repelled in their attack upon Holland, but they carried away with them the Dutch navy. A Russo-Turkish fleet, entering the Mediterranean, retook the Ionian Islands from the French; and Admiral Bruix escaped from Brest only to find it impossible to achieve any substantial results in the face of the British superiority on the sea. In the midst of this confusion and disaster, and amid the commercial and internal distress caused by the maritime legislation, Bonaparte returned. Landing on the 9th of October, he on the 9th of November overthrew the Directory. Preparations for war were at once begun, and the successes of the first consul in Italy and of Moreau in Germany, in 1800, combined with the defection of the czar from the coalition, restored peace to the Continent and internal quiet to France.
Upon this followed the renewal of the Armed Neutrality of the Baltic powers. Great Britain found herself again without an ally, face to face with France, now supported by the naval combination of the northern states. Still she stood resolute, abating not a jot of her asserted maritime rights. As before, the allies demanded that the neutral flag should cover the enemy's property that floated under it, and that the term "contraband of war" should apply only to articles strictly and solely applicable to warlike purposes, which, they claimed, naval stores and provisions were not. They proposed also to deprive Great Britain of the belligerent right of search, by sending ships of war with the merchant ships, and requiring that the assertion of the naval captain should be received as establishing the lawful character of the two or three hundred cargoes under his convoy. "The question," said Pitt, "is whether we are to permit the navy of our enemy to be recruited and supplied,—whether we are to suffer blockaded ports to be furnished with warlike stores and provisions,—whether we are to suffer neutral nations, by hoisting a flag upon a sloop or a fishing boat, to convey the treasures of South America to the harbors of Spain, or the naval stores of the Baltic to Brest and Toulon. I would ask, too, has there ever been a period, since we have been a naval country, in which we have acted upon this principle?" [348] and he alleged not only the unbroken practice of Great Britain, but her old treaties with the allied states, and especially the convention with Russia in 1793. So far as precedent and tradition went, England's case was unimpeachable. She was called upon to surrender, not a new pretension, but an old right important to her military position. "I have no hesitation," said Fox, Pitt's great opponent, "in saying that, as a general proposition, 'free bottoms do not make free goods;' and that, as an axiom, it is supported neither by the law of nations nor by common-sense." [349]
At this time the British navy was superior to the combined forces of all Europe. A fleet, of which Nelson was the animating spirit though not the nominal head, entered the Baltic. Denmark was struck down on the 2d of April, 1801; and this blow, coinciding with the murder of the Czar Paul, dissolved a coalition more menacing in appearance than in reality. The young man who succeeded to the Russian throne met with dignity the imposing attitude of Nelson, now left in chief command; but he had not inherited his father's fantastic ambitions, and the material interests of Russia in that day pointed to peace with Great Britain. The treaty, signed June 5, 1801, [350] permitted the neutral to trade from port to port on the coast of a nation at war; but renounced, on the part of Russia, the claim that the neutral flag covered the enemy's goods. On the other hand Great Britain admitted that property of a belligerent, sold bonâ fide to a neutral, became neutral in character and as such not liable to seizure; but from the operation of this admission obtained the special exception of produce from the hostile colonies. [351] This, Russia conceded, could not be carried directly from the colony to the mother country, even though it had become neutral property by a real sale; and similarly the direct trade from the mother country to the colony was renounced. Great Britain thus obtained an explicit acknowledgment of the Rule of 1756 from the most formidable of the maritime powers, and strengthened her hands for the approaching dispute with the United States. In return, she abandoned the claim, far more injurious to Russia, to seize naval stores as contraband of war. Four months later, hostilities between Great Britain and France also ceased.
The maritime commercial interests, both of belligerents and neutrals, received convincing and conspicuous illustration from this, the first of the two sea wars growing out of the French Revolution. It was the interest of the neutrals to step in and take up the trade necessarily abandoned, to a greater or less degree, by the belligerents; and it was also useful to both parties to the war that they should do so. But it was very much less to the advantage of the more purely maritime state than it was to its antagonist; for not only did she need help less, but such temporary changes in the course of trade tend to become permanent. The immediate gain may become a final and irretrievable loss. Hence Great Britain is seen to yield readily the restrictions of the Navigation Act, wherever it is clearly advisable to avail herself of neutral seamen or neutral carriers; but the concession goes no further than immediately necessary, and is always expressly guarded as temporary. The relaxation is a purely warlike measure, and she is perfectly consistent in refusing to allow it to her enemies. Every slackening of the Navigation Act was a violation in principle of the Rule of 1756, [352] which she was quite content to have her enemy imitate; as the big boy at school offers the small one the opportunity of returning an injury in kind. France might employ neutrals contrary to what Great Britain claimed as the law of nations, as the latter herself did; but there was the difference that Great Britain could put a stop to the operations favorable to her opponent, while France could only partially impede those that advantaged hers. It was, therefore, clearly the policy of the British to yield nothing to neutrals except when they could not avoid it, and then explicitly to assert the principle, while conceding a relaxation; they thus kept control over the neutral trade, and impeded operations that both helped their enemy and might also supplant their own commerce. In the latter part of the war, as the purpose of France to cripple their trade took shape, and the exclusion of British goods from the Continent became an evident and avowed intention, the ministry strengthened itself with the reflection that the measure was impracticable so long as neutral bottoms abounded; but a few months later the denial of intercourse between hostile nations and their colonies by neutral intermediaries was inserted in the Russian treaty. The intention to use neutrals to the utmost extent desirable for British interests thus coincided with the determination to stop a traffic esteemed contrary to them. The permission to neutrals, by the orders of January, 1798, to carry the produce of French and Dutch colonies to Great Britain, when they were threatened with seizure if they sailed with the same for France or Holland, illustrates both motives of action; while it betrays the gradual shaping of the policy—which grew up over against Bonaparte's Continental System—of forcing neutrals to make England the storehouse and toll-gate of the world's commerce. Superficially, Great Britain seems rather to relax toward neutrals between 1793 and 1801; but the appearance is only superficial. The tendencies that issued in the ever famous Orders in Council of 1807 were alive and working in 1798.
The question for British statesmen to determine, therefore, was how far to acquiesce in the expansion of neutral trade, and where to draw their line,—always a difficult task, dependent upon many considerations and liable to result in inconsistencies, real or apparent. For France the problem was less intricate. Her commerce even before the war was chiefly in foreign hands; [353] she had therefore little cause to fear ultimate injury by concessions. Immediate loss by neutral competition was impossible, for the British navy left her no ships to lose. Hence it was her interest to avail herself of neutral carriers to the fullest extent, to recognize that the freer their operations the better for her, and that, even could restrictions upon their carrying for her enemy be enforced, the result would be to compel the British people to develop further their own merchant shipping. Every blow at a neutral was really, even though not seemingly, a blow for Great Britain. In a general way this was seen clearly enough, and a policy favoring neutrals was traditional in France, but the blind passions of the Revolution overthrew it. To use the vigorous words of a deputy: "The French people is the victim of an ill-devised scheme, of a too blind trust in commerce-destroying, an auxiliary measure, which, to be really useful, should strike only the enemy, and not reach the navigation of neutrals and allies, and still less paralyze the circulation and export of our agriculture and of the national industries." [354] Such were the results of the direct action of successive French governments, and of the indirect embarrassment caused by the delays and inconsistencies of the executive and the tribunals. It was thought that neutrals could be coerced by French severities into resisting British restrictions, whether countenanced or not by international law. But Great Britain, though a hard taskmaster, did not so lay her burdens as to lose services which were essential to her, nor compel a resistance that under the military conditions was hopeless; and the series of wild measures, which culminated in the law of January 18, 1798, only frightened neutrals from French coasts, while leaving Great Britain in full control of the sea. The year 1797 saw the lowest depression of British trade; coincidently with the law of January 18 began a development, which, at first gradual, soon became rapid, and in which the neutrals driven from France bore an increasing proportion.
The short peace of Amiens lasted long enough to indicate how thoroughly Great Britain, while using neutrals, had preserved her own maritime advantages intact. The preliminaries were signed October 1, 1801, and war was again declared May 16, 1803; but, notwithstanding the delays in paying off the ships of war, and the maintenance of an unusually large number of seamen in the peace establishment, the neutral shipping employed fell from twenty-eight per cent, in 1801, to eighteen and a half per cent in 1802.
On the outbreak of the second war Napoleon reverted at once to the commercial policy of the Convention and the Directory. On the 20th of June, 1803, a decree was issued by him directing the confiscation of any produce of the British colonies, and of any manufactures of Great Britain, introduced into France. Neutral vessels arriving were required to present a certificate from the French consul at the port of embarkation, certifying that the cargo was in no part of British origin. The same measure was forcibly carried out in Holland, though nominally an independent state; [355] and the occupation of Hanover, while dictated also by the general principle of injuring Great Britain as much as possible, had mainly in view the closure of the Elbe and the Weser to British commerce. Beyond this, however, Bonaparte being then engrossed with the purpose of a direct attack by armed force upon the British islands, the indirect hostilities upon their commercial prosperity were, for the moment, neglected.
At the same period Great Britain began to feel that neutral rivalry was being carried too far for her own welfare, and determined to tighten the reins previously slackened. She obtained from Sweden in July, 1803, a special concession, allowing her to arrest Swedish vessels laden with naval stores for France, and to purchase the cargoes at a fair price,—a stipulation identical with that about provisions in Jay's treaty; and when the French occupation of Hanover excluded her ships from the Elbe and Weser, she by a blockade of the rivers shut out neutrals also. But it was in the West Indies, so long a fruitful source of wealth, that the pressure of neutral competition was most heavily felt. The utter ruin of San Domingo, and the embarrassments of the other islands hostile to Great Britain, had in the former war combined with the dangers of the seas to raise the price of colonial produce on the Continent, [356] and, consequently, to give a great development to the British growth of sugar and coffee, the transport of which was confined by law to British vessels. The planters, the shipping business, and the British merchants dealing with the West Indies, together with the various commercial interests and industries connected with them, all participated in the benefits of this traffic, which supplied over one fourth of the imports of the kingdom, and took off besides a large amount of manufactures. As production increased, however, and prices lowered, the West India business began to feel keenly the competition by the produce of the hostile islands, exported by American merchants.