Jefferson and His Colleagues: A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty

by Allen Johnson

* Henry Adams, History of the United States, IV, p. 110.

It is as clear as day that the British Government was now determined, under pretense of retaliating upon France, to promote British trade with the continent by every means and at the expense of neutrals. Another order-in-council, November 17, 1807, closed to neutrals all European ports under French control, "as if the same were actually blockaded," but permitted vessels which first entered a British port and obtained a British license to sail to any continental port. It was an order which, as Henry Adams has said, could have but one purpose—to make American commerce English. This was precisely the contemporary opinion of the historian's grandfather, who declared that the "orders-in-council, if submitted to, would have degraded us to the condition of colonists."

Only one more blow was needed, it would seem, to complete the ruin of American commerce. It fell a month later, when Napoleon, having overrun the Spanish peninsula and occupied Portugal, issued his Milan decree of December 17, 1807. Henceforth any vessel which submitted to search by English cruisers, or paid any tonnage duty or tax to the English Government, or sailed to or from any English port, would be captured and condemned as lawful prize. Such was to be the maritime code of France "until England should return to the principles of international law which are also those of justice and honor."

Never was a commercial nation less prepared to defend itself against depredations than the United States of America in this year 1807. For this unpreparedness many must bear the blame, but President Jefferson has become the scapegoat. This Virginia farmer and landsman was not only ignorant and distrustful of all the implements of war, but utterly unfamiliar with the ways of the sea and with the first principles of sea-power. The Tripolitan War seems to have inspired him with a single fixed idea—that for defensive purposes gunboats were superior to frigates and less costly. He set forth this idea in a special message to Congress (February 10, 1807), claiming to have the support of "professional men," among whom he mentioned Generals Wilkinson and Gates! He proposed the construction of two hundred of these gunboats, which would be distributed among the various exposed harbors, where in time of peace they would be hauled up on shore under sheds, for protection against sun and storm. As emergency arose these floating batteries were to be manned by the seamen and militia of the port. What appealed particularly to the President in this programme was the immunity it offered from "an excitement to engage in offensive maritime war." Gallatin would have modified even this plan for economy's sake. He would have constructed only one-half of the proposed fleet since the large seaports could probably build thirty gunboats in as many days, if an emergency arose. In extenuation of Gallatin's shortsightedness, it should be remembered that he was a native of Switzerland, whose navy has never ploughed many seas. It is less easy to excuse the rest of the President's advisers and the Congress which was beguiled into accepting this naive project. Nor did the Chesapeake outrage teach either Congress or the Administration a salutary lesson. On the contrary, when in October the news of the bombardment of Copenhagen had shattered the nerves of statesmen in all neutral countries, and while the differences with England were still unsettled, Jefferson and his colleagues decided to hold four of the best frigates in port and use them "as receptacles for enlisting seamen to fill the gunboats occasionally." Whom the gods would punish they first make mad!

The 17th of December was a memorable day in the annals of this Administration. Favorable tradewinds had brought into American ports a number of packets with news from Europe. The Revenge had arrived in New York with Armstrong's dispatches announcing Napoleon's purpose to enforce the Berlin decree; the Edward had reached Boston with British newspapers forecasting the order-in-council of the 11th of November. This news burst like a bomb in Washington where the genial President was observing with scientific detachment the operation of his policy of commercial coercion. The Non-Importation Act had just gone into effect. Jefferson immediately called his Cabinet together. All were of one mind. The impending order-in-council, it was agreed, left but one alternative. Commerce must be totally suspended until the full scope of these new aggressions could be ascertained. The President took a loose sheet of paper and drafted hastily a message to Congress, recommending an embargo in anticipation of the offensive British order. But the prudent Madison urged that it was better not to refer explicitly to the order and proposed a substitute which simply recommended "an immediate inhibition of the departure of our vessels from the ports of the United States," on the ground that shipping was likely to be exposed to greater dangers. Only Gallatin demurred: he would have preferred an embargo for a limited time. "I prefer war to a permanent embargo," he wrote next day. "Government prohibitions," he added significantly, "do always more mischief than had been calculated." But Gallatin was overruled and the message, in Madison's form, was sent to Congress on the following day. The Senate immediately passed the desired bill through three readings in a single day; the House confirmed this action after only two days of debate; and on the 22d of December, the President signed the Embargo Act.

What was this measure which was passed by Congress almost without discussion? Ostensibly it was an act for the protection of American ships, merchandise, and seamen. It forbade the departure of all ships for foreign ports, except vessels under the immediate direction of the President and vessels in ballast or already loaded with goods. Foreign armed vessels were exempted also as a matter of course. Coasting ships were to give bonds double the value of vessel and cargo to reland their freight in some port of the United States. Historians have discovered a degree of duplicity in the alleged motives for this act. How, it is asked, could protection of ships and seamen be the motive when all of Jefferson's private letters disclose his determination to put his theory of peaceable coercion to a practical test by this measure? The criticism is not altogether fair, for, as Jefferson would himself have replied, peaceable coercion was designed to force the withdrawal of orders-in-council and decrees that menaced the safety of ships and cargoes. The policy might entail some incidental hardships, to be sure, but the end in view was protection of American lives and property. Madison was not quite candid, nevertheless, when he assured the British Minister that the embargo was a precautionary measure only and not conceived with hostile intent.

Chimerical this policy seemed to many contemporaries; chimerical it has seemed to historians, and to us who have passed through the World War. Yet in the World War it was the possession of food stuffs and raw materials by the United States which gave her a dominating position in the councils of the Allies. Had her commerce in 1807 been as necessary to England and France as it was "at the very peak" of the World War, Thomas Jefferson might have proved that peaceable coercion is an effective alternative to war; but he overestimated the magnitude and importance of the carrying trade of the United States, and erred still more grievously in assuming that a public conscience existed which would prove superior to the temptation to evade the law. Jefferson dreaded war quite as much because of its concomitants as because of its inevitable brutality, quite as much because it tended to exalt government and to produce corruption as because it maimed bodies and sacrificed human lives. Yet he never took fully into account the possible accompaniments of his alternative to war. That the embargo would debauch public morals and make government arbitrary, he was to learn only by bitter experience and personal humiliation.

Just after the passage of this momentous act, Canning's special envoy, George Rose, arrived in the United States. A British diplomat of the better sort, with much dignity of manner and suave courtesy, he was received with more than ordinary consideration by the Administration. He was commissioned, every one supposed, to offer reparation for the Chesapeake affair. Even after he had notified Madison that his instructions bade him insist, as an indispensable preliminary, on the recall of the President's Chesapeake proclamation, he was treated with deference and assured that the President was prepared to comply, if he could do so without incurring the charge of inconsistency and disregard of national honor. Madison proposed to put a proclamation of recall in Rose's hands, duly signed by the President and dated so as to correspond with the day on which all differences should be adjusted. Rose consented to this course and the proclamation was delivered into his hands. He then divulged little by little his further instructions, which were such as no self-respecting administration could listen to with composure. Canning demanded a formal disavowal of Commodore Barron's conduct in encouraging deserters from His Majesty's service and harboring them on board his ship. "You will state," read Rose's instructions, "that such disavowals, solemnly expressed, would afford to His Majesty a satisfactory pledge on the part of the American Government that the recurrence of similar causes will not on any occasion impose on His Majesty the necessity of authorizing those means of force to which Admiral Berkeley has resorted without authority, but which the continued repetition of such provocations as unfortunately led to the attack upon the Chesapeake might render necessary, as a just reprisal on the part of His Majesty." No doubt Rose did his best to soften the tone of these instructions, but he could not fail to make them clear; and Madison, who had conducted these informal interviews, slowly awoke to the real nature of what he was asked to do. He closed further negotiations with the comment that the United States could not be expected "to make, as it were, an expiatory sacrifice to obtain redress, or beg for reparation." The Administration determined to let the disavowal of Berkeley suffice for the present and to allow the matter of reparation to await further developments. The coercive policy on which the Administration had now launched would, it was confidently believed, bring His Majesty's Government to terms.

The very suggestion of an embargo had an unexpected effect upon American shipmasters. To avoid being shut up in port, fleets of ships put out to sea half-manned, half-laden, and often without clearance papers. With freight rates soaring to unheard-of altitudes, ship-owners were willing to assume all the risks of the sea—British frigates included. So little did they appreciate the protection offered by a benevolent government that they assumed an attitude of hostility to authority and evaded the exactions of the law in every conceivable way. Under guise of engaging in the coasting trade, many a ship landed her cargo in a foreign port; a brisk traffic also sprang up across the Canadian border; and Amelia Island in St. Mary's River, Florida, became a notorious mart for illicit commerce. Almost at once Congress was forced to pass supplementary acts, conferring upon collectors of ports powers of inspection and regulation which Gallatin unhesitatingly pronounced both odious and dangerous. The President affixed his signature ruefully to acts which increased the army, multiplied the number of gunboats under construction, and appropriated a million and a quarter dollars to the construction of coast defenses and the equipment of militia. "This embargo act," he confessed, "is certainly the most embarrassing we ever had to execute. I did not expect a crop of so sudden and rank growth of fraud and open opposition by force could have grown up in the United States."

The worst feature of the experiment was its ineffectiveness. The inhibition of commerce had so slight an effect upon England that when Pinkney approached Canning with the proposal of a quid pro quo—the United States to rescind the embargo, England to revoke her orders-in-council—he was told with biting sarcasm that "if it were possible to make any sacrifice for the repeal of the embargo without appearing to deprecate it as a measure of hostility, he would gladly have facilitated its removal AS A MEASURE OF INCONVENIENT RESTRICTION UPON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE." By licensing American vessels, indeed, which had either slipped out of port before the embargo or evaded the collectors, the British Government was even profiting by this measure of restriction. It was these vagrant vessels which gave Napoleon his excuse for the Bayonne decree of April 17, 1808, when with a stroke of the pen he ordered the seizure of all American ships in French ports and swept property to the value of ten million dollars into the imperial exchequer. Since these vessels were abroad in violation of the embargo, he argued, they could not be American craft but must be British ships in disguise. General Armstrong, writing from Paris, warned the Secretary of State not to expect that the embargo would do more than keep the United States at peace with the belligerents. As a coercive measure, its effect was nil. "Here it is not felt, and in England... it is forgotten."