“The advantages to be ultimately reaped from a perseverance in the line of conduct which Great Britain has adopted for the last four years appear to my mind to be infallible and of infinite magnitude; the profitable consequences of a state of hostility, small and uncertain. I have been pleasing my imagination with looking forward to the distant spectacle of all the northern continent of America covered with friendly though not subject States, consuming our manufactures, speaking our language, proud of their parent State, attached to her prosperity. War must bring with it extensive damage to our navigation, the probable loss of Canada, and the world behind it, the propagation of enmity and prejudices which it may be impossible to eradicate. The system of the American government does not strike me, with the near view I have of it, as being in so perilous a situation as is imagined in Europe. I am willing to avoid political prophecies, but I confess I think it will get on well enough if the country remains in peace; and if they go to war, the fabric may acquire strength. God forbid that it should be to our detriment, and to the triumph of our enemies!”
CHAPTER XV.
February 4, 1801, one month before the inauguration of President Jefferson, Pitt suddenly retired from office, and was succeeded by a weak ministry, in which Mr. Addington, afterward Lord Sidmouth, took the post vacated by Pitt. No event could have been happier for the prospects of President Jefferson, who might fairly count upon Addington’s weakness to prevent his interference in American affairs.
Knowing himself to be universally regarded as the friend and admirer of France, Jefferson was the more anxious not to be classed by the British government among the enemies of England. Even before he was inaugurated, he took occasion to request Edward Thornton, the British chargé,—
“With great earnestness, to assure his Majesty’s government that it should experience during his administration as cordial and sincere acts of friendship as had ever been received under that of his predecessors. I am aware,” said the President elect, “that I have been represented as hostile to Great Britain; but this has been done only for electioneering purposes, and I hope henceforward such language will be used no longer. I can appeal to all my past conduct that in everything in which I have been engaged relatively to England, I have always been guided by a liberal policy. I wish to be at the head of affairs no longer than while I am influenced by such sentiments of equal liberality toward all nations. There is nothing to which I have a greater repugnance than to establish distinctions in favor of one nation against another.”
The day after his inauguration he returned to the subject:—
“There is nothing I have more, or I may say so much, at heart as to adjust happily all differences between us, and to cultivate the most cordial harmony and good understanding. The English government is too just, I am persuaded, to regard newspaper trash, and the assertions contained in them that I am a creature of France and an enemy of Great Britain. For republican France I may have felt some interest; but that is long over; and there is assuredly nothing in the present government of that country which could naturally incline me to show the smallest undue partiality to it at the expense of Great Britain, or indeed of any other country.”[240]
Thornton felt no great confidence in the new President’s protests, and thought it possible that Jefferson had “on this, as he seems to have done on many late public occasions, taxed his imagination to supply the deficiency of his feelings.” All Englishmen were attached to the Federalist and New England interest; they could not understand that Virginia should be a safer friend than Massachusetts. Yet in truth Jefferson never was more serious than when he made these professions. The Southern republicans had nothing to gain from a quarrel with England; they neither wished for Canada, nor aspired to create shipping or manufactures: their chief antagonist was not England, but Spain. The only Power which could seriously injure them was Great Britain; and the only injury they could inflict in return was by conquering Canada for the benefit of Northern influence, or by building up manufactures which they disliked, or by cutting off their own markets for tobacco and cotton. Nothing warranted a belief that men like Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin would ever seek a quarrel with England.
The British Ministry soon laid aside any doubts they might have felt on the subject. Lord Grenville, who retired with Pitt, was succeeded as Foreign Secretary by Lord Hawkesbury, afterward better known as Lord Liverpool. The new Ministry negotiated for peace with Bonaparte. Oct. 1, 1801, the preliminaries were signed, and the world found itself again in a sort of repose, broken only by the bloody doings at St. Domingo and Guadeloupe. England returned, like France and Spain, to the rigor of the colonial system. The customs entries of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia rapidly diminished in number; American shipping declined; but Madison was relieved from the burden of belligerent disputes, which had been the chief anxiety of his predecessors in the State Department.
Yet peace did not put an end to all difficulties. Rufus King continued to negotiate in London in regard to the outstanding British debts, twice recognized by treaty, yet still unpaid by the United States; in regard to the boundary of Maine and that of the extreme northwest territory at the source of the Mississippi; and finally, in regard to impressments; while Edward Thornton at Washington complained that, in spite of peace and the decline of American shipping, encouragement was still offered to the desertion of British seamen in every port of the United States,—in fact that this means was systematically used to prevent British shipping from entering American ports in competition with the shipping of America. When Madison alleged that the national government had no share in such unfriendly conduct, Thornton thrust under his eyes the law of Virginia,—a law enacted by President Jefferson’s political friends in his political interests,—which forbade, under penalty of death, any magistrate of Virginia to be instrumental in surrendering deserters or criminals, even in cases where they were bound by treaty to do so. Madison could not deny that this legislation was contrary to a treaty right which the United States government was bound to enforce. He admitted that American shipmasters and consuls in British ports habitually asked the benefit of the British law, and received it; but he could hold out only a remote hope that mutual legislation might solve the difficulty by applying the merchant-seamen laws of the two countries reciprocally. In conversation with Thornton he lamented, with every appearance of sincerity and candor, the deficiency of the existing laws, and did not dispute that Great Britain could hardly be blamed for refusing the surrender of seamen on her side; but when Thornton asked him to order the return of a man who under aggravated circumstances had deserted from the British ship-of-war “Andromache” in the port of Norfolk, and had been immediately engaged on the United States revenue cutter there, Madison replied in a note coldly reiterating the fact, with which both parties were already acquainted, that neither the law of nations nor the provisions of any treaty enjoined the mutual restitution of seamen. This recognized formula, under which governments commonly express a refusal to act, was understood by Thornton as equivalent to an avowal that the new Administration, controlled by Virginians, would not venture, even in the future emergency of a demand for extradition under treaty, to risk the displeasure of Virginia.[241] Desertion, therefore, received no discouragement from the United States government; on the contrary, deserters, known to be such, were received at once into the national service, and their surrender refused. Under such circumstances the British government was not likely to be more accommodating than the American.