In return Madison offered to the British government the unconditional surrender of deserters by sea and land, together with certain precautions against the smuggling of articles contraband of war.
Although Madison pressed the necessity of an immediate understanding on these points, he did so in his usual temperate and conciliatory manner; while Merry frankly avowed that he could give no hopes of such propositions being listened to. He did this the more decisively because Congress seemed about to take the matter of impressments into its own hands, and was already debating a Bill for the protection of seamen by measures which tended to hostilities. Madison disavowed responsibility for the legislation, although he defended it in principle.[283] Merry contented himself for the time by saying that if the United States government sought their remedy in municipal law, the matter would immediately cease to be a subject of negotiation.
Thus, in one short month, the two governments were brought to what the British minister supposed to be the verge of rupture. That any government should take so well-considered a position without meaning to support it by acts, was not probable. Acts of some kind, more or less hostile in their nature, were certainly intended by the United States government in case Great Britain should persist in contempt for neutral rights; the sudden change of tone at Washington left no doubt on this point. Edward Thornton, who had not yet been transferred to another post, wrote in consternation to the Foreign Office, fearing that blame might be attached to his own conduct while in charge of the legation:[284]—
“When I compare the complexion of Mr. Merry’s correspondence with that of my own, particularly during the course of the last summer, before the intelligence of the Louisiana purchase reached this country, I can scarcely credit the testimony of my own senses in examining the turn which affairs have taken, and the manifest ill-will discovered toward us by the Government at the present moment.... I believe that the simple truth of the case is, after all, the circumstance ... that a real change has taken place in the views of this Government, which may be dated from the first arrival of the intelligence relative to the Louisiana purchase, and which has since derived additional force and acrimony from the opinion that Great Britain cannot resist, under her present pressure, the new claims of the United States, and now, from the necessity they are under of recurring to the influence of France in order to support their demands against Spain.... The cession of Louisiana, notwithstanding that the circumstances under which it was made ought to convince the vainest of men that he was not the sole agent in the transaction, has elevated the President beyond imagination in his own opinion; and I have no doubt that he thinks of securing himself at the next election by having to boast of concessions and advantages derived from us, similar to those he has gained from France,—that is, great in appearance, and at a comparatively insignificant expense.”
From such premises, the conclusion, so far as concerned England, was inevitable; and Thornton agreed with Merry in affirming it without reserve:—
“Everything, as it relates to this government, now depends on our firmness. If we yield an iota without a real and perfect equivalent (not such imaginary equivalents as Mr. Madison mentions to Mr. Merry), we are lost.”
CHAPTER XVII.
Whatever objects the President and the Secretary of State may have expected to gain by their change of tone in the winter of 1803–1804 toward Spain and England, they must have been strangely free from human passions if they were unconscious of making at least two personal enemies upon whose ill-will they might count. If they were unaware of giving their victims cause for bitterness,—or if, as seemed more probable, they were indifferent to it,—the frequent chances of retaliation which the two ministers enjoyed soon showed that in diplomacy revenge was not only sweet but easy. Even the vehement Spanish hatred felt by Yrujo for Madison fell short of the patient Anglo-Saxon antipathy rooted in the minds of the British minister and his wife. When Yrujo, in March, 1804, burst into the State Department with the Mobile Act in his hand and denounced Madison to his face as party to an “infamous libel,” he succeeded in greatly annoying the secretary without violating Jefferson’s “canons of etiquette.” Under the code of republican manners which the President and his secretary had introduced, they could not fairly object to anything which Yrujo might choose to say or do. Absolute equality and “the rule of pêle-mêle” reached their natural conclusion between such hosts and guests in freedom of language and vehemence of passion. What might have been Merry’s feelings or conduct had he met with more cordiality and courtesy was uncertain; but the mortifications of his first month at Washington embittered his temper, and left distinct marks of acrimony in the diplomacy of America and England, until war wiped out the memory of reciprocal annoyances. The Spaniard’s enmity was already a peril to Madison’s ambition, and one which became more threatening every day; but the Englishman’s steady resentment was perhaps more mischievous, if less noisy. The first effect of Jefferson’s tactics was to ally the British minister with Yrujo; the second bound him to Senator Pickering and Representative Griswold; the third united his fortunes with those of Aaron Burr. Merry entered the path of secret conspiracy; he became the confidant of all the intriguers in Washington, and gave to their intrigues the support of his official influence.
The Federalists worked mischievously to widen the breach between the British minister and the President. They encouraged Merry’s resentment. Late in January, nearly two months after the first pêle-mêle, Madison officially informed Merry for the first time that the President meant to recognize no precedence between foreign ministers, but that all, even including secretaries of legation in charge, were to be treated with perfect equality, or what Madison termed “a complete pell-mell,” and would be received, even at their first audience, with no more ceremony than was practised toward any other individual. Merry replied that this notice should have been given to him on his arrival, and that he could not acquiesce in it without instructions. He then wrote to his Government,[285]—
“I have now but too much reason to fear, what I did not at first suspect, that the marked inattention toward me of the present Administration of this country has been a part of their unfriendly disposition toward his Majesty and toward the nation which I have the honor to represent.”