Monroe was well informed of the efforts made to raise or to depress his own fortunes at Washington, and could see how easily his rival, the Secretary of State, might play a double part. Nothing could be simpler than such tactics. Madison had only to impose on Monroe the task of negotiating a treaty under impossible conditions. If the treaty should fail, the blame would fall upon Monroe; if it should succeed, the credit would be divided with Pinkney. No one could suppose that Madison would make any great effort to secure the success of a negotiation when success might make the negotiator the next President of the United States.
Monroe could not doubt the President’s coldness toward the treaty; he could not fail to see that the secretary’s personal wishes were rather against than for it; and when he studied the instructions he could not but admit that they were framed, if not with the intention, at all events with the effect, of making a treaty impossible. No harder task could well have been imposed than was laid upon Monroe. Not even when he had been sent to Madrid in defiance of Talleyrand and Godoy, to impose his own terms on two of the greatest Powers in the world, had his chance of success been smaller than when his Government required him to obtain from England, after the battle of Trafalgar, concessions which England had steadily refused when she was supposed to be drawing almost her last gasp. For a British ministry to abandon the Rule of 1756 was to challenge opposition; to throw open the colonial trade was to invite defeat; but to surrender the so-called right of impressment was to rush upon destruction. No minister that had ever ruled over the House of Commons could at such a moment have made such a treaty without losing his place or his head.
If America wanted such concessions she must fight for them, as other nations had done ever since mankind existed. England, France, and Spain had for centuries paid for their power with their blood, and could see no sufficient reason why America should take their hard-won privileges without a challenge. Jefferson thought otherwise. In his opinion, all the three Powers would end by conceding American demands, not as a matter of abstract right but for fear of throwing the United States into the arms of an enemy. The instructions to Monroe rested on this idea; and that no doubt might remain, Jefferson wrote to Monroe a private letter which expressed the doctrine in set terms.
“No two countries upon earth,” said the President,[285] “ave so many points of common interest and friendship; and their rulers must be great bunglers indeed if with such dispositions they break them asunder. The only rivalry that can arise is on the ocean. England may by petty-larceny thwartings check us on that element a little; but nothing she can do will retard us there one year’s growth. We shall be supported there by other nations, and thrown into their scale to make a part of the great counterpoise to her navy. If, on the other hand, she is just to us, conciliatory, and encourages the sentiment of family feelings and conduct, it cannot fail to befriend the security of both. We have the seamen and materials for fifty ships of the line and half that number of frigates; and were France to give us the money and England the dispositions to equip them, they would give to England serious proofs of the stock from which they are sprung and the school in which they have been taught, and added to the efforts of the immensity of sea-coast lately united under one Power would leave the state of the ocean no longer problematical. Were, on the other hand, England to give the money and France the dispositions to place us on the sea in all our force, the whole world, out of the continent of Europe, might be our joint monopoly. We wish for neither of these scenes. We ask for peace and justice from all nations, and we will remain uprightly neutral in fact.”
This was masterful not to say dictatorial language; for it came in support of categorical claims which, however just, were vehemently opposed by every conservative interest in England. The claims which Monroe was to make as ultimata could not be conceded by England without opening the door to claims more sweeping still. In the same breath with which the President threatened England with fifty ships of the line in case she would not abjure the right of impressment and the Rule of 1756, he added:—
“We begin to broach the idea that we consider the whole Gulf Stream as of our waters, in which hostilities and cruising are to be frowned on for the present, and prohibited as soon as either consent or force will permit us. We shall never permit another privateer to cruise within it, and shall forbid our harbors to national cruisers. This is essential for our tranquillity and commerce.”
These were bold words, but not well suited to Monroe’s task or likely to encourage his hopes. President Jefferson was not only bent upon forcing England to abandon by treaty the right of impressment and the control of the colonial trade; he not only asked for liberal favors in many different directions, which required the whole fabric of British legislation to be reconstructed, without equivalent on the part of the United States,—but he had also “begun to broach the idea” that he should dictate where England’s line-of-battle ships might sail upon the ocean. Monroe knew how such language would sound to English ears strained to hear the distant thunders from Trafalgar, and how such words would look to English eyes, dim with tears, as they watched their hero borne through the shrouded streets of London to rest in his glory beneath the dome of St. Paul’s. That England was inflated with her triumphs, mad in her pretensions, intolerable in her arrogance, was true. A people that had swept the ocean of enemies and held the winds and waves for subjects could hardly fail to go mad with the drunkenness of such stormy grandeur. The meanest beggar in England was glorified with the faith that his march was o’er the mountain waves and his home upon the deep; and his face would have purpled with rage at the idea that Jefferson should dare to say that the squadrons of England must back their topsails and silence their broadsides when they reached the edge of the Gulf Stream.
With this picture before his eyes, Monroe could feel no great confidence either in his own success or in the good faith of the President’s instructions, which tied him to impossible conditions. Nevertheless he accepted the task; and as he had gone to Spain with the certainty of defeat and mortification, he remained in London to challenge a hopeless contest. As though to destroy his only chance of success, on the very day of Pinkney’s arrival Fox fell ill. His complaint was soon known to be dropsical, and his recovery hopeless. Two months passed, while the American envoys waited the result. Aug. 20, 1806, Fox, being still unable to do business, appointed Lord Holland and Lord Auckland to carry on the negotiation in his place. No better men could have been selected. Lord Holland especially, Fox’s favorite nephew and the most liberal of all Whig noblemen, was warmly disposed to make the negotiation a success; but much invaluable time had been lost, and Napoleon was on the eve of Jena.
The negotiation began in earnest August 27, but proved to be long and arduous. The two British commissioners, though courteous and friendly, stood in constant fear of the charge that they had surrendered vital English interests under American threats. They were especially hampered by the Admiralty, the atmosphere of which, as Lord Holland complained,[286] made those who breathed it shudder at anything like concessions to the Americans; while the Treasury, though naturally still less yielding, listened willingly to every expedient that offered hope for the revenue. September 1 began the struggle over impressments; and from the outset Monroe saw that the American claim had no chance of success, while the case of the West Indian trade was almost equally desperate. Only one serious discussion had taken place when the death of Fox, September 13, produced a new delay of several weeks; and on resuming the negotiation, Monroe and Pinkney were required to deal with a new Foreign Secretary,—Charles Grey, Lord Howick,—to be better known in English history as Earl Grey. Such a change boded no good to the Americans. All Fox’s influence could not counteract the Tory instincts of Parliament; and what Fox could not do when the Whigs were strong could much less be done by Lord Howick when the Ministry was every day tottering to its fall.
November 11 the American negotiators wrote home that they had decided to disregard their instructions and to abandon impressments,—accepting, instead of a formal article on the subject, a note in which the British commissioners pledged their government to exercise the strictest care not to impress American citizens, and to afford prompt redress should injury be inflicted while impressing British seamen. Having thus made up his mind to violate instructions on the chief point of negotiation, Monroe found nothing to prevent his doing so in other respects. His progress under William Pinkney’s influence was rapid; his good nature, in the face of Lord Holland’s difficult position, was extreme; and at the end of a few weeks, Dec. 31, 1806, Jefferson’s favorite diplomatic agent set his name to a treaty which, taking its omissions and admissions together, surpassed Jay’s treaty in outraging Jefferson’s prejudices and express desires.