In the new Ministry of 1807, the lead was to the strongest; and Canning, who treated with almost open contempt his rival Lord Castlereagh, a man intellectually his inferior, could count upon a great destiny. Less scrupulous or less broad than Pitt, he held that Napoleon’s course had absolved England from ordinary rules of morals. To fight Bonaparte with his own weapons had become the duty of Englishmen; and the first act of the new Administration showed what meaning was to be put on this favorite phrase.
February 8, Napoleon fought the desperate battle of Eylau, which closely resembled a defeat. His position was critical; but before Canning could fairly get control of events, Napoleon, June 14, again attacked the Russians at Friedland and won a decisive victory. June 25 Napoleon and Alexander held an interview on an island in the Niemen. The chief point in question was whether Alexander would abandon England; and this he was almost glad to do, for England had abandoned him. Alexander yielded to the force and flattery of Napoleon, and signed July 7 the treaty of Tilsit. By a private understanding the remaining neutrals were left to Napoleon to be dealt with as he pleased. Denmark was the only neutral power the control of which was necessary for the success of Napoleon’s system, and August 2 he sent orders to Bernadotte, who was to command at Hamburg: “If England does not accept the mediation of Russia, Denmark must declare war upon her, or I will declare war on Denmark.”[40] Finding that the Prince Royal hesitated, Napoleon, August 17, sent orders[41] to Bernadotte to hold himself ready with all his troops to march into Denmark either as ally or enemy, according to the issue of the pending negotiation. Threatened by this overwhelming danger, the Prince Royal of Denmark alternately promised and evaded the declaration of war; when suddenly his doubts were brought to an end by the diplomacy of Canning.
The British ministry had been secretly informed of what took place at Tilsit, and even without secret information could not have doubted the fate of Denmark. Vigor was necessary; and as early as July 19, before news had arrived of the formal signature of the Tilsit treaty, the Cabinet decided on sending to Copenhagen a large naval expedition which had been collected for a different purpose. July 26 the expedition, commanded by Lord Gambier, sailed from the Downs. It consisted of some twenty ships of the line, forty frigates, and transports containing twenty-seven thousand troops commanded by Lord Cathcart; and it carried a diplomatic agent with instructions to require from the Prince Royal of Denmark the delivery of the Danish fleet, as a temporary security for the safety of England.
The man whom Canning charged with this unpleasant duty was the same Jackson whose appointment as Minister to the United States had been opposed by Rufus King, and who had subsequently gone as British minister to Berlin. Jackson’s dogmatic temper and overbearing manners made him obnoxious even to the clerks of the Foreign Office;[42] but he was a favorite with Lord Malmesbury, who since Pitt’s death had become Canning’s political mentor, and Lord Malmesbury’s influence was freely used in Jackson’s behalf. Obeying his instructions, the British envoy went to Kiel and had an interview with the Prince Royal early in August, at about the time when Napoleon issued his first orders to Bernadotte. The Prince could only refuse with indignation Jackson’s demand, and sent orders to Copenhagen to prepare for attack. He was in the situation of Barron on the “Chesapeake.” Copenhagen had hardly a gun in position, and no troops to use in defence.
The British demand was in itself insulting enough, but Jackson’s way of presenting it was said to have been peculiarly offensive, and London soon rang with stories of his behavior to the unfortunate Prince Royal.[43] Even the King of England seemed to think that his agent needed rebuke. Lord Eldon, who was one of the advisers and most strenuous supporters of the attack on Copenhagen,—although he said in private that the story made his heart ache and his blood run cold,—used to relate,[44] on the authority of old King George himself, that when Jackson was presented at Court on his return from Copenhagen the King abruptly asked him, “Was the Prince Royal upstairs or down, when he received you?” “He was on the ground floor,” replied Jackson. “I am glad of it! I am glad of it!” rejoined the old King; “for if he had half the spirit of his uncle George III., he would infallibly have kicked you downstairs.” The Prince did not kick Mr. Jackson, though the world believed he had reason to do so, but he declined to accept the British envoy’s remark that in war the weak must submit to the strong; and Lord Gambier landed twenty thousand men, established batteries, and for three days and nights, from September 1 to September 5, bombarded Copenhagen. The city was neither invested nor assaulted nor intended to be occupied; it was merely destroyed, little by little,—as a bandit would cut off first an ear, then the nose, then a finger of his victim, to hasten payment of a ransom. At the end of the third day’s bombardment, when at last the Danish ships were delivered, the bodies of near two thousand non-combatants lay buried in the smoking ruins of about one half the city. At the same time all the Danish merchant-vessels in English waters, with their cargoes, to the value of ten million dollars, were seized and confiscated; while the Danish factory in Bengal was, without warning, swept into England’s pouch.
At the news of the awful tragedy at Copenhagen, Europe, gorged as for fifteen years she had been with varied horrors, shuddered from St. Petersburg to Cadiz. A long wail of pity and despair rose on the Continent, was echoed back from America, and found noble expression in the British Parliament. The attack upon the “Chesapeake” was a caress of affection compared with this bloody and brutal deed. As in 1804 Bonaparte—then only First Consul, but about to make himself a bastard Emperor—flung before the feet of Europe the bloody corpse of the Duc d’Enghien, so George Canning in 1807, about to meet Bonaparte on his own field with his own weapons, called the world to gaze at his handiwork in Copenhagen; and the world then contained but a single nation to which the fate of Copenhagen spoke in accents of direct and instant menace. The annihilation of Denmark left America almost the only neutral, as she had long been the only Republican State. In both characters her offences against Canning and Perceval, Castlereagh and Eldon, had been more serious than those of Denmark, and had roused to exasperation the temper of England. A single ship of the line, supported by one or two frigates, could without a moment’s notice repeat at New York the tragedy which had required a vast armament at Copenhagen; and the assault on the “Chesapeake” had given warning of what the British navy stood ready to do. Other emphatic omens were not wanting.
About July 27—the day after Lord Gambier’s fleet sailed from the Downs, and the day when Monroe first saw in the newspapers an account of the “Leopard’s” attack on the “Chesapeake”—the American minister might have read a report made by a committee of the House of Commons on the commercial state of the West Indian Islands. The main evil, said the committee,[45] was the very unfavorable state of the foreign market, in which the British merchant formerly enjoyed nearly a monopoly. “The result of all their inquiries on this most important part of the subject has brought before their eyes one grand and primary evil from which all the others are easily to be deduced; namely, the facility of intercourse between the hostile colonies and Europe under the American neutral flag, by means of which not only the whole of their produce is carried to a market, but at charges little exceeding those of peace, while the British planter is burdened with all the inconvenience, risk, and expense resulting from a state of war.” To correct this evil, a blockade of the enemies’ colonies had been suggested; “and such a measure, if it could be strictly enforced, would undoubtedly afford relief to our export trade. But a measure of more permanent and certain advantage would be the enforcement of those restrictions on the trade between neutrals and the enemies’ colonies which were formerly maintained by Great Britain, and from the relaxation of which the enemies’ colonies obtain indirectly, during war, all the advantages of peace.”
In its way this West Indian Report was stamped with the same Napoleonic character as the bombardment of Copenhagen or the assault on the “Chesapeake;” in a parliamentary manner it admitted that England, with all her navy, could not enforce a blockade by lawful means, and therefore it had become “a matter of evident and imperious necessity” that she should turn pirate. The true sense of the recommendation was neither doubted nor disputed in England, except as matter of parliamentary form. That the attempt to cut off the supply of French and Spanish sugar from Europe, either by proclaiming a paper blockade or the Rule of 1756, might result in war with the United States was conceded, and no one in private denied that America in such a case had just cause for war. The evidence upon which the Report founded its conclusion largely dealt with the probable effect on the colonies of a war with the United States; and the Report itself, in language only so far veiled as to be decent, intimated that although war would be essentially detrimental to the islands it would not be fatal, and would be better than their actual condition. The excuse for what every reasonable Englishman frankly avowed to be “a system of piracy,”[46] was that the West Indian colonies must perish without it, and England must share their fate. In vain did less terrified men, like Alexander Baring or William Spence, preach patience, explaining that the true difficulty with the West Indies was an overproduction of sugar, with which the Americans had nothing to do.
“To charge the distresses of the West Indian planters upon the American carriers,” said Spence,[47] “is almost as absurd as it would be for the assassin to lay the blame of murder upon the arsenic which he had purposely placed in the sugar-dish of his friend.”
Thus Parliament, Ministry, navy, colonies, the shipping and the landed interest of England had wrought public opinion to the point of war with the United States at the moment when Lord Gambier bombarded Copenhagen and the “Leopard” fired into the “Chesapeake.” The tornado of prejudice and purposeless rage which broke into expression on the announcement that a British frigate had fired into an American, surpassed all experience. The English newspapers for the year that followed the “Chesapeake” affair seemed irrational, the drunkenness of power incredible. The Americans, according to the “Morning Post” of Jan. 14, 1808, “possess all the vices of their Indian neighbors without their virtues;” and two days afterward the same newspaper—which gave tone to the country press—declared that England was irresistible: “Our vigor and energy have just reached that sublime pitch from which their weight must crush all opposition.”