[105] Correspondance de Napoleon, xvi. 192; American State Papers, iii. 90.
CHAPTER VI.
Oct. 29, 1807, Monroe left London; and November 14, the day when the Orders in Council were first published in the official “Gazette,” he sailed from Plymouth for home.
Nearly five years had passed since Monroe received the summons from Jefferson which drew him from his retirement in Virginia to stand forward as the diplomatic champion of the United States in contest with the diplomatists of Europe; and these five years had been full of unpleasant experience. Since signing the Louisiana treaty, in May, 1803, he had met only with defeat and disaster. Insulted by every successive Foreign Secretary in France, Spain, and England; driven from Madrid to Paris and from Paris to London; set impossible tasks, often contrary to his own judgment,—he had ended by yielding to the policy of the British government, and by meeting with disapproval and disavowal from his own. As he looked back on the receding shores of England, he could hardly fail to recall the circumstances of his return from France ten years before. In many respects Monroe’s career was unparalleled, but he was singular above all in the experience of being disowned by two Presidents as strongly opposed to each other as Washington and Jefferson, and of being sacrificed by two secretaries as widely different as Timothy Pickering and James Madison.
In America only two men of much note were prepared to uphold his course, and of these the President was not one; yet Jefferson exerted himself to disguise and soften Monroe’s discredit. He kept the treaty a secret when its publication would have destroyed Monroe’s popularity and strengthened Madison. When at length, after eight months’ delay, the British note appended to the treaty was revealed, Monroe’s friend Macon, though anxious to make him President, privately admitted that “the extract of the treaty which has been published has injured Monroe more than the return of it by the President.”[106] John Randolph alone held up Monroe and his treaty as models of statesmanship; and although Randolph was the only Republican who cared to go this length, Monroe found one other friend and apologist in a person who rivalled Randolph in his usual economy of praise. Timothy Pickering held that Merry and Erskine were no good Englishmen, but he was satisfied with Monroe.
“I sincerely wish an English minister here to be a very able man,” he wrote[107] privately from Washington to a friend in Philadelphia,—“one who will feel and justly estimate the dignity of his country, and bring down the supercilious looks of our strutting Administration. The feebleness of Merry and Erskine have encouraged them to assume a vain importance and haughtiness as remote from the genuine spirit and as injurious to the solid interests of our country as they are irritating to Great Britain. The ridiculous gasconade of our rulers has indeed disgraced our nation. The sentiment above expressed is excited by the consideration that Great Britain is our only shield against the overwhelming power of Bonaparte; and therefore I view the maintenance of her just rights as essential to the preservation of our own. I have regretted to see our newspapers continue to reproach Monroe. His abilities you know how to estimate, but I never considered him as wanting in probity. An enragé relative to the French, and implicitly relying on the advice of Jefferson, his deportment did not permit his remaining the minister of the United States at Paris [in 1797]; but I have certain information that at London no one could conduct with more propriety than he does; and, such is his sense of the proceedings of our rulers, he lately said he did not know how long the British government would bear with our petulance.”
This letter, written while Monroe was at sea, betrayed a hope that the notorious quarrel between him and Jefferson would prove to be permanent; but Pickering could never learn to appreciate Jefferson’s genius for peace. Doubtless only personal friendship and the fear of strengthening Federalist influence prevented President Jefferson from denouncing Monroe’s conduct as forcibly as President Washington had denounced it ten years before; and Jefferson’s grounds of complaint were more serious than Washington’s. Monroe expected and even courted martyrdom, and never quite forgot the treatment he received. In private, George Hay, Monroe’s son-in-law, who knew all the secrets of his career, spoke afterward of Jefferson as “one of the most insincere men in the world; ... his enmity to Mr. Monroe was inveterate, though disguised, and he was at the bottom of all the opposition to Mr. Monroe in Virginia.”[108] Peacemakers must submit to the charges which their virtues entail, but Jefferson’s silence and conciliation deserved a better return than to be called insincere.
Monroe returned to Virginia, praised by George Canning and Timothy Pickering, to be John Randolph’s candidate for the Presidency, while Jefferson could regard him in no other light than as a dupe of England, and Madison was obliged to think him a personal enemy. As a result of five years’ honest, patient, and painstaking labor, this division from old friends was sad enough; but had Monroe been a nervous man, so organized as to feel the arrows of his outrageous fortune, his bitterest annoyance on bidding final farewell to Europe would have been, not the thought of his reception in America, not even the memory of Talleyrand’s reproofs, or of the laurels won by Don Pedro Cevallos, or of Lord Harrowby’s roughness, or Lord Mulgrave’s indifference, or Lord Howick’s friendly larcenies, or Canning’s smooth impertinences,—as a diplomatist he would rather have felt most hurt that the British ministry had contrived a new measure of vital interest to America, and should have allowed him to depart without a word of confidence, explanation, or enlightenment as to the nature of the fresh aggression which was to close a long list of disasters with one which left to America only the title of an independent nation.
As early as October 3 the “Morning Post” announced at great length that his Majesty’s government had adopted the principle of retaliation. November 10, while Monroe was still waiting at Portsmouth for a fair wind, the “Times” made known that a proclamation was in readiness for the King’s signature, declaring France and all her vassal kingdoms in a state of siege: “The sum of all reasoning on the subject is included in this, that the Continent must and will have colonial productions in spite of the orders and decrees of its master, and we are to take care that she have no other colonial produce than our own.” The fact that American commerce with the Continent was to be forbidden became a matter of public notoriety in London before November 13, and on Saturday, November 14, the day when Monroe’s ship sailed from Portsmouth, the order appeared in the “Gazette;” yet Monroe himself would be obliged to appear before the President in official ignorance of a measure discussed and adopted under his eyes.
George Henry Rose, whom Canning selected as special envoy to settle the “Chesapeake” affair, and who sailed in the “Statira” frigate two days before Monroe, knew officially as little as Monroe himself of the coming order; but this ignorance was due to Canning’s settled plan of keeping the “Chesapeake” affair independent of every other dispute. Canning could have had no deep motive in withholding official knowledge of the order from Monroe, Pinkney, and Rose; he could not have foreseen when or how the winds would blow; yet, by mere accident, one day’s delay added greatly to the coming embarrassments of the American government. The departure of vessels depended on a favorable wind, and for some weeks before November 14 westerly winds prevailed. About that day the weather changed, and all the ships bound to America sailed nearly together. The “Statira” and “Augustus,” carrying Rose and Monroe, started from Portsmouth for Norfolk; the “Revenge” set sail from Cherbourg, with despatches from Armstrong; the “Brutus,” with London newspapers of November 12, departed from Liverpool for New York; and the “Edward,” with London newspapers and letters to November 10, left Liverpool for Boston. All were clear of land by November 14, when the “Gazette” published the Order in Council; but for weeks afterward no other vessels crossed the Atlantic.