Each government thus tried to overthrow the other; but that of England was for the moment the more successful. The uneducated force of democracy seemed about to break against the strength of an aristocratic system. When Parliament rose, July 4, domestic opposition was silenced, and nothing remained but to crush the resistance of America,—a task which all advices from the United States showed to be easy; while as though to make ministers invulnerable, Spain suddenly opened her arms to England, offering new markets that promised boundless wealth. At this unexpected good fortune England went well-nigh mad; and the Spanish revolution, which was in truth a gain to democracy, seemed to strike Jefferson a mortal blow. During the month of July, 1808, Canning and his colleagues exulted over Europe and America alike, looking down on Jefferson and his embargo with the disgust and horror which they might have felt for some monster of iniquity like the famous butcher of the Marrs, who was to rouse the shudders of England during these lurid years. According to Canning, Napoleon’s system was already “broken up into fragments utterly harmless and contemptible.”[279] According to Henry Brougham,[280] hardly ten men could be found in London who did not believe Bonaparte utterly broken, or think him worth paying one hundred pounds a year to live in retirement at Ajaccio the rest of his life. America was still more contemptible, and equally hated. Early in August, at a great dinner given at the London Tavern to the Spanish patriots, Sir Francis Baring, of the house of Baring Brothers,—a man who for a whole generation had stood at the head of British merchants,—proposed as chairman, among the regular toasts, the health of the President of the United States, and his voice was instantly drowned in hisses and protests. Jefferson, thanks to the slanders of Pickering and the Federalists, stood before England in the attitude of a foiled cutthroat, at the moment when by his order the American minister in London came to the British Foreign Office with a request that the Orders in Council should be withdrawn.
“That the Orders in Council did not produce the embargo, that they were not substantially known in America when the embargo took place,”[281] was the burden of Canning’s and Castlereagh’s constant charge against the United States government. Canning was one of six or eight men in the world who might with truth have said that they knew the orders to have produced the embargo. He alone could have proved it by publishing Erskine’s official evidence;[282] but he preferred to support Timothy Pickering and Barent Gardenier in persuading the world that Jefferson’s acts were dictated from Paris, and that their only motive was the assassination of England. “Nor, sir, do I think,” continued Canning before the whole House of Commons, “that the Orders in Council themselves could have produced any irritation in America.... Since the return of Mr. Rose no communication has been made by the American government in the form of complaint, or remonstrance, or irritation, or of any description whatever.” With infinite industry the assertions of Pickering and Gardenier, of John Randolph and of the Boston newspapers and pamphlets, were reprinted and circulated in London. “Your modesty would suffer,” wrote Rose to Pickering,[283] “if you were aware of the sensation produced in this country by the publication of a letter from a senator of Massachusetts to his constituents.”
Every American slander against Jefferson was welcomed in England, until Pinkney asked Madison in disgust, “Have you prohibited the exportation of all pamphlets which uphold our rights and honor?”[284] The English people could hardly be blamed if they became almost insane under the malice of these falsehoods, for no whisper of Iago was more poisonous than Canning’s innuendoes. Believing Jefferson to be in secret league with Napoleon, they insisted that the United States should be punished for the treason Jefferson had planned. Joseph Marriatt, a prominent member of Parliament, in a pamphlet[285] published in August, reminded President Jefferson of the fate of the late Czar Paul. The feeling of society was so bitter that by tacit agreement America ceased to be talked about; no one ventured longer to defend her.
In June Pinkney received instructions, dated April 30,[286] authorizing him to offer a withdrawal of the embargo on condition that England should withdraw the Orders in Council. In the situation of English feeling such an offer was almost an invitation to insult, and Pinkney would have gladly left it untouched. He tried to evade the necessity of putting it in writing; but Canning was inexorable. From week to week Pinkney postponed the unpleasant task. Not until August 23 did he write the note which should have been written in June. No moment could have been more unfortunate; for only two days before, Arthur Wellesley had defeated Junot at Vimieiro; and August 30 Junot capitulated at Cintra. The delirium of England was higher than ever before or since.
September 23 Canning replied.[287] Beginning with a refusal to admit the President’s advance, his note went on to discuss its propriety. “His Majesty,” it said, “cannot consent to buy off that hostility which America ought not to have extended to him, at the expense of a concession made, not to America, but to France.” Canning was a master of innuendo; and every sentence of his note hinted that he believed Jefferson to be a tool of Napoleon; but in one passage he passed the bounds of official propriety:—
“The Government of the United States is not to be informed that the Berlin Decree of Nov. 21, 1806, was the practical commencement of an attempt, not merely to check or impair the prosperity of Great Britain, but utterly to annihilate her political existence through the ruin of her commercial prosperity; that in this attempt almost all the Powers of the European continent have been compelled more or less to co-operate; and that the American embargo, though most assuredly not intended to that end,—for America can have no real interest in the subversion of the British power, and her rulers are too enlightened to act from any impulse against the real interests of their country,—but by some unfortunate concurrence of circumstances, without any hostile intention, the American embargo did come in aid of the ‘blockade of the European continent’ precisely at the very moment when if that blockade could have succeeded at all, this interposition of the American government would most effectually have contributed to its success.”
Like his colleague Lord Castlereagh, Canning deliberately tried to “lower and degrade” the American government in the eyes of its own people. His defiance was even more emphatic than his sarcasm.
“To this universal combination,” he continued, “his Majesty has opposed a temperate but a determined retaliation upon the enemy,—trusting that a firm resistance would defeat this project, but knowing that the smallest concession would infallibly encourage a perseverance in it.
“The struggle has been viewed by other Powers not without an apprehension that it might be fatal to this country. The British government has not disguised from itself that the trial of such an experiment might be arduous and long, though it has never doubted of the final issue. But if that issue, such as the British government confidently anticipated, has providentially arrived much sooner than could even have been hoped; if ‘the blockade of the Continent,’ as it has been triumphantly styled by the enemy, is raised even before it had been well established; and if that system, of which extent and continuity were the vital principles, is broken up into fragments utterly harmless and contemptible,—it is, nevertheless, important in the highest degree to the reputation of this country (a reputation which constitutes a great part of her power), that this disappointment of the hopes of her enemies should not have been purchased by any concession; that not a doubt should remain to distant times of her determination and of her ability to have continued her resistance; and that no step which could even mistakenly be construed into concession should be taken on her part while the smallest link of the confederacy remains undissolved, or while it can be a question whether the plan devised for her destruction has or has not either completely failed or been unequivocally abandoned.”
With this sweeping assertion of British power Canning might well have stopped; but although he had said more than enough, he was not yet satisfied. His love of sarcasm dragged him on. He thought proper to disavow the wish to depress American prosperity, and his disavowal was couched in terms of condescension as galling as his irony; but in one paragraph he concentrated in peculiar force the worst faults of his character and taste:—