After experimenting upon Pinkney, much as he had sounded Parliament, Canning lost not an hour in composing the new instructions to Erskine. Four in number, all bearing the same date of January 23, they dealt successively with each of the disputed points; but in order to understand the embroilment they caused, readers must carry in mind, even at some effort of memory, precisely what Canning ordered Erskine to do, and precisely what Erskine did.
The first instruction dealt with the “Chesapeake” affair, and the Proclamation occasioned by it. Accepting Gallatin’s idea that the Proclamation being merged in the general non-intercourse would cease to exist as a special and separate provision of law, Canning instructed Erskine that if French ships of war should be excluded from American ports, and if the Proclamation should be tacitly withdrawn, he need no longer insist upon the formal recall. Further, Gallatin had suggested that Congress was about to exclude foreign seamen by law from national ships; and Canning admitted also this evasion of his demand that the United States should engage not to countenance desertions. Finally, he withdrew the demand for disavowals which had wrecked Rose’s mission.
Evidently the British government wished to settle the “Chesapeake” affair. Had Canning in like manner swept away his old conditions precedent to withdrawal of the Orders in Council, his good faith would have been above suspicion; but he approached that subject in a different spirit, and imposed one condition after another while he adopted the unusual course of putting each new condition into the mouth of some American official. He drew from Erskine’s despatches the inference that Madison, Smith, and Gallatin were willing to recognize in express terms the validity of the British “Rule of 1756.”[48] For this misunderstanding Erskine was to blame,[49] but Canning was alone responsible for the next remark, that “Mr. Pinkney has recently, but for the first time, expressed to me his opinion that there will be no indisposition on the part of his Government to the enforcement, by the naval power of Great Britain,” of the Act of Congress declaring non-intercourse with France. On the strength of these supposed expressions of William Pinkney, Madison, Smith, and Gallatin, none of which was official or in writing, Canning concluded:—
“I flatter myself that there will be no difficulty in obtaining a distinct and official recognition of these conditions from the American government. For this purpose you are at liberty to communicate this despatch in extenso to the American government.”
The chief interest of these instructions lay in the question whether Canning meant in good faith to offer on any conditions a withdrawal of the Orders in Council. The course of his own acts and of Perceval’s measures, suggested that he did not intend to offer any terms which the United States could accept. His remark to Perceval three weeks before, that they were quite at liberty to take new steps without “any hazard of seeing them too well received,” pointed in the same direction. Yet motives were enigmas too obscure for search, and the motives of Canning in this instance were more perplexing than usual. If he was serious in hoping an agreement, how could he insist on requiring official recognition of the right of Great Britain to enforce the municipal laws of the United States when he afterward admitted that such a claim “could not well find its way into a stipulation; that he had nevertheless believed it proper to propose the condition to the United States; that he should have been satisfied with the rejection of it; and that the consequence would have been that they should have intercepted the commerce to which it referred, if any such commerce should be attempted”?[50] In the instructions to Erskine he imposed the condition as essential to the agreement,—the same condition which he thought “could not well find its way into a stipulation,” and which “he should have been satisfied” to see rejected.
For two years Canning had lost no opportunity of charging the American government with subservience to Napoleon; even in these instructions he alleged Jefferson’s “manifest partiality” to France as a reason why England could entertain no propositions coming from him. He had in his hands Madison’s emphatic threats of war; how then could he conceive of obtaining from Madison an express recognition of the British Rule of 1756, which Madison had most deeply pledged himself to resist?
On the other hand, Canning showed forbearance and a wish for peace, by leaving Erskine minister at Washington as well as by passing unnoticed Madison’s threats of war; and he betrayed a singular incapacity to understand the bearing of his own demands when he directed Erskine to communicate his instructions in extenso to the American government. Had he intelligently acted in bad faith, he would not have given the President, whose attachment to France he suspected, the advantage of seeing these instructions, which required that America should become a subject State of England.
Perhaps a partial clew to these seeming contradictions might be found in the peculiar traits of Canning’s character. He belonged to a class of men denied the faculty of realizing the sensibilities of others. At the moment when he took this tone of authority toward America, he gave mortal offence to his own colleague Lord Castlereagh, by assuming a like attitude toward him. He could not understand, and he could never train himself to regard, the rule that such an attitude between States as between gentlemen was not admitted among equals.
Whatever was the reason of Canning’s conduct, its effect was that of creating the impression of bad faith by offering terms intended to be refused. The effect of bad faith was the more certain because the instructions closed by giving Erskine some latitude, not as to the conditions which were to be distinctly and officially recognized, but as to the form in which the recognition might be required:—
“Upon the receipt here of an official note containing an engagement for the adoption of the three conditions above specified, his Majesty will be prepared on the faith of such engagement,—either immediately, if the repeal shall have been immediate in America or on any day specified by the American government for that repeal,—reciprocally to recall the Orders in Council.”