October 9 the Secretary of State sent to the British Legation a formal letter, written, like all Robert Smith’s important papers, by the President.[92] After recapitulating the negative results reached in the two interviews, Jackson was asked whether he had been rightly understood; and the letter ended by saying, that, “to avoid the misconceptions incident to oral proceeding, I have also the honor to intimate that it is thought expedient that our further discussions on the present occasion be in the written form.”[93]
Jackson saw a challenge in this change of attitude, and undertook to meet it by vigorous resistance. He had no mind to be thrown on the defensive; as he wrote to Canning, he wished to teach the American government not to presume on his patience.
“On connecting all these circumstances,” he reported,[94]—“the manner in which Mr. Smith had conducted our conferences; the abruptness, especially, with which he had put an end to them; and the style in which he announces to me, without leaving any choice or alternative, but as the absolute decision of his Government, ‘that it is thought expedient that our future discussions on the present occasion’ (i. e., the only occasion of doing away existing differences) ‘should be in the written form,’—it occurred to me to be necessary to put the matter on such a footing as to preclude, in limine, the idea that every species of indirect obloquy was to be patiently submitted to by his Majesty’s minister in this country.”
In this temper Jackson wrote a long letter, dated October 11, for the purpose, as he reported to Canning,[95] of checking “that spirit which can never lead to conciliation, by which America thinks herself entitled to make her will and her view of things the criterion by which they are to be generally approved or condemned.” Beginning with the assertion that “there does not exist in the annals of diplomacy a precedent” for stopping verbal communication within so few days after the delivery of credentials, he rehearsed the story of Erskine’s arrangement, and justified his refusal of apology or explanation. In doing so, he allowed himself to insinuate what Canning expressly asserted in his instructions, that Robert Smith had connived at Erskine’s misconduct:—
“It was not known when I left England whether Mr. Erskine had, according to the liberty allowed him, communicated to you in extenso his original instructions. It now appears that he did not. But ... I find ... that he has submitted to your consideration the three conditions specified in those instructions as the ground-work of an arrangement.... Mr. Erskine reports, verbatim et seriatim, your observations upon each of the three conditions, and the reasons which induced you to think that others might be substituted in lieu of them. It may have been concluded between you that these latter were an equivalent for the original conditions; but the very act of substitution evidently shows that those original conditions were in fact very explicitly communicated to you, and by you, of course, laid before the President for his consideration.”
After justifying the disavowal of Erskine on the admitted ground that he had disobeyed instructions, Jackson came to the point of his own powers. “His Majesty has authorized me,” he said, “notwithstanding the ungracious manner in which his former offer of satisfaction for the affair of the ‘Chesapeake’ was received, to renew that which Mr. Erskine was instructed to make.” As for the Orders in Council, these had been so far modified by the blockade of April 26 as to make any formal agreement on that subject seem unnecessary, and he reserved his proposals until he should hear those of the President.
Two days after this letter was despatched, Robert Smith sent a civil message that there had been no intention to stop personal intercourse; “he should be most happy to see me whenever I would call upon him; we might converse upon indifferent subjects; but that his memory was so incorrect that it was on his account necessary that in making his reports to the President he should have some written document to assist him.”[96] With this excuse for the secretary’s sudden withdrawal from the field the British minister contented himself until October 19, when he received an official letter, signed as usual by Robert Smith, but written with ability such as that good-natured but illiterate Secretary of State never imagined himself to possess.
The American note of October 19, far too long to quote or even to abridge, was perhaps the best and keenest paper Madison ever wrote. His faults of style and vagueness of thought almost wholly disappeared in the heat of controversy; his defence was cool, his attack keen, as though his sixty years weighed lightly the day when he first got his young antagonist at his mercy. He dealt Jackson a fatal blow at the outset, by reminding him that in July, 1808, only the previous year, Canning had put an end to oral communication after two interviews with Pinkney on the subjects under negotiation. He then made three points, well stated and easily remembered: (1) That when a government refuses to fulfil a pledge, it owes a formal and frank disclosure of its reasons. (2) That, in the actual situation, Mr. Erskine’s successor was the proper channel for that disclosure. (3) That since Mr. Jackson disclaimed authority to make either explanations or proposals, the President could do no more than express his willingness to favor any honorable mode of settling the matters in dispute.
In enlarging on the subjects touched by Jackson’s letter, the President made more than one remark of the kind that most exasperated the British minister. Since no settlement of the dispute was possible or even desired by Jackson, such flashes of Madison’s temper were neither harmful nor inappropriate, yet they were certainly on the verge of insult. He told Jackson plainly that Great Britain, by retaining her so-called retaliation after admitting that it no longer retaliated, was guilty of deception:—
“You cannot but be sensible that a perseverance under such circumstances in a system which cannot longer be explained by its avowed object would force an explanation by some object not avowed. What object might be considered as best explaining it is an inquiry into which I do not permit myself to enter, further than to remark that in relation to the United States it must be an illegitimate object.”