“You must say everywhere, and make the army believe, that I shall return in three or four weeks. In fact, my mere presence at Paris will make Austria shrink back to her nullity; and then, before the end of October, I will be back here. I shall be in Paris in five days. I shall go at full speed, day and night, as far as Bordeaux. Meanwhile everything will go on quieting itself in Spain.”[22]
Giving out that the conduct of Austria required his presence at Paris, he succeeded in imposing this fiction upon Europe by the empire of his will. Europe accepted the fable, which became history; but although the Emperor soon disposed of Austria, and although Spain was a more difficult problem than Austria ever was, Napoleon never kept his word to Joseph, and never again ventured within sight of the mistakes he could no longer correct.
Meanwhile Armstrong, disgusted with the disappointments and annoyances of his residence at Paris, had become anxious to escape without further loss of credit. His letters to Madison, published by Congress, returned to terrify his French acquaintance, and to close his sources of information. He could see no hope of further usefulness. As early as Oct. 25, 1808, when the Emperor was addressing his legislative chambers before setting out for Spain, Armstrong wrote to Madison that no good could come from keeping an American minister at Paris.[23] Yet in the enforced idleness of the month when Napoleon was in Spain, Armstrong found one ally whose aid was well worth seeking. After the Czar Alexander accepted, at Tilsit, the ascendency of Napoleon, he appointed as his minister of foreign relations the Count Nicholas Roumanzoff. The Czar was still a young man in his thirty-first year, while Roumanzoff, fifty-four years old, had the full powers of maturity. Together they shaped a Russian policy, in the traditional direction of Russian interests, founded upon jealousy of British maritime tyranny. Lord Howick’s and Spencer Perceval’s Orders in Council served to sharpen Russian as well as American antipathies, and brought the two distant nations into a sympathy which was certainly not deep, but which England had reason to fear. In the autumn of 1808 Count Roumanzoff came to Paris to arrange with Champagny the details of their joint diplomacy; and at the same time, in the month of November, William Short arrived in Paris secretly accredited as minister plenipotentiary at St. Petersburg, but waiting confirmation by the Senate before going to his post. When Armstrong told Roumanzoff that an American minister would soon be on his way to St. Petersburg, the count was highly pleased, and promised at once to send a full minister to replace André Daschkoff, the chargé at Washington. “Ever since I came into office,” he said to Armstrong,[24] “I have been desirous of producing this effect; for in dissolving our commercial connections with Great Britain it became necessary to seek some other power in whom we might find a substitute; and on looking round I could see none but the United States who were at all competent to this object.” So far as concerned England, the alliance promised great advantages; but Armstrong’s chief anxiety affected France, and when he attempted to enlist Roumanzoff in resistance to Napoleon’s robberies, he found no encouragement. Roumanzoff had already tried his influence with Napoleon on behalf of the Danes, who wanted compensation for their plundered commerce. “Give them a civil answer,” replied Napoleon,[25] “but of course one never pays for this sort of thing,—On ne paye jamais ces choses-là, n’est-ce pas?” From Roumanzoff’s refusal, Armstrong inferred that no change need be hoped in Napoleon’s conduct.
“On the contrary,” he wrote to Madison, the day when Napoleon abandoned the pursuit of Sir John Moore,[26] “their anti-neutral system is more rigidly observed; the embargo on ships of the United States found here before the imperial decrees were issued is continued; every ship of ours coming into a port of France or of her allies is immediately seized and sequestered; cargoes regularly admitted to entry by the custom-houses are withheld from their owners; ships most obviously exceptions to the operation of the Decrees have been recently condemned; and—what in my view of the subject does not admit of aggravation—the burning of the ship ‘Brutus’ on the high seas, so far from being disavowed, is substantially justified.”
Had this been all, perhaps President Madison and Congress might have waited with courtesy, if not with hope, for Napoleon’s pleasure; but grievances equally serious ran back to the year 1803, and not one of them had been redressed by France.
“It is now three years since one of her admirals, on the principle of self-preservation, burnt four of our ships at sea, and the Emperor immediately acknowledged the debt and repeatedly promised to discharge it; but not a shilling has yet been paid, nor is it probable that a shilling ever will be paid. Besides this breach of justice in the first instance and of promise in the last, we have to complain that bills of exchange drawn to the order of citizens of the United States by the public functionaries of France, to the amount of many millions of dollars, and for articles of the first necessity, and drawn many years ago, are not only not paid, but are officially denounced as not payable.”
Armstrong’s temper, bad in the winter, became worse in the spring, until his letters to the Department of State seemed to leave no remedy but war for the grievances he described. The angry tone of his despatches was not counteracted by fair words in the instructions sent by Champagny to Turreau, which were calculated to irritate President Madison beyond patience.
“You cannot too much call attention to the grievances of the Americans against England in order to make them more sensibly felt,” wrote Champagny to Turreau, after the Emperor went to Spain.[27] “The Americans would like France to grant them commercial privileges which no nation at present enjoys.... But ... hitherto it has not seemed proper, in the execution of general measures, to introduce exceptions which would have really destroyed their effect. If the rules adopted against English commerce had not been made common, that commerce would continue through every opening left to it; England would preserve the same resources as before for supporting the war. A system of exception for one people would turn the rule into an injustice toward all others; all would have right to complain of a privilege granted to the Federal government which themselves would not enjoy.”
Unanswerable as this reasoning was from the Napoleonic standpoint, it was open to the objection of placing Madison among the belligerents at war with England, and of obliging him not only to accept the rules imposed by Napoleon on the allies of France, but also to admit the corresponding right of British retaliation, even to the point of war. Until President Madison made up his mind to war with England, he could hardly be induced by Napoleon’s diplomacy to overlook his causes of war with France.
Had Napoleon acted according to rules of ordinary civilization, he would at least have softened the harshness of his commercial policy toward America by opening to the American President some vista of compensation elsewhere. Florida seemed peculiarly suited for this object, and no one so well as Napoleon knew the anxiety of the late Administration to obtain that territory, which, for any legitimate purpose, was useless and worthless to France. In December, 1808, Napoleon could have retained little or no hope of controlling the Spanish colonies by force; yet he ordered the American government to leave them alone, as he ordered it to adopt the French system of commercial restraint. “I venture to presume,” continued Champagny to Turreau, “that if his Majesty has no reason to complain of the disposition shown by the United States toward him, he will show himself more and more inclined to treat them favorably. What will most influence his course will be the conduct pursued by the United States toward the Spanish colonies, and the care that shall be taken to do nothing in regard to them which can contravene the rights of the mother-country.”