A rupture with France seemed certain. Turreau expected it and hoped only to delay it. In his eyes the Emperor had suffered an indignity that could not be overlooked, although he asked that retaliation should be delayed till autumn. “However dissatisfied the French government may be by the last measures adopted by Congress, I believe it would be well to await the result of the next session two months hence before taking a severer course against the Americans. This opinion, which I express only with doubt, is yet warranted by advices which I have received within a few days, and which have been given me by men who know the Executive intentions, and who at least till now have not deceived me.” Turreau believed that when the Emperor learned what the late Congress had done, he would strike the United States with the thunderbolt of his power. Doubtless the same impression was general. Even after Napoleon’s character has been the favorite study of biographers and historians for nearly a hundred years, the shrewdest criticism might fail in the effort to conjecture what shape the Emperor’s resentment took. This story has shown many of his processes from the time when he met the resistance of the Haytian negroes in 1803 to the time when he met the uprising of the Spanish patriots in 1809; but even with the advantage of his own writings as a guide, neither friend nor enemy could test theories of his character better than by attempting to divine the conduct he was to pursue toward the United States after their defiance of his wishes in the repeal of the embargo.
As though to remove the last doubt of rupture with Napoleon, the President startled the country by suddenly announcing a settlement of his disputes with England. April 7 Erskine received new instructions from London, and during the next two weeks he was closeted with the President and the Cabinet. April 21 the “National Intelligencer” announced the result of their labors.
CHAPTER III.
In Canning’s note to Pinkney of Sept. 23, 1808,—the same paper which expressed his Majesty’s regret for the embargo “as a measure of inconvenient restriction upon the American people,”—a paragraph easily overlooked had been inserted to provide for future chances of fortune:—
“It is not improbable, indeed, that some alterations may be made in the Orders of Council as they are at present framed,—alterations calculated, not to abate their spirit or impair their principle, but to adapt them more exactly to the different state of things which has fortunately grown up in Europe, and to combine all practicable relief to neutrals with a more severe pressure upon the enemy. But of alterations to be made with this view only it would be uncandid to take any advantage in the present discussion, however it might be hoped that in their practical effect they might prove beneficial to America, provided the operation of the embargo were not to prevent her from reaping that benefit.”
This intended change in the orders depended on the political change which converted Spain from an enemy into an ally. Spencer Perceval did not care to press the cause of British commerce so far as to tax American wheat and salt-fish on their way to Spain and Portugal, where he must himself provide money to pay for them after they were bought by the army commissaries. Accordingly, in December, 1808, a new Order in Council appeared, doing away with the export duties lately imposed by Parliament on foreign articles passing through England. Thenceforward American wheat might be shipped at Liverpool for the Spanish peninsula without paying ten shillings a quarter to the British Treasury,[34] if only the embargo did not prevent American wheat from entering Liverpool at all.
In a short note, dated December 24, Canning enclosed to Pinkney a copy of the new order; and while taking care to explain that this measure conceded nothing in principle, he offered it as a step toward removing the most offensive, if not the most oppressive, restraint imposed on American commerce by the Orders of 1807:—
“As I have more than once understood from you that the part of the Orders in Council which this order goes to mitigate is that which was felt most sorely by the United States, I have great pleasure in being authorized to communicate it to you.”
Pinkney was in no humor to bear more of what he considered Canning’s bad taste, and he could have but one opinion of the measure which Canning announced. “This order is a shadow,” he wrote to Madison,[35] “and if meant to conciliate us, ridiculous.” His reply to Canning verged for the first time on abruptness, as though the moment were near when he meant to speak another language.
“It is perfectly true,” began Pinkney’s acknowledgment of Dec. 28, 1808,[36] “as the concluding paragraph of your letter supposes me to believe, that the United States have viewed with great sensibility the pretension of this Government (which, as a pretension, the present order reasserts without much if at all modifying its practical effect) to levy imposts upon their commerce, outward and inward, which the Orders in Council of the last year were to constrain to pass through British ports. But it is equally true that my Government has constantly protested against the entire system with which that pretension was connected, and has in consequence required the repeal, not the modification, of the British Orders in Council.”