“The Secretary of State sent for me three days ago to his office,” wrote Serurier, July 20.[52] “After having congratulated me on this decision [of the Emperor], he told me that he had no doubt of its producing on the public the same excellent impression it had made on the Government; but he added that as it was not official, the President would like to have me write a letter as confirmative as possible, in the absence of instructions, both of these events and of his Majesty’s good intentions; and that if I could write him this letter, Mr. Barlow should immediately depart.”
The only instructions possessed by Serurier on the subject of the decrees warned him against doing what Monroe asked; but the temptation to win a success was strong, and he wrote a cautious letter,[53] dated July 19, saying that he had no official knowledge on the subject, but that “it is with reason, sir, that you reject the idea of a doubt on the fidelity of France in fulfilling her engagements; for to justify such a doubt one must have some contradictory facts to cite,—one must show that judgments have been rendered in France on the principle of maintaining the Decrees of Berlin and Milan, or that a series of American ships coming from England to America, or from America to England, have been captured by our privateers in virtue of the blockade of the British Isles. Nothing of the sort has become known to any of us, and, on the contrary,” all advices showed that the decrees in France and on the ocean had ceased to affect American commerce.
Probably this letter disappointed the President, for it was never published, nor was any allusion made to it in the correspondence that followed. Without even such cover, Monroe ordered Barlow to depart, and made the decision public. Serurier, puzzled though delighted by his success, groped in the dark to discover how the Government had reached its decision. Foster’s attitude failed to enlighten him; and he could see no explanation, except that the result was a personal victory of Madison over Monroe and the Cabinet.
“The joy is general among the authorities,” he wrote July 20,[54] “except among some friends of Mr. Foster; but more than any one else, Mr. Madison seems enchanted to see himself confirmed (raffermi) in a system which is wholly his own, but which he began to see no means of maintaining. I do him the justice to say that if he had a movement of hesitation on the point of Mr. Barlow’s departure, it was more the effect of public clamor than of his own sentiments,—a movement of spite (dépit) and discouragement, rather than of inclination toward England, which he frankly detests, as does his friend Mr. Jefferson,—and that he has not been for a moment unfaithful to his engagements with us. I have never seen him more triumphant. The Secretaries of State, of the Treasury, and of War are doubtful, perhaps, and conduct themselves more according to events; but happily the President, superior to them in enlightenment as in position, governs entirely by himself, and there is no reason to fear his being crossed by them.”
Serurier knew Madison and Jefferson only as a Frenchman might, and his ideas of their feelings toward England were such as a Frenchman could understand. In truth, Madison did not want a distinct issue of peace or war with England. Had he wished for such an issue, he would have made it. Disbelieving in war, as war approached, he clung to the last chances of peaceful coercion. The fiction that Napoleon’s decrees were repealed enabled him to enforce his peaceful coercive measures to avoid war. Not because he wanted war, but because he wanted peace, Madison insisted that the decrees were withdrawn. As he carried each point, he stood more and more alone; he was misunderstood by his enemies and overborne by his friends; he failed in his policy of peace, and knew himself unfit to administer a policy of war. Yet he held to his principle, that commercial restrictions were the true safeguards of an American system.
A man of keen intelligence, Madison knew, quite as well as Monroe, Serurier, or Foster, that the French Decrees were not repealed. His alleged reason for despatching Barlow was unsatisfactory to himself as to Monroe, and doubly worthless because unofficial. Even while he insisted on his measures, he made no secret of his discontent. When official despatches arrived a few days later, Serurier was puzzled at finding Madison well aware that the Emperor had not withdrawn and did not mean to withdraw his decrees. July 23 Serurier communicated[55] to Monroe the substance of the despatches from France. The next day he called at the Department and at the White House to watch the effect of his letter, which announced the admission of American merchandise into French ports.
“Mr. Monroe showed himself less satisfied than I had hoped, either because the President had so directed, in order to reserve the right of raising new pretensions, or because, already advised by Mr. Russell, he had been at the same time informed that the prizes made since November by our privateers were not restored; and these restrictions had been represented in an unfavorable light by the chargé d’affaires. He confined himself to telling me that certainly there were things agreeable to the American government in the Emperor’s arrangements, but that there were others wholly contrary to expectation, and that before his departure he would send me a list of the complaints left unsatisfied.. .. As the President is to start to-morrow for his estate in Virginia, I called this morning to bid him good-by. I had on this occasion with Mr. Madison an interview which put the last stroke to my suspicions. When I told him that I was glad to see him a last time under auspices so happy as the news I had officially given him the evening before, he answered me that he had learned with pleasure, though without surprise, the release of the sequestered ships and the Emperor’s decision to admit American products; but that one thing pained him profoundly. This was that the American ships captured since last November, under pretext of the Berlin and Milan Decrees, had not been released with those which voluntarily entered French ports; and he pretended that this failure to execute the chief of our engagements destroyed the effect of all the rest.”[56]
The opinion scarcely admitted dispute. Reversing Madison’s theory, Napoleon had relieved American vessels from the “municipal operation” of his decrees in France, while he enforced that international operation on the high seas which alone Madison declared himself bound by the law of nations to resist. The blockade thus enforced by Napoleon against England was more extravagant than any blockade England had ever declared. Of his acts in Denmark and on the Baltic Madison took no notice at all, though these, more than the detention of American prizes in France, “destroyed the effect of all the rest.” If, then, the decrees were still enforced on the ocean,—as Madison insisted they were,—they could not have been repealed; and Madison, by submitting to their enforcement on the ocean, not only recognized their legality, but also required England to make the same submission, under penalty of a declaration of war from the United States. This dilemma threatened to overthrow Madison’s Administration, or even to break up the Union. Serurier saw its dangers, and did his utmost to influence Napoleon toward concessions:
“The revocation of the Decrees of Milan and Berlin has become a personal affair with Mr. Madison. He announced it by proclamation, and has constantly maintained it since. The English party never stops worrying him on this point, and saying that he has been made a tool of France,—that the decrees have not been repealed. He fears the effect of this suspension, and foresees that it will cause great discussions in the next Congress, and that it alone may compromise the Administration, triumphant on all other points.”
Under such circumstances, Monroe needed more than common powers in order to play his part. Talleyrand himself would have found his impassive countenance tried by assuring Foster in the morning that the decrees were repealed, and rating Serurier in the afternoon because they were in force. Such conversations, extended over a length of time, might in the end raise doubts of a statesman’s veracity; yet this was what Monroe undertook. On the day when Serurier communicated the news that disturbed the President, Monroe sent to the British minister the note maintaining broadly that France had revoked her decrees. Three days later, after the President had told Serurier that “the failure to execute the chief of our engagements destroyed the effect of all the rest,” Monroe gave to Barlow his instructions founded on the revocation of the decrees. Doubtless this double-dealing exasperated all the actors concerned in it. Madison and Monroe at heart were more angry with France than with England, if indeed degrees in anger could be felt where the outrages of both parties were incessant and intolerable. Yet Barlow took his instructions and set sail for France; a proclamation appeared in the “National Intelligencer” calling Congress together for November 1; and the President and his Secretary of State left Washington for their summer vacation in Virginia, having accepted, once for all, the conditions imposed by Napoleon.