The war fever of 1811 swept far and wide over the country, but even at its height seemed somewhat intermittent and imaginary. A passion that needed to be nursed for five years before it acquired strength to break into act, could not seem genuine to men who did not share it. A nation which had submitted to robbery and violence in 1805, in 1807, in 1809, could not readily lash itself into rage in 1811 when it had no new grievance to allege; nor could the public feel earnest in maintaining national honor, for every one admitted that the nation had sacrificed its honor, and must fight to regain it. Yet what honor was to be hoped from a war which required continued submission to one robber as the price of resistance to another? President Madison submitted to Napoleon in order to resist England; the New England Federalists preferred submitting to England in order to resist Napoleon; but not one American expected the United States to uphold their national rights against the world.
Politicians of the old school looked coldly on the war spirit. Nations like individuals, when driven to choose between desperate courses, might at times be compelled to take the chances of destruction, often destroying themselves, or suffering irreparable harm. Yet the opponents of war could argue that Americans were not placed between desperate alternatives. They had persevered hitherto, in spite of their leaders, in the policy of peace; had suffered much injury and acute mortification, but had won Louisiana and West Florida, had given democracy all it asked, and had remained in reasonable harmony with the liberal movement of the world. They were reaping the fruit of their patient and obstinate husbandry; for Russia and Sweden were about to fight their battles without reward. Napoleon offered them favors more or less real, and even England could not long resist the pressure of her interests. Jefferson’s policy had wrought all the evil it could cause,—perhaps it had cost the highest price the nation could pay; but after the nation had suffered the evil and paid the price, it had a right to the profit. With more force than in 1798, the old Republicans pleaded that if they should throw aside their principles and plunge into hostilities with England, they would not only sacrifice the results of six years’ humiliation, but would throw the United States athwart the liberal movement of Europe, destroy the hopes of pure government at home, and with more eagerness than they had shown for the past ten years in stripping government of its power, must devote themselves to the task of rebuilding a sovereignty as terrible in peace as in war.
The moment for fighting, conservatives argued, had come in 1807, had passed in 1809; and henceforward good policy called only for perseverance in the course that had been so persistently preferred. Not merely old Republicans, but an actual majority of the people probably held these opinions; yet the youthful energy of the nation, which had at last come to its strength under the shelter of Jefferson’s peaceful rule, cried out against the cowardice of further submission, and insisted on fighting if only to restore its own self-respect.
The course of Massachusetts had much to do with changing the current of opinion. Hitherto this State had barred the way to a British war. Although the Republican party in Massachusetts several times elected their candidate for governor by majorities more or less decisive, they failed to gain full control of the State legislature before 1811. In 1810 they elected Elbridge Gerry and a majority of the representatives, but they still lacked one vote to give them control of the Senate. In April, 1811, Gerry succeeded once more, defeating Christopher Gore, the Federalist candidate, by a majority of three thousand votes; while the House, which consisted of some six hundred and fifty members, chose a Republican speaker by a majority of thirty-one. For the first time the Republicans controlled also a majority, though only of one vote, in the State Senate. This success, gained in spite of the unpopular Non-importation Act, gave extraordinary confidence to the Government, and left the Federalists powerless. Timothy Pickering lost his seat in the United States Senate, and Speaker Varnum received it. The Republicans hastened to introduce, and to carry through the Massachusetts legislature, measures that threatened to upturn the foundation of Federalist society. Other measures still more radical were expected. Jefferson’s hopes of reforming Massachusetts were almost fulfilled; but the success which gave reality to them removed the last obstacle to war with England.
As the autumn advanced, the Republican newspapers broke into a general cry for war. The British minister’s refusal to withdraw the Orders in Council, the return of Pinkney from London, the affair of the “Little Belt,” the notorious relations between the northwestern Indians and the British traders,—all served to increase the ill-temper of a public trying to lash itself into an act it feared. Even the battle at Tippecanoe, although evidently contrary to British interest, was charged to British influence. As though England had not already given cause for a score of wars, the press invented new grievances; and became as eager to denounce imaginary crimes as to correct flagrant and chronic wrongs.
The matter of impressments then began to receive the attention which had never yet been given it. Hitherto neither Government nor people had thought necessary to make a casus belli of impressments. Orders in Council and other measures of Great Britain which affected American property had been treated as matters of vital consequence; but as late as the close of 1811, neither the President, the Secretary of State, nor Congress had yet insisted that the person of an American citizen was as sacred as his property. Impressments occurred daily. No one knew how many native-born Americans had been taken by force from the protection of the American flag; but whether the number was small or great, neither Republican nor Federalist had ventured to say that the country must at all hazards protect them, or that whatever rules of blockade or contraband the belligerents might adopt against property, they must at least keep their hands off the persons of peaceable Americans whether afloat or ashore. President Madison had repeated, until the world laughed in his face, that Napoleon no longer enforced his decrees, and that therefore if England did not withdraw her blockade, war would result; but he had never suggested that America would fight for her sailors. When he and his supporters in earnest took up the grievances of the seamen, they seemed to do so as an afterthought, to make out a cause of war against England, after finding the public unwilling to accept the cause at first suggested. However unjust the suspicion might be, so much truth existed in this Federalist view of Madison’s course as warranted the belief that if England in July, 1811, had yielded to the demand for commercial freedom, the Government would have become deaf to the outcry of the imprisoned seamen. Only by slow degrees, and in the doubtful form of a political manœuvre, did this, the worst of all American grievances, take its proper place at the head of the causes for war.
Winter drew near, finding the public restless, irritable, more than half afraid of its own boldness, but outspoken at last. British frigates once more blockaded New York, seizing ships and impressing men without mercy, while the British prize-courts, after a moment’s hesitation, declared that the French Decrees were not repealed, and that American vessels sailing to France were good prize. Under these irritations the temper of the American press became rapidly worse, until war was declared to be imminent, and the conquest of Canada became the favorite topic of newspaper discussion.
Yet the true intentions of the President and his Cabinet were as uncertain as those of the Twelfth Congress, which had not yet met. A very large part of the public could not believe war to be possible, and the Government itself shared so far in the doubt as to wait for Congress to give the impulse so often refused. When the President and his Cabinet met in Washington to prepare for the session of Congress called for November 4, a month earlier than usual, neither the Cabinet nor the congressmen felt a certainty of the future; and so little did the outside world believe in war, that Madison, Monroe, and Gallatin were supposed to be aiming at a diplomatic rather than at a military victory. In truth they had no well-defined plan. The process by which a scattered democracy decided its own will, in a matter so serious as a great and perhaps fatal war, was new to the world; bystanders were surprised and amused at the simplicity with which the people disputed plans of war and peace, giving many months of warning and exact information to the enemy, while they showed no sign of leadership, discipline, or union, or even a consciousness that such qualities were needed. Men like Josiah Quincy, Rufus King, John Randolph, and even Madison and Gallatin, seeing that the people themselves, like the machine of government they had invented, were incompetent to the work of war, waited with varied emotions, but equally believing or fearing that at last a fatal crisis was at hand.
Monroe was far from easy; but he had accepted, as was his wont, the nearest dominating will, and he drifted without an effort, although his old friends had already parted company with him. Though obliged to support the President in holding that Napoleon’s decrees were withdrawn so that they had ceased to violate the neutral commerce of the United States, he showed that he did so, not so much because he thought it the truth, as because England gave him no choice. To Serurier, the French minister, Monroe made little concealment of his real wishes; and when Serurier first called at the Department after Monroe’s return from Virginia, he heard nothing that greatly pleased him.
“I found the Secretary of State,” wrote Serurier, October 23,[122] “nearly in the same state of mind in which I left him at his departure for Virginia. He told me at the outset that although the information received by the President during the last two months had added to his hopes, it had not yet completed his conviction on the decrees; that he could not believe them entirely repealed so long as there remained in our ports a single vessel captured by our privateers since November.... He pretended that very recent advices from Naples announced an order sent lately from Paris to sell the American prizes, and this news had been very disagreeable to the Executive, and had thrown it into new uncertainties.... He returned again to our customs-tariff, and the indispensability of its reduction.”