Ships were still captured on their way to England. “If your decrees are in fact repealed,” asked Monroe, “why this sequestration?” Serurier strove in vain to satisfy Monroe that the decrees, though repealed in principle, might be still enforced in fact. He failed to calm the secretary or the President, whose temper became worse as he saw more clearly that he had been overreached by Napoleon, and that his word as President of the United States had been made a means of deceiving Congress and the people.
Had the British government at that moment offered the single concession asked of it, no war could have taken place, unless it were a war with France; but the British government had not yet recovered its reason. Foster came to Washington with instructions to yield nothing, yet to maintain peace; to threaten, but still conciliate. This mixture of policy, half Canning and half Fox, feeble and mischievous as it was, could not be altered by Foster; his instructions were positive. “Nor can we ever deem the repeal of the French hostile decrees to be effectual,” wrote Wellesley in April, 1811, “until neutral commerce shall be restored to the condition in which it stood previously to the commencement of the French system of commercial warfare.” Wellesley hinted that the Decrees of Berlin and Milan were no longer important; they were in effect superseded by Napoleon’s tariff of prohibitions and prohibitive duties; and until this system of war was abandoned, and neutral rights of trade were respected, Great Britain could not withdraw her blockades. In obedience to these instructions, Foster was obliged to tell Monroe in July, and again in October, 1811, that even if the repeal of the decrees were genuine, it would not satisfy the British government. Not the decrees, but their principle, roused British retaliation.
When the President in his Annual Message represented Foster as requiring that the United States should force British produce and manufactures into France, Foster protested, explained, and remonstrated in vain; he found himself reduced to threats of commercial retaliation which no one regarded, and his position became mortifying beyond any in the experience of his unfortunate predecessors. Compelled to witness constant insults to his country, he was still ordered to maintain peace. As early as Dec. 11, 1811, he notified his Government that unless its system were changed, war was likely to follow. The suggestions offered by the Federalist congressmen, February 1, could hardly fail to show the British government that at last it must choose between war and concession. Feb. 26, 1812, Foster wrote again that war might be declared within a fortnight. March 9 the revelations of John Henry gave the minister another anxiety, and called from him another lame disavowal. Yet throughout these trying months Foster remained on friendly and almost intimate terms with Monroe, whom he described as “a very mild, moderate man.”[144]
Matters stood thus till March 21, 1812, when Washington was excited by news that Foster had received recent instructions from his Government, and the crisis of war and peace was at hand. “The anxiety and curiosity of both Houses of Congress,” reported Foster, April 1,[145] “to know the real nature of the despatches was so great that some of the members on committees told me they could not get the common routine of business at all attended to. The Department of State was crowded with individuals endeavoring to obtain information from Mr. Monroe, while I was questioned by all those with whom I happened to be acquainted.” A report spread through Washington that the Orders in Council were repealed, and that an immediate accommodation of all differences between England and the United States might be expected.
Foster would have been glad to find his new instructions composed in such a sense; but he hardly expected to find them so positive as they were in an opposite spirit. Lord Wellesley’s despatch of Jan. 28, 1812,[146] which may be said to have decided the declaration of war, was afterward published, and need not be quoted in detail. He remonstrated against the arming of merchant vessels, and ordered Foster to speak earnestly on the subject “for the purpose of preventing a state of affairs which might probably lead to acts of force.” The pretended revocation of the French Decrees, said Lord Wellesley, was in fact a fresh enactment of them, while the measures of America tended to occasion such acts of violence as might “produce the calamity of war between the two countries.” This usual formula, by which diplomacy announced an expected rupture, was reinforced by secret instructions warning Foster cautiously to “avoid employing any suggestions of compromise to the American government which might induce them to doubt the sincerity or firmness of his Majesty’s government in their determination, already announced, of maintaining steadfastly the system of defence adopted by them until the enemy shall relinquish his unwarrantable mode of attack upon our interests through the violation of neutral rights.”
Foster regarded this order as a rebuke, for he had talked freely, both to his own Government and in Washington, of the possibility that the Orders in Council might be withdrawn. The warning gave him a manner more formal than usual when he went, March 21, to assure Monroe that the Prince Regent would never give way. Monroe listened with great attention; “then merely said, with however considerable mildness of tone, that he had hoped his conversations with me at the early part of the session would have produced a different result.” Foster left him without further discussion, and announced everywhere in public that, “far from being awed and alarmed at the threatening attitude and language” of Congress, his Government would maintain its system unimpaired.[147]
The President looked upon this declaration as final. Already every preparation had been made to meet it. Only a fortnight before, the papers of John Henry had been sent to Congress, and the halls of Congress, as well as the columns of every Republican newspaper in the country, were filled with denunciations of England’s conduct, while the President prepared a message recommending an embargo for sixty days,—a measure preliminary to the declaration of war,—when March 23, two days after Foster’s interview, news arrived that a French squadron, under open orders, had begun to burn and sink American commerce on the ocean. The American brig “Thames” reached New York March 9, and her captain, Samuel Chew, deposed before a magistrate that February 2, in the middle of the Atlantic, his brig on the return voyage from Portugal was seized by a French squadron which had sailed from Nantes early in January, and which had already seized and burned the American ship “Asia” and the brig “Gershom.” The French commodore declared that he had orders to burn all American vessels sailing to or from an enemy’s port. The American newspapers were soon deluged with affidavits to the same effect from the captains and seamen of vessels burned by these French frigates, and the news, arriving in Washington at a moment when the Federalists were most eager to retaliate the insult of the Henry letters, caused extreme sensation. In face of these piratical acts no one longer pretended that the French Decrees were repealed. Republicans were angrier than Federalists. Madison and Monroe were angriest of all. Serurier was in despair. “I am just from Mr. Monroe’s office,” he wrote March 23;[148] “I have never yet seen him more agitated, more discomposed. He addressed me abruptly: ‘Well, sir, it is then decided that we are to receive nothing but outrages from France! And at what a moment too! At the very instant when we were going to war with her enemies.’” When the French minister tried to check his vehemence of reproach, Monroe broke out again:—
“Remember where we were two days ago. You know what warlike measures have been taken for three months past; adopted slowly, they have been progressively followed up. We have made use of Henry’s documents as a last means of exciting (pour achever d’exalter) the nation and Congress; you have seen by all the use we have made of them whither we were aiming; within a week we were going to propose the embargo, and the declaration of war was the immediate consequence of it. A ship has arrived from London, bringing us despatches to February 5, which contain nothing offering a hope of repeal of the orders; this was all that was needed to carry the declaration of war, which would have passed almost unanimously. It is at such a moment that your frigates come and burn our ships, destroy all our work, and put the Administration in the falsest and most terrible position in which a government can find itself placed.”
For the hundredth time Monroe repeated the old story that the repeal of the French Decrees was the foundation of the whole American system; “that should the Executive now propose the embargo or the declaration of war, the whole Federal party—reinforced by the Clinton party, the Smith party, and the discontented Republicans—would rise in mass and demand why we persist in making war on England for maintaining her Orders in Council when we have proofs so recent and terrible that the French Decrees are not withdrawn.” He added that if the question were put at such a moment, he did not doubt that the Government would lose its majority.
Foster also attempted to interfere in this complicated quarrel:—