Congress for the time followed Gallatin’s advice, and did nothing; but in the summer session of 1813, after Gallatin’s departure for Europe, the privateer owners renewed their appeal, and the acting Secretary of the Treasury, Jones, wrote to the chairman of the Naval Committee July 21, 1813,[439]—
“The fact is that ... privateering is nearly at an end; and from the best observation I have been enabled to make, it is more from the deficiency of remuneration in the net proceeds of their prizes than from the vigilance and success of the enemy in recapturing.”
In deference to Jones’s opinion, Congress passed an Act, approved Aug. 2, 1813, reducing one third the duties on prize-goods. Another Act, approved August 3, granted a bounty of twenty-five dollars for every prisoner captured and delivered to a United States agent by a private armed vessel. A third Act, approved August 2, authorized the Secretary of the Navy to place on the pension list any privateersman who should be wounded or disabled in the line of his duty.
These complaints and palliations tended to show that the privateer cost the public more than the equivalent government vessel would have cost. If instead of five hundred privateers of all sizes and efficiency, the government had kept twenty sloops-of-war constantly at sea destroying the enemy’s commerce, the result would have been about the same as far as concerned injury to the enemy, while in another respect the government would have escaped one of its chief difficulties. Nothing injured the navy so much as privateering. Seamen commonly preferred the harder but more profitable and shorter cruise in a privateer, where fighting was not expected or wished, to the strict discipline and murderous battles of government ships, where wages were low and prize-money scarce. Of all towns in the United States, Marblehead was probably the most devoted to the sea; but of nine hundred men from Marblehead who took part in the war, fifty-seven served as soldiers, one hundred and twenty entered the navy, while seven hundred and twenty-six went as privateersmen.[440] Only after much delay and difficulty could the frigates obtain crews. The “Constitution” was nearly lost by this cause at the beginning of the war; and the loss of the “Chesapeake” was supposed to be chiefly due to the determination of the old crew to quit the government service for that of the privateers.
Such drawbacks raised reasonable doubts as to the balance of advantages and disadvantages offered by the privateer system. Perhaps more careful inquiry might show that, valuable as the privateers were, the government would have done better to retain all military and naval functions in its own hands, and to cover the seas with small cruisers capable of pursuing a system of thorough destruction against the shipping and colonial interests of England.
CHAPTER XIV.
Gallatin and Bayard, having sailed from the Delaware May 9, arrived at St. Petersburg July 21, only to find that during the six months since the Czar offered to mediate, Russia had advanced rapidly in every direction except that of the proposed mediation. Napoleon after being driven from Russia in December, 1812, passed the winter in Paris organizing a new army of three hundred thousand men on the Elbe, between Dresden and Magdeburg, while a second army of more than one hundred thousand was to hold Hamburg and Bremen. Russia could not prevent Napoleon from reconstructing a force almost as powerful as that with which he had marched to Moscow, for the Russian army had suffered very severely and was unfit for active service; but the Czar succeeded in revolutionizing Prussia, and in forcing the French to retire from the Vistula to the Elbe, while he gained a reinforcement of more than one hundred thousand men from the fresh and vigorous Prussian army. Even with that assistance the Czar could not cope with Napoleon, who, leaving Paris April 17, during the month of May fought furious battles at Lützen and Bautzen, which forced the allied Russian and Prussian armies back from the Elbe to the Oder.
At that point Austria interfered so energetically as to oblige Napoleon to accept an armistice for the purpose of collecting new forces. During the armistice the Czar stationed himself at Gitschin in Bohemia, nine hundred miles from St. Petersburg, and about the same distance from London by the path that couriers were obliged to take. When Gallatin and Bayard reached St. Petersburg, July 21, the armistice, which had been prolonged until August 10, was about to expire, and the Czar could not be anxious to decide subordinate questions until the issue of the coming campaign should be known.
Meanwhile the government of England had in May, with many friendly expressions, declined the Russian mediation.[441] Castlereagh probably hoped that this quiet notification to Lieven, the Russian envoy in London, would end the matter; but toward the month of July news reached London that the American commissioners, Gallatin and Bayard, had arrived at Gothenburg on their way to Russia, and Castlereagh then saw that he must be more explicit in his refusal. Accordingly he took measures for making the matter clear not only to the Russian government but also to the American commissioners.
With the Russian government he was obliged by the nature of their common relations to communicate officially, and he wrote instructions to Lord Cathcart, dated July 5, directing communication to be made.