Mr. Jefferson’s reply to this argument will be found in his letter of February 9, 1807, to Mr. Gallatin. When he fairly mounted a hobby-horse he rode it over all opposition, and, of all hobby-horses, gun-boats happened at this time to be his favorite. He insisted that the whole two hundred must be built, for five reasons: 1. Because they could not be built in two, or even in six months. 2. Because, in case of war, the enemy would destroy them on the stocks in New York, Boston, Norfolk, or any seaport. 3. “The first operation of war by an enterprising enemy would be to sweep all our seaports of their vessels at least.” 4. The expense of their preservation would be nothing. 5. The expense of construction would be less than supposed.[78]
Mr. Jefferson was a great man, and like other great men he occasionally committed great follies, yet it may be doubted whether in the whole course of his life he ever wrote anything much more absurd than this letter. When war came, each of his three former reasons was shown to be an error, and long before the war arrived, his two concluding reasons were contradicted by facts. These letters were written in February, 1807. In June, 1809, barely two years later, the then Secretary of the Navy, Paul Hamilton, reported that 176 gun-boats had been built, of which 24 only were in actual service. The aggregate expense to that date had been $1,700,000, or about $725,000 a year; while the reader will remember that the whole navy expenditure for 1807 was $1,722,000, and in 1808 nearly $1,900,000, against the modest $650,000 which had been agreed upon at the beginning of Mr. Jefferson’s Administration. Any one who is curious to see how far Mr. Gallatin’s opinion as to the “perpetual bill of costs for repairs” was correct, may refer to Paul Hamilton’s letter of June 6, 1809, to the Senate committee.[79] Had all this expenditure improved the national defences, the waste of money would have seemed less outrageous even to Mr. Gallatin, who was its chief victim; but, as most naval officers expected, the gun-boats were in some respects positively mischievous, in others of very little use, and they were easily destroyed by the enemy whenever found. At the end of the war such of them as were not already captured, burned, wrecked, or decayed were quietly broken up or sold.[80]
Friends and enemies have long since agreed that Mr. Jefferson’s gun-boats were a grievous mistake. How decidedly Mr. Gallatin remonstrated against the development given to this policy, may be seen in the letter of which a portion has been quoted. He strongly urged that no more gun-boats should be built till they were wanted, and he begged Mr. Jefferson to let Congress decide whether they were wanted or not. Mr. Jefferson did not take the advice, and, as usual, Mr. Gallatin was the one to suffer for the mistakes of his chief; the gun-boats lasted long enough to give him great trouble and to be one of the principal means of bankrupting the Treasury even before the war; unfortunately, he had exhausted his strength in complaints of the Navy Department; he had spoken again and again in language which for him was without an example; in the present instance he had Mr. Jefferson himself for his strongest opponent, and there was nothing to be done but to submit.
With this exception, one merely of detail and judgment, Mr. Gallatin seems to have cordially supported the comprehensive scheme which the Administration of Mr. Jefferson pointed out to Congress as the goal of its long pilgrimage. Six years of frugality and patience had, as it conceived, fixed beyond question the republicanism of national character, established a political system purely American, and sealed this result by reducing the national debt until its ultimate extinction was in full view. To fix the future course of the republican system thus established was a matter of not less importance, was perhaps a matter of much greater difficulty, than the task already accomplished. To make one comprehensive, permanent provision for the moral and economical development of the people, to mark out the path of progress with precision and to enter upon it at least so far as to make subsequent advance easy and certain, this was the highest statesmanship, the broadest practical philanthropy. For this result Mr. Gallatin, in the ripened wisdom of his full manhood, might fairly say that his life had been well spent.
For a time he saw the prize within his grasps then almost in an instant it was dashed away, and the whole fabric he had so laboriously constructed fell in ruins before his eyes. That such a disaster should have overwhelmed him at last was neither his fault nor that of Mr. Jefferson; it was the result of forces which neither he nor any other man or combination of men, neither his policy nor any other policy or resource of human wisdom, could control. In the midst of the great crash with which the whole structure of Mr. Jefferson’s Administration toppled over and broke to pieces in its last days, there is ample room to criticise and condemn the theories on which he acted and the measures which he used, but few critics would now be bold enough to say that any policy or any measure could have prevented that disaster.
The story is soon told. Mr. Monroe and Mr. William Pinkney, appointed as a special commission to negotiate with the government of Great Britain, began their labors in July, 1806. They were fortunate enough to find the British government in friendly hands, for they happened to fall upon the short administration of Mr. Fox. With much difficulty they negotiated a treaty which was signed on the last day of the year. This treaty was doubtless a bad treaty; not so bad as that of Mr. Jay, but still very unsatisfactory, and, what was worse, the British government, by a formal note appended to it, reserved the right to render it entirely nugatory if the United States did not satisfy Great Britain that she would resist the maritime decrees of France. Whether, under these circumstances, the treaty was worth accepting, is doubtful; whether Mr. Jefferson erred in insisting upon modifications of it, may be a question. Certain it is that the Administration concurred in sending it back to England for essential changes, and that Mr. Jefferson, undaunted by his previous failure to influence France by fear of his alliance with England, now expected to control England by fear of his alliance with France. “It is all-important that we should stand on terms of the strictest cordiality” with France, he wrote to Paris in announcing his treatment of the British treaty; but this cordiality was to go no further than friendly favors. “I verily believe,” he wrote at the same time,[81] “that it will ever be in our power to keep so even a stand between England and France as to inspire a wish in neither to throw us into the scale of his adversary.”
Never did a man deceive himself more miserably, for even while he wrote these lines the government of England was reverting to its policy of crushing the commercial growth of America. Mr. Fox was dead; a new Administration had come into power, strongly retrograde in policy, and with George Canning for its soul. Whatever the errors or faults of Mr. Canning may have been, timidity was not one of them, and the diplomatic ingenuity of Mr. Jefferson, with its feeble attempts to play off France against England and England against France, was the last policy he was likely to respect. Even the American who reads the history of the year 1807, seeing the brutal directness with which Mr. Canning kicked Mr. Jefferson’s diplomacy out of his path, cannot but feel a certain respect for the Englishman mingled with wrath at his insolent sarcasm. From the moment Mr. Canning and his party assumed power, the fate of Mr. Jefferson’s Administration was sealed; nothing he could do or could have done could avert it; England was determined to recover her commerce and to take back her seamen, and America could not retain either by any means whatever; she had no alternative but submission or war, and either submission or war was equally fatal to Mr. Jefferson’s Administration. Mr. Canning cared little which course she took, but he believed she would submit.
The first intimation of the new state of affairs came in an unexpected and almost accidental shape. The winter of 1806-7 had passed, and, so far as Congress was concerned, it had passed without serious conflicts. Burr’s wild expedition had startled and excited the country, but this episode had no special connection with anything actual; it was rather a sporadic exhibition of the personal peculiarities of Mr. Burr and his lurid imagination. Congress adjourned on the 3d March, 1807; as the summer advanced, Mr. Gallatin went with his family to New York; on the 25th June he was suddenly summoned back to Washington by a brief note from Mr. Jefferson announcing the capture of the American frigate Chesapeake by the British ship-of-war Leopard.
The story of this famous event, which more than any other single cause tended to exasperate national jealousies and to make England and America permanently hostile, is told in every American school history, and will probably be familiar to every school-boy in the United States for generations yet to come. Even time is slow in erasing the memory of these national humiliations, and the singular spectacle has been long presented of a great nation preserving the living memory of a wrong that the offending nation hardly noticed at the time and almost immediately forgot. The reason was that in this instance the wrong was a cruel and cynical commentary on all the mistakes of our national policy; it gave the sentence of death to the favorite dogmas and doctrines of the American Administration, and it was a practical demonstration of their absurdity, the more mortifying because of its incontestable completeness.
Mr. Gallatin hastened to Washington, sickened by anxiety and responsibility; his state of mind and that of his political friends may be shown by a few extracts from his papers: