The Life of Albert Gallatin

by Henry Adams

Dear Sir,—I received your favor of the 12th instant, and observed the contents. Some time in the beginning of April, 1812, General Worthington came to my house from the city to see Mrs. Worthington and children set out for Ohio; he continued part of two days at my house, within which time we had considerable conversation on the prospect of war. He insisted war was inevitable. I condemned the folly and madness of such a measure. He then told me that Mr. Bayard would first be sent to England to make one effort more to prevent the war; that Mr. Madison had consented to do so; and that Mr. Bayard had agreed to go; that he had used every means in his power with some more of the moderate men of their party to effect this object, and that he had frequent conversations with Mr. Madison and Bayard on this subject before it was effected, and that I might rely upon it that such measures would be adopted. He left my house and returned to the city. After the declaration of war and rising of Congress, General Worthington, on his way home to the State of Ohio, called at my house and stayed a night. I then asked him what had prevented the President from carrying into effect this intended mission to England, and observed I was very sorry it had not been put in execution. He answered he was as sorry as I possibly could be, and that he had never met with any occurrence in his life that had mortified him so much. He said as soon as he returned to the city from my house he was informed of what had taken place by a set of hot-headed, violent men, and he immediately waited on Mr. Madison to know the cause. Mr. Madison told him that his friends had waited upon him and said, if he did send Mr. Bayard to England they would forsake him and be opposed to him, and he was compelled to comply, or bound to comply, with their wishes. I then asked General Worthington who those hot-headed, violent men were. He said Mr. Clay was the principal. I cannot positively say, but think Grundy was mentioned with Clay.

I clearly understood that Clay and Grundy were two of the number that waited on the President. I did not ask him how he got his information. As I understood the business, a caucus was held and Mr. Clay and others appointed, and waited on the President in the absence of Worthington, which will ascertain when this business took place.

Mr. Pickering seems to have thought that this explanation hardly supported the charge, and he discreetly allowed the subject to drop. So far, indeed, as the original charge was concerned, the letter of Mr. Shepherd entirely disposed of it, and proved that Mr. Hanson and Mr. Pickering had no authority for asserting that the President was coerced into sending the message of June 1, or that this message was the price of his re-nomination. On the other hand, Mr. Shepherd’s statement raises a new charge against Mr. Madison. In his letter of 24th April, 1812, to Mr. Jefferson, the President said: “You will have noticed that the embargo, as recommended to Congress, was limited to sixty days. Its extension to ninety proceeded from the united votes of those who wished to make it a negotiating instead of a war measure,” &c., &c. Of these Senator Worthington was doubtless one, for the substitution of “90” for “60” was made by the Senate on April 3, on motion of Dr. Leib, and Worthington voted for it. There was, then, a party in Congress which wished to use the embargo as a weapon of negotiation. It is not improbable that this party may have wished Mr. Madison to send a special mission to England, and that they may have pressed Mr. Bayard for the place. It is possible that Clay and his friends may have told Mr. Madison that in such a step he must not expect their support. This is all that can be now affirmed in regard to the celebrated charge that Mr. Madison made war in order to obtain a re-election.

Mr. Madison’s Administration wanted energy and force. No one who is at all familiar with the private history of this party can escape the confession that the President commanded personal love and esteem in a far higher degree than obedience. Whether Senator Worthington counted Mr. Madison and Mr. Gallatin among the active supporters of his proposed peace mission does not appear, nor is there any clue to the other friends of that policy; but there can be little doubt that this was merely one of many suggestions with which the remnant of the old Jeffersonian democracy struggled in a helpless way to stem the current of the times. Mr. Gallatin’s ears were wearied with the complaints and remonstrances of his friends, the Macons, the Worthingtons, the Dallases, the Nicholsons; and the strident tones of John Randolph echoed their complaints to the public. The President heard, but, both by temperament and conviction, followed the path which seemed nearest the general popular movement, without a serious effort to direct it or to provide for its consequences. Even Mr. Worthington believed war to be inevitable. Yet had they known that only the utter disorganization of the British government now prevented a repeal of the orders in council; had there been an American minister in London capable of seeing through the outer shell of politics and of measuring the force of social movements, war might even yet have been avoided. Nay, had Mr. Madison thrown himself at this decisive moment into the arms of the peace party; had he, on the 1st April, 1812, sent to the Senate, together with his embargo message, the nominations of Mr. Bayard and Mr. Monroe or Mr. Gallatin as special commissioners to England, the war could hardly have happened, for the commissioners would have found the orders in council revoked before negotiations could have been seriously begun.

This, however, Mr. Madison did not know, and, perhaps, even had he known it, the fate of John Adams might have seemed to his gentler spirit a warning not to thwart a party policy. His action was founded on the official utterances of the British government and the temper of our own people; it was perfectly consistent from beginning to end, and there was no disagreement in the Cabinet on the subject. It is true that until Congress met he was in doubt what course was best to pursue; his message did not directly recommend war; but from the moment Congress assembled and showed a disposition to support the national dignity, Mr. Madison and his Cabinet accepted the situation and needed no outside compulsion. To use his own words, as written down by a celebrated visitor in the year 1836, “he knew the unprepared state of the country, but he esteemed it necessary to throw forward the flag of the country, sure that the people would press onward and defend it.”[113] He had been ready to do this in the winter of 1808-09. He had urged measures almost equivalent to war in every following session, so far as Congress would allow him to do so. He had wished to maintain peace, but he had been quite aware that government must have the moral courage to resist outrage, as a condition of maintaining peace. It is not to be denied that his party was far behind him, and that, as a consequence, the whole foreign policy from February, 1809, to June, 1812, was one long series of blunders and misfortunes. France made a dupe of him and betrayed him into a diplomatic position which was, as regarded England, untenable. To use his own words in a letter to Joel Barlow, his minister at Paris, dated August 11, 1812: “The conduct of the French government ... will be an everlasting reproach to it.... In the event of a pacification with Great Britain, the full tide of indignation with which the public mind here is boiling, will be directed against France, if not obviated by a due reparation of her wrongs. War will be called for by the nation almost una voce.” But the diplomatic mistake did not affect the essential merits of the case, and the factiousness of Congress merely prevented the possibility of a peaceable solution. Neither the one nor the other offers the smallest evidence of inconsistency in Mr. Madison or in his Cabinet. Even Mr. Gallatin, to whose success peace was essential, had never wished and did not now wish to obtain it by deprecating war.

The real trouble which weighed upon the mind of Mr. Gallatin was not the war; he accepted this as inevitable. His difficulty was that the government wanted the faculties necessary for carrying on a war with success, and that Mr. Madison was not the person to supply, by his own energy and will, the deficiencies of the system. Mr. Gallatin knew, what was known to every member of Congress and every newspaper editor in the land, that both the Navy and Army Departments were wholly unequal to the war. With regard to the navy, this was of the less consequence, because the subordinate material was excellent, and our naval officers were sure to supply the lack of energy in their official head; yet even here the mere fact that Governor Hamilton wanted the qualities necessary to a Secretary of the Navy in war times diminished the confidence of the public and the vigor of the Cabinet. In regard to Dr. Eustis and the War Department the situation was far worse; this had always been the weak branch of our system, for the army was wanting in very nearly every element of success derived from efficient organization. Complete collapse was inevitable if the situation were prolonged.

The weight of government now fell almost wholly upon Mr. Monroe and Mr. Gallatin; it is believed that even the Act for the organization of the army at the beginning of the war was drawn up by Mr. Gallatin. The Cabinet broke down first of all, and this helplessness of the War Secretaries, as they were called, has led to a strange mystification of history in regard to the first achievements of our navy in 1812. Long afterwards, in the year 1845, Mr. C. J. Ingersoll published a history of the war, in which he dealt his blows very freely upon Mr. Madison and Mr. Gallatin, and charged them, among other things, with having meant to dismantle our frigates and convert them into harbor defences. This attack drew a paper from Commodore Stewart, who gave another account of the affair. His statement was that he and Commodore Bainbridge arrived at Washington on the 20th June; that on the 21st they were shown by Mr. Goldsborough, chief clerk of the Navy Department, a paper containing the orders, which had just been drawn, for Commodore Rodgers not to leave the waters of New York with his naval force; that on the same day the Secretary of the Navy informed them that it had been decided by the President and the Cabinet, to lay up our vessels of war in the harbor of New York; that they had an interview with the President on the same day, in which the President confirmed this decision; that on the 22d the two commodores presented a joint remonstrance; and that the subsequent orders, under which the vessels went to sea, were the result of this remonstrance. A letter of Mr. Goldsborough to Commodore Bainbridge, dated May 4, 1825, confirmed the fact of the joint remonstrance, and added some details in regard to the transaction.

This statement of Commodore Stewart drew from Mr. Gallatin a reply, which will be found in his printed Writings.[114] He asserted that he had no recollection of any such scheme for laying up the frigates; that he was confident no such Cabinet council was ever held as was referred to by Commodore Stewart; that the President, under the laws, had no power to make such a disposition of the navy; that Congress had never contemplated anything of the sort; and that the orders previously or simultaneously given contradicted such an idea.

His remarks upon the Secretary of the Navy, however, show the situation as it then existed: “Owing to circumstances irrelevant to any question now at issue, my intercourse with Mr. Hamilton was very limited. He may have been inefficient; he certainly was an amiable, kind-hearted, and honorable gentleman. From his official reports he appears to have been devoted to the cause of the navy, and I never heard him express opinions such as he is stated to have entertained on that subject. Yet his official instructions of 18th June and 3d July, 1812, to Commodore Hull, which I saw for the first time in Mr. Ingersoll’s work, evince an anxiety bordering on timidity, a fear to assume any responsibility, and a wish, if any misfortune should happen, to make the officer solely responsible for it.”

Mr. Ingersoll and Commodore Stewart, though in different ways, both in effect charged upon Mr. Gallatin this scheme of laying up the navy; it was, according to them, his influence in the Cabinet which had almost deprived the nation of its maritime glories. This is one of those curious echoes of popular notions which so often bias historians, and was founded partly on his old hostility to the navy, partly on his known indisposition towards the war. There was, in fact, no truth in it. Mr. Gallatin has himself, in the paper quoted above, recorded his feelings about the navy at this time: