Je n’ai pas été assez heureux pour vous trouver ce matin, mon illustre ami. J’aurais bien désiré cependant vous parler de mon attachement constant et tendre, de mon vif intérêt pour la paix que vous avez eu la gloire de conclure dans des circonstances difficiles. J’aurais aussi voulu vous féliciter sur cette belle et noble défense de la Nouvelle-Orléans qui fera respecter les armées de la Liberté, comme les flottes qui voguent sous votre pavillon se sont couvertes de gloire depuis longtemps. Que dans ces temps malheureux mes yeux se fixent avec attendrissement sur ces contrées qui seront bientôt le centre de la civilisation humaine! Je ferai d’autres tentatives pour vous trouver et vous recommander de nouveau Mr. Warden, mon ami et celui de Messrs. Berthollet, Thenard, Gay Lussac, et de tout ce qui aime les sciences. Je ne puis croire qu’un homme aussi instruit, aussi doux, aussi honnête, aussi attaché aux États-Unis, à M. Jefferson et aux doctrines vertueuses puisse être rejetté par votre gouvernement. Je supplie Madame Gallatin d’agréer l’hommage de mon respectueux dévouement. Quel contraste entre cette époque et celle où vous me vîtes à Londres ennuyé des “magnanimous Soverains” et de la croisade des héros!
Humboldt.
Quai Malaquais, No. 3.
Jeudi.
Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Clay arrived in London early in April and began negotiations with Lord Castlereagh. Mr. Adams, now appointed minister to England, joined his colleagues in the following month, but Mr. Bayard remained in Paris or on shipboard. The President had appointed him minister to Russia, but he was not in a condition to accept the post even if he had cared to take it; broken down by illness, he was destined to reach home only to die. The negotiation with Lord Castlereagh was carried on almost entirely by Mr. Gallatin, and was the first of a long series of similar negotiations mainly conducted by him during the next fifteen years.
So far as England was concerned, excepting the questions of the fisheries, impressment, and boundary, the only source of serious difficulty arose in her colonial policy and the complications necessarily springing from it. These complications were numerous, but became threatening only when England was engaged in maritime war; at other times they were merely annoying, and kept our government incessantly employed in efforts to obtain the relaxation or abandonment of vexatious commercial restrictions. To obtain this result, however, the United States had left herself no inducements to offer. Most of the maritime powers in Europe had colonies, which they regarded as mere farms of the State; private property with regard to other nations; industrial speculations with which foreigners had no more to do than with their arsenals and dock-yards; places where they were admitted only on tolerance, and where they dealt not with the colonist, but with the imperial government. England especially had created a great system of this kind, and, to protect it, she had enacted a long series of navigation laws whose object was to secure all her own colonial trade to her own ships, and as much of her neighbors’ trade as she could gather into her ubiquitous hands. Between European nations there was a sort of colonial compact; they bargained one colonial trade against another, and admitted one another’s ships into their colonial ports provided their own ships were admitted in return; but when the United States claimed the same privilege, the European governments, with the spirit and in the language of so many small hucksters, asked what equivalent the United States could offer; where were the American colonies whose trade could be exchanged for that of the European? Mr. Gallatin pointed out where the American colonies lay, a long uninterrupted succession stretching from Lake Erie and Lake Superior to Mobile and New Orleans,—colonies whose growth surpassed that of the most prosperous European settlement as absolutely as the American continent surpassed in size and wealth the largest and richest island of either Indies. To this there was but one reply. The United States had already thrown the trade of her colonies open to the world; she could not now bargain for an equivalent. Even retaliation was precluded, for her own constitution would neither permit her to close any of her ports without closing all, nor to lay a duty on exports.
The English colonial system was the most difficult to deal with, since it was not only the most extensive, the most valuable, and the English colonies among the nearest to the United States, but its complications and inconsistencies were the most elaborate and perplexing, while to the British nation there was no absurdity in the whole mass that was not twisted deeply about some strong moneyed interest and that was not sanctified by age and English blood. To the United States there were three groups of questions involved in commercial relations with the British colonies. The first group included Canada and the whole trade with the provinces on our northern frontier, and was further complicated by our claim to the right of navigating the St. Lawrence. The second group included the British West India islands and their indirect trade with the United States through Nova Scotia. The third group consisted of the East Indies, and involved the trade between Calcutta, Europe, and the United States. These were the subjects which Mr. Gallatin attempted to settle by a commercial convention in the summer of 1815, and which detained him, much against his will, in England at a time when he was extremely anxious to be again at home.
Lord Castlereagh was friendly, and did what he could to smooth negotiation. Mr. Goulburn and Dr. Adams were continued in the British commission; but, in place of Lord Gambier, the American commissioners had a man to deal with whose qualifications and temper were of a very different kind. This was Frederic Robinson, afterwards Lord Goderich and Earl Ripon, who played a distinguished part in reforming the worst faults of the English commercial system. He was now vice-president of the Board of Trade, and treated the American ministers with courtesy and kindness, although able to do little more. Mr. Gallatin succeeded in disposing of none of the more difficult points in dispute. Not only did the British government politely decline to open the questions of impressment, blockade, and the trade with enemies’ colonies in time of war, but it withdrew the whole subject of the West India trade from discussion, and refused to listen to the American proposition for regulating the traffic with Canada and opening the river St. Lawrence. There remained only the East Indies, and a convention was ultimately signed which secured the Americans for four years in the enjoyment of this branch of commerce. In discussing with the Secretary of State the merits of this commercial convention of 1815, Mr. Gallatin afterwards declared that the only portion of it which appeared to him truly valuable was that which abolished discriminating duties, “a policy which, removing some grounds of irritation, and preventing in that respect a species of commercial warfare, may have a tendency to lay the foundation of a better understanding between the two nations on other points.”[153] This result of three months’ labor was small enough, but Mr. Gallatin might derive some encouragement from the fact that the British government looked upon itself as having done a very generous act, since, in the words of its last note, “it considers itself as granting to the United States a privilege in regard to the East Indies for which it is entitled to require an equivalent.”
The negotiation did not close without its inevitable accompaniment of discord.[154] Mr. Adams, who commonly recorded all his own sins of temper with conscientious self-reproach, seems in this case to have thought Mr. Gallatin at fault, and accuses him of speaking in a peremptory and somewhat petulant manner against a point of form in which Mr. Adams was undoubtedly right. The charge may very possibly be in this instance correct. The whole matter was trivial, so far as the dispute was concerned, and, like all these diplomatic irritations, had no lasting effect except to associate in Mr. Gallatin’s mind the recollection of Mr. Adams with ideas of deplorable wrong-headedness. This was not necessarily a correct conclusion, and Mr. Adams was naturally led to retaliate by thinking Mr. Gallatin tortuous. In point of fact, Mr. Adams was but one representative of a common New England type, little understood beyond the borders of that province; a type which, with an indurated exterior, was sinewy and supple to the core. The true Yankee wrested from man and from nature all he could get by force, but when force was exhausted he could be as pliable as his neighbors. In the present case, Mr. Adams attempted an experiment of this kind at the risk of some personal inconvenience to Mr. Gallatin. The nearly futile negotiation had detained Gallatin and Clay in England much beyond their intention; meanwhile, Bayard and Crawford, on June 18, had sailed in the Neptune, leaving their two companions to get home as they best could. It was now the 2d of July, and the treaty was waiting to be signed, when Mr. Adams made in the final draft some changes of form, which were certainly proper as a matter of national dignity, but which threatened to create further delay. This appears for a moment to have disturbed Gallatin’s equanimity; but Mr. Adams carried his point, Mr. Robinson made no difficulty, and the disagreement ended by Gallatin saying to Adams: “Well, they got over the transpositions very easily; but you would not have found it so if Dr. Adams had had the reading of your copy instead of Robinson.” “I said, that might be,” was Mr. Adams’s final entry.
That evening Mr. Gallatin dined for the last time during these negotiations with Mr. Alexander Baring, now and ever afterwards his warm friend, who had done more than any other man in England, or perhaps, with one exception, even in America, to hasten the peace, and who had, with the knowledge and consent of his own government, rendered very important financial assistance even while the war was going on. There had been much social entertainment in London, part of which is recorded in Mr. Adams’s Diary; but the only English friend Mr. Gallatin ever made whose society he greatly enjoyed, and whose character he deeply respected, was Mr. Baring.
On July 4, Mr. Gallatin began his homeward journey, and, after the usual delays, he reached America early in September. On the 4th of that month he wrote from New York to President Madison: “I received the account of my appointment to France with pleasure and gratitude, as an evidence of your undiminished friendship and of public satisfaction for my services. Whether I can or will accept, I have not yet determined. The season will be far advanced for taking Mrs. Gallatin across the Atlantic, and I have had no time to ascertain what arrangements, if any, I can make for my children and private business during a second absence. The delay has been rather advantageous to the public, as it was best to have no minister at Paris during the late events.”