The trial at once became a political affair, the Federalists, to spite the President, making Burr’s cause their own, though he had killed Alexander Hamilton but three years before, and pretending to regard him as an [pg 134]innocent man persecuted by the President for political reasons. Jefferson himself took a hand in the prosecution to the extent of writing letters to the district attorney full of advice and suggestions. It would have been more dignified had he held aloof, but the provocation which he received was very great. Burr and his counsel used every possible means of throwing odium upon the President; and in this they were assisted by Chief Justice Marshall, who presided at the trial. Marshall, though in the main a just man, was bitterly opposed to Jefferson in political affairs, and in this case he harshly blamed the executive for not procuring evidence with a celerity which, under the circumstances, was impossible. He also summoned the President into court as a witness. The President, however, declined to attend, and the matter was not pressed. Burr was acquitted, chiefly on technical grounds.
The Burr affair, however, was but a trifle compared with the difficulties arising from our relations with England. That country had always asserted over the United States [pg 135]the right of impressment, a right, namely, to search American ships, and to take therefrom any Englishmen found among the crew. In many cases, Englishmen who had been naturalized in the United States were thus taken. This alleged right had always been denied by the United States, and British perseverance in it finally led to the war of 1812.
Another source of contention was the neutral trade. During the European wars in the early part of the century the seaport towns of the United States did an immense and profitable business in carrying goods to European ports, and from one European port to another. Great Britain, after various attempts to discourage American commerce with her enemies, undertook to put it down by confiscating vessels of the United States on the ground that their cargoes were not neutral but belligerent property,—the property, that is, of nations at war with Great Britain. And, no doubt, in some cases this was the fact,—foreign merchandise having been imported to this country to get a neutral name for it, and thence exported to a [pg 136]country to which it could not have been shipped directly from its place of origin. In April, 1806, the President dispatched Mr. Monroe to London in order, if possible, to settle these disputed matters by a treaty. Monroe, in conjunction with Mr. Pinckney, our minister to England, sent back a treaty which contained no reference whatever to the matter of impressments. It was the best treaty which they could obtain, but it was silent upon this vital point.
The situation was a perilous one; England had fought the battle of Trafalgar the year before; and was now able to carry everything before her upon the high seas. Nevertheless, the President’s conduct was bold and prompt. The treaty had been negotiated mainly by his own envoy and friend, Monroe, and great pressure was exerted in favor of it,—especially by the merchants and shipowners of the east. But Jefferson refused even to lay it before the Senate, and at once sent it back to England. His position, and history has justified it, was that to accept a treaty which might be con[pg 137]strued as tacitly admitting the right of impressment would be a disgrace to the country. The other questions at issue were more nearly legal and technical, but this one touched the national honor; and with the same right instinct which Jefferson showed in 1807, the people of the United States, five years later, fixed upon this grievance, out of the fog in which diplomacy had enveloped our relations with England, as the true and sufficient cause of the war of 1812.
Nevertheless, Jefferson treated Monroe with the greatest consideration. At this period Monroe and Madison were both candidates for the Republican nomination for the presidency. Jefferson’s choice was Madison, but he remained impartial between them; and he withheld Monroe’s treaty from publication at a time when to publish it would have given a fatal blow to Monroe’s prospects. In every way, in fact, he exerted himself to disguise and soften Monroe’s discredit.
The wisdom of Jefferson’s course as to the treaty was shown before three months had elapsed by an act of British aggression, which, [pg 138]had the Monroe treaty been accepted, might fairly have been laid to its door. In June, 1807, the British frigate Leopard, having been refused permission to search the American frigate Chesapeake, fired upon the Chesapeake, which was totally unprepared for action, and, after killing three men and wounding eighteen, refused to accept the surrender of the ship, but carried off three alleged deserters.
This event roused a storm of indignation, which never quite subsided until the insult had been effaced by the blood which was shed in the war of 1812. “For the first time in their history,” says Mr. Henry Adams, “the people of the United States learned in June, 1807, the feeling of a true national emotion.” “Never since the battle of Lexington,” wrote Jefferson, “have I seen this country in such a state of exasperation as at present.”
War might easily have been precipitated, had Jefferson been carried away by the popular excitement. He immediately dispatched a frigate to England demanding reparation, [pg 139]and he issued a proclamation forbidding all British men-of-war to enter the waters of the United States, unless in distress or bearing dispatches. Jefferson expected war, but he meant to delay it for a while.
To his son-in-law, John Eppes, he wrote: “Reason and the usage of civilized nations require that we should give them an opportunity of disavowal and reparation. Our own interests, too, the very means of making war, require that we should give time to our merchants to gather in their vessels and property and our seamen now afloat.”
Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury, even criticised the President’s annual message at this time as being too warlike and “not in the style of the proclamation, which has been almost universally approved at home and abroad.” It cannot truly be said, therefore, that Jefferson had any unconquerable aversion to war.