The Wars Between England and America

by Theodore Clarke Smith

The revulsion of temper was illustrated in the commencement at this time of the organized movement for settled international peace, which may be dated from the establishment of the New York and Massachusetts Peace Societies in 1815, and the London Peace Society in the following year. But its most signal expression came in the remarkable agreement by which the Canadian-American frontier has been, for nearly a century, unfortified, and yet completely peaceful. On November 16, 1815, State Secretary Monroe instructed Adams to propose to the British Government that—as, "if each party augments its force there with a view to obtaining the ascendancy over the other, vast expense will be incurred and the danger of collision augmented in like degree"—such military preparations should be suspended on both sides. The smaller the number of the armed forces agreed upon, he said, the better; "or to abstain altogether from an armed force beyond that used for the revenue." After some suspicious hesitation, Lord Castlereagh accepted this novel proposal; and it was {246} given effect to by an exchange of notes, signed by Mr. Bagot, British Minister at Washington, and Mr. Rush (Monroe's successor) on April 28 and 29, 1817, approved by the Senate a year later, and proclaimed by the President on April 28, 1818. By Rush-Bagot Agreement, the naval force of each Government was limited to one small gun-boat of each power on Champlain and Ontario, and two on the upper lakes, an arrangement of immense value to both Canada and the United States.

The old-time commercial antagonism was also destined to disappear in a few years after the close of the war. At first England clung to the time-honoured West Indian policy, and, when in 1815 the two countries adjusted their commercial relations, American vessels were still excluded, although given the right to trade directly with the East Indies. But already the new economic thought, which regarded competition and reciprocal trade as the ideal, instead of legal discriminations and universal protectionism, was gaining ground, as England became more and more the manufacturing centre of the world. Under Huskisson, in 1825, reciprocity was definitely substituted for exclusion; and a few years later, under Peel and Russell, and within the lifetime of men who had maintained the Orders in Council, the whole {247} elaborate system of laws backed by the logic of Lord Sheffield and James Stephen was cast away and fell into disrepute and oblivion.

In America, it should be added, the rush of settlers into the West and the starting of manufactures served, within a few years from the end of the War of 1812, to alter largely the former dependence of the United States upon foreign commerce. By the time that England was ready to abandon its restrictive policy, the United States was beginning to be a manufacturing nation with its chief wealth in its great internal trade, and the ancient interest in the West Indies was fast falling into insignificance. The same men who raged against the Jay treaty and the Orders in Council lived to forget that they had ever considered the West India trade important. So, on both sides, the end of commercial antagonism was soon to follow on the Treaty of Ghent.

Finally, and more slowly, the original political and social antagonism ceased to be active, and ultimately died out. So far as the United States was concerned, the change was scarcely visible until three-quarters of a century after the Treaty of Ghent. The temper of the American people, formed by Revolutionary traditions and nourished on memories of battle and injuries, remained {248} steadily antagonistic toward England; and the triumph of western social ideals served to emphasize the distinction between the American democrat and the British aristocrat, until dislike became a tradition and a political and literary convention. But the emptiness of this normal national hatred of John Bull was shown in 1898, when, at the first distinct sign of friendliness on the part of the British government and people, the whole American anglophobia vanished, and the people of the continent realized that the time had come for a recognition of the essential and normal harmony of the ancient enemies.

In England, the change began somewhat earlier, for within less than a generation after the Treaty of Ghent the exclusive Tory control collapsed, and the Revolution of 1832 gave the middle classes a share of political power. A few years later the Radicals, representing the working-men, became a distinct force in Parliament, and to middle class and Radicals there was nothing abhorrent in the American Republic. Aristocratic society continued, of course, as in the eighteenth century, to regard the United States with scant respect, and those members of the upper middle classes who took their social tone from the aristocracy commonly reflected their prejudices. But the masses of {249} the British people—whose relatives emigrated steadily to the western land of promise—felt a genuine sympathy and interest in the success of the great democratic experiment, a sympathy which was far deeper and more effective than had been that of the eighteenth-century Whigs. From the moment that these classes made their weight felt in government, the time was at hand when the old social antagonism was to die out, and with it the deep political antipathy which, since the days of 1793, had tinged the official British opinion of a democratic state. The last evidence of the Tory point of view came when, in 1861, the American Civil War brought out the unconcealed aversion of the British nobility and aristocracy for the northern democracy; but on the occasion the equally unconcealed sense of political and social sympathy manifested by the British middle and working classes served to prevent any danger to the United States, and to keep England from aiding in the disruption of the Union.

Thus the Treaty of Ghent, marking the removal of immediate causes of irritation, was the beginning of a period in which the under-lying elements of antagonism between England and the United States were definitely to cease. When every discount is made, the celebration, heartily supported by the national leaders on {250} both sides, of a century of peace between the British, Canadian, and American peoples, does exhibit, in Sir Wilfred Laurier's words, "a spectacle to astound the world by its novelty and grandeur."

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The references to the epoch covered in this volume may be rather sharply divided into those which deal with the years before 1783, and those which relate to the subsequent period. In the first group, there are both British and American works of high excellence, but in the second there are practically none but American authorities, owing to the preoccupation of British writers with the more dramatic and important French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, of the events of parliamentary politics.

For the years 1763-1783 the best American history is E. CHANNING, History of the United States, vol. iii (1912), distinctly independent, thorough, and impartial. S. G. FISHER, The Struggle for American Independence, 2 vols. (1908), is cynically critical and unconventional. Three volumes of the American Nation series,—G. E. HOWARD, Preliminaries of the Revolution; C. H. VAN TYNE, The American Revolution; and A. C. McLAUGHLIN, The Confederation and the Constitution (1905), are equally scholarly and less detailed. The older American works, exhibiting the traditional "patriotic" view, are best represented by J. FISKE, American Revolution, 2 vols. (1891); and G. BANCROFT, History of the United States, 6 vols. (ed. 1883-1885).