Gouverneur Morris

by Theodore Roosevelt

[CHAPTER IX.]

MISSION TO ENGLAND: RETURN TO PARIS.

In March, 1790, Morris went to London, in obedience to a letter received from Washington appointing him private agent to the British government, and enclosing him the proper credentials.

Certain of the conditions of the treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States, although entered into seven years before, were still unfulfilled. It had been stipulated that the British should give up the fortified frontier posts within our territory, and should pay for the negroes they had taken away from the Southern States during the war. They had done neither, and Morris was charged to find out what the intentions of the government were in the matter. He was also to find out whether there was a disposition to enter into a commercial treaty with the United States; and finally, he was to sound them as to their sending a minister to America.

On our part we had also failed to fulfil a portion of our treaty obligations, not having complied with the article which provided for the payment of debts due before the war to British merchants. Both sides had been to blame; each, of course, blamed only the other. But now, when we were ready to perform our part, the British refused to perform theirs.

As a consequence, Morris, although he spent most of the year in London, failed to accomplish anything. The feeling in England was hostile to America; to the king, in particular, the very name was hateful. The English were still sore over their defeat, and hated us because we had been victors; and yet they despised us also, for they thought we should be absolutely powerless except when we were acting merely on the defensive. From the days of the Revolution till the days of the Civil War, the ruling classes of England were bitterly antagonistic to our nation; they always saw with glee any check to our national well-being: they wished us ill, and exulted in our misfortunes, while they sneered at our successes. The results have been lasting, and now work much more to their hurt than to ours. The past conduct of England certainly offers much excuse for, though it cannot in the least justify, the unreasonable and virulent anti-English feeling—that is, the feeling against Englishmen politically and nationally, not socially or individually—which is so strong in many parts of our country where the native American blood is purest.

The English ministry in 1790 probably had the general feeling of the nation behind them in their determination to injure us as much as they could; at any rate, their aim seemed to be, as far as lay in them, to embitter our already existing hostility to their empire. They not only refused to grant us any substantial justice, but they were inclined to inflict on us and on our representatives those petty insults which rankle longer than injuries.

When it came to this point, however, Morris was quite able to hold his own. He had a ready, biting tongue; and, excepting Pitt and Fox, was intellectually superior to any of the public men whom he met. In social position, even as they understood it, he was their equal; they could hardly look down on the brother of a British major-general, and a brother-in-law of the Duchess of Gordon. He was a man of rather fiery courage, and any attacks upon his country were not likely to be made twice in his presence. Besides, he never found the English congenial as friends or companions; he could not sympathize, or indeed get along well, with them. This distaste for their society he always retained, and though he afterwards grew to respect them, and to be their warm partisan politically, he was at this time much more friendly to France, and was even helping the French ministers concoct a scheme of warfare against their neighbor. To his bright, impatient temperament, the English awkwardness seemed to be an insuperable obstacle to bringing people together "as in other countries." He satirized the English drawing-rooms, "where the arrangement of the company was stiff and formal, the ladies all ranged in battalia on one side of the room;" and remarked "that the French, having no liberty in their government, have compensated to themselves that misfortune by bestowing a great deal upon society. But that, I fear, in England, is all confined to the House of Commons." Years afterwards he wrote to a friend abroad: "Have you reflected that there is more of real society in one week at manners." Times have changed, and the manners of the Islanders with them. Exactly as the "rude Carinthian boor" has become the most polished of mortals, so, after a like transformation, English society is now perhaps the pleasantest and most interesting in Europe. Were Morris alive to-day, he would probably respect the English as much as he ever did, and like them a good deal more; and, while he might well have his preference for his own country confirmed, yet, if he had to go abroad, it is hard to believe that he would now pass by London in favor of any continental capital or watering-place.

In acknowledging Washington's letter of appointment, Morris wrote that he did not expect much difficulty, save from the king himself, who was very obstinate, and bore a personal dislike to his former subjects. But his interviews with the minister of foreign affairs, the Duke of Leeds, soon undeceived him. The duke met him with all the little tricks of delay, and evasion, known to old-fashioned diplomacy; tricks that are always greatly relished by men of moderate ability, and which are successful enough where the game is not very important, as in the present instance, but are nearly useless when the stakes are high and the adversary determined. The worthy nobleman was profuse in expressions of general good-will, and vague to a degree in his answers to every concrete question; affected to misunderstand what was asked of him, and, when he could not do this "slumbered profoundly" for weeks before making his reply. Morris wrote that "his explanatory comments were more unintelligible than his texts," and was delighted when he heard that he might be replaced by Lord Hawksbury; for the latter, although strongly anti-American, "would at least be an efficient minister," whereas the former was "evidently afraid of committing himself by saying or doing anything positive." He soon concluded that Great Britain was so uncertain as to how matters were going in Europe that she wished to keep us in a similar state of suspense. She had recovered with marvelous rapidity from the effects of the great war; she was felt on all sides to hold a position of commanding power; this she knew well, and so felt like driving a very hard bargain with any nation, especially with a weak one that she hated. It was particularly difficult to form a commercial treaty. There were very many Englishmen who agreed with a Mr. Irwin, "a mighty sour sort of creature," who assured Morris that he was utterly opposed to all American trade in grain, and that he wished to oblige the British people, by the force of starvation, to raise enough corn for their own consumption. Fox told Morris that he and Burke were about the only two men left who believed that Americans should be allowed to trade in their own bottoms to the British Islands; and he also informed him that Pitt was not hostile to America, but simply indifferent, being absorbed in European matters, and allowing his colleagues free hands.