I trust [he said] that the good sense of our country
will see that its greatest prosperity depends on a
due balance between agriculture, manufactures, and
commerce; and not on this protuberant navigation,
which has kept us in hot water since the commencement
of our government... It is essentially necessary for
us to have shipping and seamen enough to carry our
surplus products to market, but beyond that I do not
think we are bound to give it encouragement... This
exuberant commerce brings us into collision with other
Powers in every sea.
Notwithstanding such opinions, Jefferson stood firm on the question of 'Sailors' Rights.' He refused to approve a treaty that had been signed on the last day of 1806 by his four commissioners in London, chiefly because it provided no precise guarantee against impressment. The British ministers had offered, and had sincerely meant, to respect all American rights, to issue special instructions against molesting American citizens under any circumstances, and to redress every case of wrong. But, with a united nation behind them and an implacable enemy in front, they could not possibly give up the right to take British seamen from neutral vessels which were sailing the high seas. The Right of Search was the acknowledged law of nations all round the world; and surrender on this point meant death to the Empire they were bound to guard.
Their 'no surrender' on this vital point was, of course, anathema to Jefferson. Yet he would not go beyond verbal fulminations. In the following year, however, he was nearly forced to draw the sword by one of those incidents that will happen during strained relations. In June 1807 two French men-of-war were lying off Annapolis, a hundred miles up Chesapeake Bay. Far down the bay, in Hampton Roads, the American frigate Chesapeake was fitting out for sea. Twelve miles below her anchorage a small British squadron lay just within Cape Henry, waiting to follow the Frenchmen out beyond the three-mile limit. As Jefferson quite justly said, this squadron was 'enjoying the hospitality of the United States.' Presently the Chesapeake got under way; whereupon the British frigate Leopard made sail and cleared the land ahead of her. Ten miles out the Leopard hailed her, and sent an officer aboard to show the American commodore the orders from Admiral Berkeley at Halifax. These orders named certain British deserters as being among the Chesapeake's crew. The American commodore refused to allow a search; but submitted after a fight, during which he lost twenty-one men killed and wounded. Four men were then seized. One was hanged; another died; and the other two were subsequently returned with the apologies of the British government.
James Monroe, of Monroe Doctrine fame, was then American minister in London. Canning, the British foreign minister, who heard the news first, wrote an apology on the spot, and promised to make 'prompt and effectual reparation' if Berkeley had been wrong. Berkeley was wrong. The Right of Search did not include the right to search a foreign man-of-war, though, unlike the modern 'right of search,' which is confined to cargoes, it did include the right to search a neutral merchantman on the high seas for any 'national' who was 'wanted.' Canning, however, distinctly stated that the men's nationality would affect the consideration of restoring them or not. Monroe now had a good case. But he made the fatal mistake of writing officially to Canning before he knew the details, and, worse still, of diluting his argument with other complaints which had nothing to do with the affair itself. The result was a long and involved correspondence, a tardy and ungracious reparation, and much justifiable resentment on the American side.
Unfriendliness soon became Hostility after the Chesapeake affair had sharpened the sting of the Orders-in-Council, which had been issued at the beginning of the same year, 1807. These celebrated Orders simply meant that so long as Napoleon tried to blockade the British Isles by enforcing his Berlin Decree, just so long would the British Navy be employed in blockading him and his allies. Such decisive action, of course, brought neutral shipping more than ever under the power of the British Navy, which commanded all the seaways to the ports of Europe. It accentuated the differences between the American and British governments, and threw the shadow of the coming storm over the exposed colony of Canada.
Not having succeeded in his struggle for 'Sailors' Rights,' Jefferson now took up the cudgels for 'Free Trade'; but still without a resort to arms. His chosen means of warfare was an Embargo Act, forbidding the departure of vessels from United States ports. This, although nominally aimed against France as well, was designed to make Great Britain submit by cutting off both her and her colonies from all intercourse with the United States. But its actual effect was to hurt Americans, and even Jefferson's own party, far more than it hurt the British. The Yankee skipper already had two blockades against 'Free Trade.' The Embargo Act added a third. Of course it was evaded; and a good deal of shipping went from the United States and passed into Canadian ports under the Union Jack. Jefferson and his followers, however, persisted in taking their own way. So Canada gained from the embargo much of what the Americans were losing. Quebec and Halifax swarmed with contrabandists, who smuggled back return cargoes into the New England ports, which were Federalist in party allegiance, and only too ready to evade or defy the edicts of the Democratic administration. Jefferson had, it is true, the satisfaction of inflicting much temporary hardship on cotton-spinning Manchester. But the American cotton-growing South suffered even more.
The American claims of 'Free Trade and Sailors' Rights' were opposed by the British counter-claims of the Orders-in-Council and the Right of Search. But 'Down with the British' and 'On to Canada' were without exact equivalents on the other side. The British at home were a good deal irritated by so much unfriendliness and hostility behind them while they were engaged with Napoleon in front. Yet they could hardly be described as anti-American; and they certainly had no wish to fight, still less to conquer, the United States. Canada did contain an anti-American element in the United Empire Loyalists, whom the American Revolution had driven from their homes. But her general wish was to be left in peace. Failing that, she was prepared for defence.
Anti-British feeling probably animated at least two-thirds of the American people on every question that caused international friction; and the Jeffersonian Democrats, who were in power, were anti-British to a man. So strong was this feeling among them that they continued to side with France even when she was under the military despotism of Napoleon. He was the arch-enemy of England in Europe. They were the arch-enemy of England in America. This alone was enough to overcome their natural repugnance to his autocratic ways. Their position towards the British was such that they could not draw back from France, whose change of government had made her a more efficient anti-British friend. 'Let us unite with France and stand or fall together' was the cry the Democratic press repeated for years in different forms. It was strangely prophetic. Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1808 began its self-injurious career at the same time that the Peninsular War began to make the first injurious breach in Napoleon's Continental System. Madison's declaration of war in 1812 coincided with the opening of Napoleon's disastrous campaign in Russia.
The Federalists, the party in favour of peace with the British, included many of the men who had done most for Independence; and they were all, of course, above suspicion as patriotic Americans. But they were not unlike transatlantic, self-governing Englishmen. They had been alienated by the excesses of the French Revolution; and they could not condone the tyranny of Napoleon. They preferred American statesmen of the type of Washington and Hamilton to those of the type of Jefferson and Madison. And they were not inclined to be more anti-British than the occasion required. They were strongest in New England and New York. The Democrats were strongest throughout the South and in what was then the West. The Federalists had been in power during the Accommodation period. The Democrats began with Unfriendliness, continued with Hostility, and ended with War.
The Federalists did not hesitate to speak their mind. Their loss of power had sharpened their tongues; and they were often no more generous to the Democrats and to France than the Democrats were to them and to the British. But, on the whole, they made for goodwill on both sides; as well as for a better understanding of each other's rights and difficulties; and so they made for peace. The general current, however, was against them, even before the Chesapeake affair; and several additional incidents helped to quicken it afterwards. In 1808 the toast of the President of the United States was received with hisses at a great public dinner in London, given to the leaders of the Spanish revolt against Napoleon by British admirers. In 1811 the British sloop-of-war Little Belt was overhauled by the American frigate President fifty miles off-shore and forced to strike, after losing thirty-two men and being reduced to a mere battered hulk. The vessels came into range after dark; the British seem to have fired first; and the Americans had the further excuse that they were still smarting under the Chesapeake affair. Then, in 1812, an Irish adventurer called Henry, who had been doing some secret-service work in the United States at the instance of the Canadian governor-general, sold the duplicates of his correspondence to President Madison. These were of little real importance; but they added fuel to the Democratic fire in Congress just when anti-British feeling was at its worst.