THE SECOND ADMINISTRATION
OF
THOMAS JEFFERSON
1805–1809

HISTORY
OF THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DURING THE SECOND ADMINISTRATION OF

THOMAS JEFFERSON

By HENRY ADAMS

Vol. III.

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1921

Copyright, 1890
By Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Copyright, 1918
By Henry Adams

CONTENTS OF VOL. III.

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

CHAPTER I.

A second time President Jefferson appeared at the Capitol, escorted with due formalities by a procession of militia-men and other citizens; and once more he delivered an inaugural address, “in so low a voice that not half of it was heard by any part of the crowded auditory.”[1] The second Inaugural roused neither the bitterness nor the applause which greeted the first, although in part it was intended as a cry of triumph over the principles and vanishing power of New England.

Among Jefferson’s manuscripts he preserved a curious memorandum explaining the ideas of this address. As the first Inaugural declared the principles which were to guide the government in Republican hands, the second should report the success of these principles, and recall the results already reached. The task deserved all the eloquence and loftiness of thought that philosophy could command; for Jefferson had made a democratic polity victorious at home and respectable in the world’s eyes, and the privilege of hearing him reaffirm his doctrines and pronounce their success was one that could never be renewed. The Moses of democracy, he had the glory of leading his followers into their promised and conquered Canaan.

Jefferson began by renewing the professions of his foreign policy:—

“With nations, as with individuals, our interests, soundly calculated, will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties; and history bears witness to the fact that a just nation is taken on its word, when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others.”

The sentiments were excellent; but many of Jefferson’s followers must have asked themselves in what history they could find the fact, which the President asserted, that a just nation was taken on its word; and they must have been still more perplexed to name the nation, just or unjust, which was taken on its word by any other in the actual condition of the world. Without dwelling on this topic, which had already become one of interest in the councils of his Cabinet, Jefferson, passing to practical questions involved in redemption of debt, advanced a new idea.

“Redemption once effected,” he said, “the revenue thereby liberated may, by a just repartition among the States and a corresponding amendment of the Constitution, be applied, in time of peace, to rivers, canals, roads, arts, manufactures, education, and other great objects within each State. In time of war,—if injustice, by ourselves or others, must sometimes produce war,—increased as the same revenue will be increased by population and consumption, and aided by other resources reserved for that crisis, it may meet within the year all the expenses of the year without encroaching on the rights of future generations by burdening them with the debts of the past. War will then be but a suspension of useful works, and a return to a state of peace a return to the progress of improvement.”

Ten years earlier, in the mouth of President Washington, this sentiment would have been generally denounced as proof of monarchical designs. That Jefferson was willing not only to assume powers for the central government, but also to part from his States-rights associates and to gratify the Northern democrats by many concessions of principle, his first Administration had already proved; but John Randolph might wonder to see him stride so fast and far toward what had been ever denounced as Roman imperialism and corruption; to hear him advise a change of the Constitution in order to create an annual fund for public works, for the arts, for education, and even for such manufactures as the people might want,—a fund which was to be distributed to the States, thus putting in the hands of the central government an instrument of corruption, and making the States stipendiaries of Congress. Every principle of the Republican party, past or to come, was put to nought by a policy which contradicted the famous sentiment of Jefferson’s first annual message: “Sound principles will not justify our taxing the industry of our fellow-citizens to accumulate treasure for wars to happen we know not when, and which might not perhaps happen but from the temptations offered by that treasure.” Yet pregnant as this new principle might be in connection with the Constitution and the Union, its bearing on foreign affairs was more startling. Jefferson, the apostle of peace, asked for a war fund which should enable his government to wage indefinite hostilities without borrowing money!

Quitting this dangerous ground, the President spoke of the Louisiana purchase. Then followed a paragraph upon religion. Next he came to the subject of the Indians, and chose this unusual medium for enforcing favorite philosophical doctrines. The memorandum written to explain his address declared the reasons that led him to use the mask of Indian philanthropy to disguise an attack upon conservatism.[2]

“Every respecter of science,” said this memorandum, “every friend to political reformation, must have observed with indignation the hue-and-cry raised against philosophy and the rights of man; and it really seems as if they would be overborne, and barbarism, bigotry, and despotism would recover the ground they have lost by the advance of the public understanding. I have thought the occasion justified some discountenance of these anti-social doctrines, some testimony against them; but not to commit myself in direct warfare on them, I have thought it best to say what is directly applied to the Indians only, but admits by inference a more general extension.”

In truth, under the lead of Napoleon and Pitt, Europe seemed bent on turning back the march of time and renewing the bigotry and despotism of the Middle Ages; but this occasion hardly dignified Jefferson’s method of bearing testimony against the danger, by not committing himself to direct warfare upon it, but by applying to Indians the homily which by inference included the churches of New England.

“The aboriginal inhabitants of these countries,” said the President to his great audience, “I have regarded with the commiseration their history inspires. Endowed with the faculties and the rights of men, breathing an ardent love of liberty and independence, and occupying a country which left them no desire but to be undisturbed, the stream of overflowing population from other regions directed itself on these shores.”

If the Boston newspapers were not weary of ridiculing Jefferson’s rhetoric, this sentence was fitted to rouse their jaded amusement; but in a few moments they had reason to feel other emotions. He said that he had done what humanity required, and had tried to teach the Indians agriculture and other industries in order to prepare them for new conditions of life,—a claim not only true, but also honorable to him. Unfortunately these attempts met with obstacles from the Indians themselves:—

“They are combated by the habits of their bodies, prejudice of their minds, ignorance, pride, and the influence of interested and crafty individuals among them, who feel themselves something in the present order of things, and fear to become nothing in any other. These persons inculcate a sanctimonious reverence for the customs of their ancestors; that whatsoever they did must be done through all time; that reason is a false guide, and to advance under its counsel, in their physical, moral, or political condition, is perilous innovation; that their duty is to remain as their Creator made them, ignorance being safety, and knowledge full of danger. In short, my friends, among them is seen the action and counter-action of good sense and bigotry; they too have their anti-philosophers, who find an interest in keeping things in their present state, who dread reformation, and exert all their faculties to maintain the ascendency of habit over the duty of improving our reason and obeying its mandates.”

Gallatin remonstrated in vain against this allusion to New England habits;[3] the President could not resist the temptation to strike once more his old enemies. Gallatin, whose sense of humor was keener than that of Jefferson, must have been amused by the travesty of New England under the war-paint and blankets of the Choctaws and Kickapoos; but Jefferson was never more serious than in believing that the people of Massachusetts and Connecticut were held in darkness by a few interested “medicine-men,” and that he could, without committing himself in direct warfare, insult the clergy, lawyers, and keen-witted squirarchy of New England, thus held up “by inference” to the world as the equivalent to so many savages.

The rest of the Inaugural was chiefly devoted to the press and its licentiousness. Jefferson expressed himself strongly in regard to the slanders he had received, and even hinted that he would be glad to see the State laws of libel applied to punish the offenders; but he pointed out that slander had no political success, and that it might safely he disregarded as a political weapon. He urged “doubting brethren” to give up their fears and prejudices, and to join with the mass of their fellow-citizens. “In the mean time let us cherish them with patient affection; let us do them justice, and more than justice, in all competitions of interest.” Finally, as though to silence the New-England pulpit, he closed with a few words which the clergy might perhaps think misplaced in the mouth of so earnest a deist,—an invocation of “that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old,” to the “country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life, ... and to whose goodness I ask you to join with me in supplications.”

The Second Inaugural strode far beyond the first in the path of democracy, away from the landmarks of Virginia republicanism, betraying what Jefferson’s friends and enemies alike thought a craving for popularity. If this instinct sometimes led him to forget principles he had once asserted, and which he would some day again declare vital, the quality was so amiable as to cover many shortcomings; but its influence on national growth could not be disputed. Jefferson cherished but one last desire,—to reach the end of his next term without disaster. He frankly expressed this feeling in a letter written to General Heath soon after the autumn election of 1804, which gave him the electoral vote of Massachusetts:—

“I sincerely join you,” said he, “in congratulations on the return of Massachusetts into the fold of the Union. This is truly the case wherein we may say, ‘This our brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.’ It is but too true that our Union could not be pronounced entirely sound while so respectable a member as Massachusetts was under morbid affection. All will now come to rights.... The new century opened itself by committing us on a boisterous ocean; but all is now subsiding; peace is smoothing our path at home and abroad; and if we are not wanting in the practice of justice and moderation, our tranquillity and prosperity may be preserved until increasing numbers shall leave us nothing to fear from abroad. With England we are in cordial friendship; with France in the most perfect understanding; with Spain we shall always be bickering, but never at war till we seek it. Other nations view our course with respect and friendly anxiety. Should we be able to preserve this state of public happiness, and to see our citizens, whom we found so divided, rally to their genuine principles, I shall hope yet to enjoy the comfort of that general good-will which has been so unfeelingly wrested from me, and to sing at the close of my term the Nunc dimittis, Domine, with a satisfaction leaving nothing to desire but the last great audit.”[4]

He could not forgive the New England clergy their want of feeling in wresting from him ever so small a share of the general good-will, and he looked forward with impatience to the moment when he should enjoy universal applause and respect. In December, 1804, when this letter was written, he felt confident that his splendid triumph would last unchecked to the end of his public career; but the prize of general good-will, which seemed then almost won, continually eluded his grasp. The election of November, 1804, was followed by the session of 1804–1805, which stirred bad blood even in Virginia, and betrayed a spirit of faction among his oldest friends. His Inaugural Address of March, 1805, with its mixture of bitter-sweet, was answered within a few weeks by Massachusetts. At the April election the Federalists reversed the result of November, and re-elected Caleb Strong as governor by a vote of about 35,200 against 33,800, with a Federalist majority in the Legislature. Even in Pennsylvania divisions among Jefferson’s followers increased, until in the autumn of 1805 Duane and Leib set up a candidate of their own choice for governor, and forced McKean, Dallas, and Gallatin’s friends to unite with the Federalists in order to reelect McKean. Jefferson balanced anxiously between these warring factions, trying to offend neither Duane nor John Randolph, nor even Burr, while he still drew the mass of moderate Federalists to sympathize in his views.

Thus the new Presidential term began, bringing with it little sign of change. The old arrangements were continued, with but one exception. Madison, Gallatin, Robert Smith, and Dearborn remained in the Cabinet; but Attorney-General Lincoln resigned, and Robert Smith asked to be transferred from the Navy Department to the Attorney-General’s office.[5] After some hesitation Jefferson yielded to Smith’s request and consented to the transfer. As Smith’s successor in the Navy Department Jefferson selected Jacob Crowninshield, a member of Congress from Massachusetts, who was then at Washington. Crowninshield, in consequence of his wife’s objection to leaving her family, declined the offer, Jan. 29, 1805,[6] but the President nevertheless sent the nomination to the Senate, March 2, 1805, together with that of Robert Smith, “now Secretary of the Navy to be Attorney-General of the United States.” The same day the Senate confirmed both appointments, and the commissions were regularly issued, March 3,—Robert Smith apparently ceasing thenceforward to possess any legal authority over the Navy Department.

Nevertheless Crowninshield persisted in declining the office, and Robert Smith continued to act as Secretary of the Navy, probably by the verbal request of the President. At length he consented to retain his old position permanently, and Jefferson sought for a new attorney-general. He offered the post, June 15, to John Julius Pringle of South Carolina, who declined. He then offered it, July 14, to John Thomson Mason, who also declined. August 7, Jefferson wrote to Senator Breckinridge of Kentucky, asking him to accept the office of attorney-general, and a temporary commission was the same day issued to him.

When Congress met, Dec. 2, 1805, Breckenridge was attorney-general under a temporary commission, and Robert Smith, who had ceased to be Secretary of the Navy on the confirmation of his successor, March 3, was acting as secretary under no apparent authority. Dec. 20, 1805, the President sent a message to the Senate making nominations for vacancies which had occurred during the recess, for which commissions had been granted “to the persons herein respectively named.” One of these persons was John Breckinridge of Kentucky to be Attorney-General of the United States, and the nomination was duly confirmed. Breckenridge’s permanent commission bore date Jan. 17, 1806.

These dates and facts were curious for the reason that Robert Smith, who had ceased to be Secretary of the Navy, March 3, 1805, ceased necessarily to be attorney-general on the confirmation of Breckinridge, and continued to act as Secretary of the Navy without authority of law. The President did not send his name to the Senate, or issue to him a new commission either permanent or temporary. On the official records of the Department of State, not Robert Smith but Jacob Crowninshield was Secretary of the Navy from March 3, 1805, till March 7, 1809, when his successor was appointed, although Jacob Crowninshield died April 15, 1808, and Robert Smith never ceased to act as Secretary of the Navy from his appointment in 1801 to his appointment as Secretary of State in 1809. During the whole period of Jefferson’s second administration, his Secretary of the Navy acted by no known authority except the verbal request or permission of the President.

In perfect quiet, disturbed only by rumors of wars abroad, spring crept forward to summer, summer ripened to autumn. Peace was restored with Tripoli; commerce grew apace; the revenue rose to $14,000,000; the Treasury was near a surfeit; no sign appeared of check to the immense prosperity which diffused itself through every rivulet in the wilderness, and the President could see no limit to its future increase. In 1804 he had sent out an expedition under Captain Meriwether Lewis to explore the Louisiana purchase along the course of the Missouri River. May 14, 1804, Lewis and his party began their journey from St. Louis, and without serious difficulty reached the Mandan towns, sixteen hundred and nine miles from the starting point, where, Nov. 1, 1804, they went into winter quarters. April 8, 1805, Lewis resumed his journey to the westward, sending the report of his wanderings to Washington. This report told only of a vast region inhabited by Indian tribes and disturbed by the restless and murderous Sioux; but it served to prove the immensity of the new world which Jefferson’s government had given to the American people. Other explorations had been begun along the line of the Red and Washita rivers. In such contributions to human knowledge Jefferson took keen interest, for he had no greater delight than in science and in whatever tended to widen the field of knowledge.

These explorations of the territory beyond the Mississippi had little immediate bearing on the interests of commerce or agriculture; but the government was actively engaged in measures of direct value. July 4, 1805, William Henry Harrison, Governor of the Indiana Territory, closed a bargain with the Wyandots, Ottawas, and other Indian tribes, by which the Indian title over another part of Ohio was extinguished. The Indians thenceforward held within the State of Ohio only the country west of Sandusky and north of the old line fixed by the treaty of Greenville. Within the year the Piankeshaw tribe sold for a small annuity a tract of land in southern Indiana, along the Ohio River, which made the United States government master of the whole north bank of the Ohio to its mouth. These concessions, of the utmost value, were obtained at a trifling cost. “The average price paid for the Indian lands within the last four years,” wrote the Secretary of War,[7] “does not amount to one cent per acre.” The Chickasaws and Cherokees sold a very large district between the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers in Tennessee, so that thenceforward the road from Knoxville to Nashville passed through no Indian land. In Georgia the Creeks were induced to sell an important territory between the Oconee and Ocmulgee rivers. In these treaties provision was also made for horse-roads through the Creek and Cherokee country, both from Knoxville and from central Georgia to the Mobile River.

Besides the many millions of acres thus gained for immediate improvement, these treaties had no little strategic value in case of war. No foreign country could fail to see that the outlying American settlements were defenceless in their isolation. Even the fort and village at Detroit were separated from the nearest white village by a wide Indian country impassable to wagons or artillery; and the helplessness of such posts was so evident as to impress every observer.

“The principles of our government,” said Jefferson when danger at last arose,[8] “leading us to the employment of such moderate garrisons in time of peace as may merely take care of the post, and to a reliance on the neighboring militia for its support in the first moments of war, I have thought it would be important to obtain from the Indians such a cession in the neighborhood of these posts as might maintain a militia proportioned to this object.”

This “principle of our government” that the settlers should protect the army, not the army the settlers, was so rigorously carried out that every new purchase of Indian lands was equivalent to providing a new army. The possession of Sandusky brought Detroit nearer its supports; possession of the banks of the Ohio strengthened Indiana. A bridle-path to New Orleans was the first step toward bringing that foreign dependence within reach; and although this path must necessarily pass through Spanish territory, it would enable the government in an emergency to hear from Louisiana within six weeks from the despatch of an order.

In spite of these immense gains, the military situation was still extremely weak. The Indians held in strong force the country west of Sandusky. The boundary between them and the whites was a mere line running from Lake Erie south and west across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to the neighborhood of St. Louis. Directly on this boundary line, near Greenville, lived the Shawanese, among whom a warrior named Tecumthe, and his brother called the Prophet were acquiring an influence hostile to the white men. These Indians, jealous of the rapid American encroachments, maintained relations with the British officials in Canada, and in case of a war between the United States and England they were likely to enter into a British alliance. In this case unless the United States government could control Lake Erie, nothing was more certain than that Detroit and every other post on the Lakes beyond must fall into British hands, and with them the military possession of the whole Northwest. Whether Great Britain could afterward be forced to surrender her conquests remained to be seen.

Even in Kentucky the country between the Tennessee River and the Mississippi still belonged to the Chickasaws; and south of the Tennessee River as far as the Gulf of Mexico, and east to the Ocmulgee, all belonged to Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws, who could not boast, like the Chickasaws, that “they had never spilt the blood of a white man.” These tribes maintained friendly relations with the Spanish authorities at Mobile and Pensacola, and, like the Shawanese and Northwestern Indians, dreaded the grasping Americans, who were driving them westward. In case of war with Spain, should New Orleans give trouble and invite a Spanish garrison, the Indians might be counted as Spaniards, and the United States government might be required to protect a frontier suddenly thrust back from the Floridas to the Duck River, within thirty miles of Nashville.

The President might well see with relief every new step that brought him within nearer reach of his remote military posts and his proconsular province at New Orleans. That he should dread war was natural, for he was responsible for the safety of the settlements on the Indian frontier, and he knew that in case of sudden war the capture of these posts was certain, and the massacre of their occupants more than probable. New Orleans was an immediate and incessant danger, and hardly a spot between New Orleans and Mackinaw was safe.

Anxiety caused by these perils had probably much to do with the bent of the President’s mind toward internal improvements and democratic rather than Virginia principles. In 1803 the United States government became owner of a territory which dwarfed the States themselves, and which at its most important point contained a foreign population governed by military methods. Old political theories had been thrown aside both in the purchase and in the organization of this New World; their observance in its administration was impossible. The Louisiana purchase not only required a military system of government for itself, but also reacted on the other national territory, and through it on the States in their relations to Washington. New England was thrown to the verge of the political system; but New York and Pennsylvania, Georgia and Tennessee, Ohio and Kentucky found many new interests which they wanted the central government to assist, and Virginia, holding the power and patronage of the central government, had every inducement to satisfy these demands.

So it happened that Jefferson gave up his Virginia dogmas, and adopted Gallatin’s ideas. They were both jealous of the army and navy; but they were willing to spend money with comparative liberality on internal improvements; and the wisdom of this course was evident. Even in a military point of view, roads and canals were more necessary than forts or ships.

The first evidence of change was the proposed fund for internal improvements and war purposes described in the second Inaugural Address. The suggestion was intended to prepare the public for a relaxation of Gallatin’s economy. Although the entire debt could not be paid before 1817, only ten and a half millions of bonds remained to be immediately dealt with. By the year 1809 these ten and a half millions would be discharged; and thereafter Gallatin might reduce his annual payments of principal and interest from $8,000,000 to $4,500.000, freeing an annual sum of $3,500,000 for use in other directions. During the next three years Gallatin was anxious to maintain his old system, and especially to preserve peace with foreign nations; but after the year 1808 he promised to relax his severity, and to provide three or four millions for purposes of internal improvement and defence. The rapid increase of revenue helped to create confidence in this calculation, and to hasten decision as to the use of the promised surplus. The President had already decided to convert it into a permanent reserve fund. He looked forward to the moment when, as he expressed it, he could “begin upon canals, roads, colleges, etc.”[9] He no longer talked of “a wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned;” he rather proposed to devote a third of the national revenues to improvements and to regulation of industries.

This theory of statesmanship was broader than that which he had proclaimed four years earlier. Jefferson proved the liberality and elevation of his mind; and if he did this at some cost to his consistency, he did only what all men had done whose minds kept pace with the movement of their time. So far as he could see, at the threshold of his second term, he had every reason to hope that it would be more successful than his first. He promised to annihilate opposition; and no serious obstacle seemed in his path. No doubt his concessions to the spirit of nationality, in winning support from moderate Federalists and self-interested democrats, alienated a few State-rights Republicans, and might arouse uneasiness among old friends; but to this Jefferson resigned himself. He parted company with the “mere metaphysical subtleties” of John Randolph. Except in his aversion to military measures and to formal etiquette, he stood nearly where President Washington had stood ten years before.

The New England hierarchy might grumble, but at heart Massachusetts was already converted. Only with the utmost difficulty, and at the cost of avoiding every aggressive movement, could the Federalists keep control of their State governments. John Randolph flattered himself that if Jefferson’s personal authority were removed from the scale, Virginia would again incline to her old principles; but he was mistaken. So long as Virginia held power, she was certain to use it. At no time since the Declaration of Independence had the prospects of nationality seemed so promising as in the spring of 1805. With the stride of the last four years as a standard for the future, no man could measure the possible effects of the coming four years in extending the powers of the government and developing the prosperity of the nation. Gallatin already meditated schemes of internal improvements, which included four great thoroughfares across the Alleghanies, while Fulton was nearly ready with the steamboat. The Floridas could not escape the government’s grasp. Even New England must at last yield her prejudices to the spirit of democratic nationality.

No one could wonder if Jefferson’s head was somewhat turned by the splendors of such a promise. Sanguine by nature, he felt that every day made more secure the grandeur of his destiny. He could scarcely be blamed for putting a high estimate on the value of his services, for in all modesty he might reasonably ask what name recorded in history would stand higher than his own for qualities of the noblest order in statesmanship. Had he not been first to conceive and to put in practice the theories of future democracy? Had he not succeeded in the experiment? Had he not doubled the national domain? Was not his government a model of republican virtues? With what offence against the highest canons of personal merit could he be charged? What ruler of ancient or modern times, what Trajan or Antonine, what Edward or Louis, was more unselfish or was truer to the interests intrusted to his care? Who had proposed to himself a loftier ideal? Among all the kings and statesmen who swayed the power of empire, where could one be found who had looked so far into the future, and had so boldly grappled with its hopes?

CHAPTER II.

During the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, the national government was in the main controlled by ideas and interests peculiar to the region south of the Potomac, and only to be understood from a Southern stand-point. Especially its foreign relations were guided by motives in which the Northern people felt little sympathy. The people of the Northern States seemed almost unwilling to know what the people of the Southern States were thinking or doing in certain directions, and their indifference was particularly marked in regard to Florida. Among the varied forms of Southern ambition, none was so constant in influence as the wish to acquire the Floridas, which at moments decided the action of the government in matters of the utmost interest; yet the Northern public, though complaining of Southern favoritism, neither understood nor cared to study the subject, but turned impatiently away whenever the Floridas were discussed, as though this were a local detail which in no way concerned the North. If Florida failed to interest the North, it exercised the more control over the South, and over a government Southern in character and purpose. Neither the politics of the Union nor the development of events could be understood without treating Florida as a subject of the first importance. During the summer and autumn of 1805,—a period which John Randolph justly regarded as the turning point of Republican administration,—Florida actually engrossed the attention of government.

On arriving at Madrid, Jan. 2, 1805, Monroe found Charles Pinckney waiting in no happy temper for a decision in regard to himself. Pinckney’s recall was then determined upon, and his successor chosen. He was anxious only to escape the last humiliation of being excluded from the new negotiation by Monroe. From this fear he was soon relieved. Monroe shared his views; allowed him to take part in the conferences, and to put his name to the notes. The two ministers acted in harmony.

Nearly a month was consumed in the necessary preliminaries. Not until Jan. 28, 1805, were matters so far advanced that Monroe could present his first note.[10] Following his instructions, he put forward all the claims which had been so often discussed,—the Spanish and French spoliations; the losses resulting from suppression of the entrepôt at New Orleans in 1802; the claim of West Florida, and that to the Rio Bravo. With the note the two envoys enclosed the projet of a treaty,—to which could be made only the usual objection to one-sided schemes, that it required Spain to concede every point, and offered no equivalent worth mention. Spain was to cede both the Floridas, and also Texas as far as the Rio Colorado, leaving the district between the Colorado and the Rio Bravo as a border-land not to be further settled. She was to create a commission for arranging the spoliation and entrepôt claims; and this commission should also take cognizance of all claims that might be made by Spanish subjects against the United States government.

To this note and projet Don Pedro Cevallos quickly replied.[11] Availing himself of an inadvertent sentence in Monroe’s opening paragraph, to the effect that it was necessary to examine impartially the several points at issue in each case, Cevallos informed the Americans that in accordance with their wish he would first examine each point separately, and then proceed to negotiation. He proposed to begin with the claims convention of August, 1802.

Commonly nothing gratified American diplomatists more than to discuss questions which they were ordered to take in charge. Yet the readiness shown by Cevallos to gratify this instinct struck Monroe as a bad sign; he saw danger of lowering the national tone, and even of becoming ridiculous, if he allowed the Spaniards to discuss indefinitely claims which the United States had again and again asserted to be too plain for discussion. He felt too the influence of Pinckney, who had never ceased to urge that nothing could be done with the Spanish government except through fear or force. He could not refuse discussion, but he entered into it with the intention of promptly cutting it short.[12]

To cut the discussion short was precisely what Cevallos meant should not be done; and a contest began, in which the Spaniard had every advantage. Monroe replied to the Spanish note of January 31 by imposing an ultimatum at once.[13] “We consider it our duty to inform your Excellency that we cannot consent to any arrangement which does not provide for the whole subject” of the claims, including the French spoliations. “It is in his Majesty’s power, by the answer which you give, to fix at once the relations which are to subsist in future between the two nations.” Cevallos, leaving the ultimatum and the French spoliations unnoticed, rejoined by discussing the conditions which the King had placed on his consent to ratify the claims convention of 1802.[14] Taking up first the Mobile Act, he expressed in strong terms his opinion of it, and of the explanation given to it by the President. Nevertheless, he withdrew his demand that the Act should be annulled. The King’s “well-founded motives of complaint in respect to that Act still exist,” he said, “and his Majesty intends to keep them in mind, that satisfaction may be given by the United States; but as it relates to ratifying the convention of August, 1802, his Majesty agrees from this time to be satisfied in this respect.” The question of French spoliations he reserved for separate discussion.

Monroe replied briefly by referring to his ultimatum, and by inviting discussion of the boundary question; but Cevallos, instead of taking up the matter of boundaries in his next note, discussed the French spoliation claims and the right of deposit at New Orleans.[15] To rebut the first, he produced a letter from Talleyrand dated July 27, 1804, in which Napoleon announced that neither Spain nor the United States must touch these claims, under penalty of incurring the Emperor’s severe displeasure. In regard to the right of deposit, Cevallos took still stronger ground:—

“The edict of the Intendant of New Orleans, suspending the deposit of American produce in that city, did not interrupt, nor was it the intention to interrupt, the navigation of the Mississippi; consequently these pretended injuries are reduced to this small point,—that for a short time the vessels loaded in the stream instead of taking in their cargoes at the wharves.... If the erroneous opinions which were formed in the United States, if the complaints published in the papers of your country,—as false as they were repeated,—that the navigation of the Mississippi was interrupted, if the virulent writings by which the public mind was heated, and which led to compromit the American government and tarnish the good name of that of Spain, were causes that the inhabitants of the western territory of the United States could not form a correct idea of what passed at New Orleans; and if, in this uncertainty, they were disappointed in the extraction of their produce, or suffered other inconveniences,—they ought to attribute the same to internal causes, such as the writings before mentioned, filled with inflammatory falsehoods, the violence of enthusiastic partisans, and other occurrences which on those occasions served to conceal the truth. The Government of Spain, so far from being responsible for the prejudices occasioned by these errors and erroneous ideas, ought in justice to complain of the irregular conduct pursued by various writers and other individuals in the United States, which was adapted to exasperate and mislead the public opinion, and went to divulge sentiments the most ignominious, and absurdities the most false, against the government of his Majesty and his accredited good faith.”

Not satisfied with this rebuttal, Cevallos added that the persons who complained of this trifling inconvenience “had been enjoying the rights of deposit for four years more than was stipulated in the treaty, and this notwithstanding the great prejudice it occasioned to his Majesty’s revenue, by making New Orleans the centre of a most scandalous contraband trade, the profits of which it is not improbable but that some of those individuals have in part received.” Finally, he affirmed the Intendants right to prohibit the deposit.

On receiving this paper, Monroe hesitated whether to break off the negotiation; but quickly came to the decision not to do so. His instructions expressly authorized him to abandon the entrepôt claims; while a rupture founded on the French spoliations, in the face of Talleyrand’s threats, was rupture with France as well as with Spain, and exceeded his authority. He concluded to go on, although he saw that every new step involved new dangers.

Before Monroe had prepared a reply to the sharp letter on the claims convention, Cevallos wrote again.[16] In this letter, dated February 24, he discussed the West Florida boundary, and contented himself with stating the Spanish case as it stood on the treaties and public evidence. His argument contained no new points, but was evidently intended to lure the Americans into endless discussion. Monroe was obliged to follow where Cevallos led. February 26 he replied to the Spanish note on the claims. Beginning with complaints that Cevallos had not met with directness the American proposals; branching into other complaints that he had renewed propositions which Monroe had already declared incompatible with the rights of the United States; that he had charged the American government with trying to obtain double payment for the same loss, and had branded the whole American people as being in league with smugglers; that he had attacked the freedom of the press, and had called the right of deposit a charity of King Charles,—after adding that “it was impossible for us to have received a note which could have been more unexpected,” the two American envoys began to discuss the French spoliation claims, “on the presumption that no premeditated outrage was intended.”[17]

After a long argument on the French spoliations, Monroe’s note next reached the most delicate point in discussion,—the positive order of Napoleon forbidding recognition of the claims. Treating the order as though it were only an expression of opinions, Monroe said, “We have received them with the consideration which is due to the very respectable authority from which they emanate. On all treaties between independent Powers each party has a right to form its own opinion. Every nation is the guardian of its own honor and rights; and the Emperor is too sensible of what is due to his own glory, and entertains too high a respect for the United States, to wish them to abandon a just sense of what is due to their own.” Appealing finally to the positive orders of his own government, Monroe repeated that on these claims he must insist. Cevallos replied with a disavowal of “premeditated outrage;” and there, March 1, 1805, after Monroe had passed two months in Spain, he found himself at his starting-point, at a loss how to go forward or to recede.

Monroe received early in February Talleyrand’s letter of Dec. 21, 1804, on the boundary of West Florida;[18] he next suffered the mortification of listening to Talleyrand’s order of July 27, 1804, forbidding Spain to “condescend” to pay or even to discuss the French spoliation claims; and from these documents he saw that for nearly a year past the French and Spanish governments had combined to entrap and humiliate him. The fault was his own, for he had received plain, not to say rude, warning; but he was perhaps only the more angry on that account, and in his irritation he undertook to terrify Napoleon. March 1, 1805, under the full consciousness of his situation, he wrote to Armstrong at Paris;[19]—

“It cannot be doubted that if our Government could be prevailed on to give ground, that of France would be very glad of it, as it would be to take us and all our concerns, especially our funds, under its care. We are inclined to believe, with almost equal confidence, if we are firm, and show that we are not only able but resolved to take care of ourselves, that she will let us do so, and in regard to this question with Spain throw her weight into our scale to promote an adjustment between us on the fair principles insisted on by our Government. To bring her to this, she must clearly understand that the negotiation is about to break up without doing anything, and that the failure is entirely owing to the part she has taken against us. When she sees that this is the literal fact, I do not think that her government will expose itself to the consequences resulting from it. It is not prepared to quarrel with us for many reasons: first, as we are a republic, and that system of government too recently overset there, and the one established in its stead too feebly founded, to make it a desirable object with the Emperor; second, as she relies altogether for supplies on our flag, and on our merchants and people for many other friendly offices in the way of trade, which none others can render; third, as our government pursues, by prohibiting our trade with St. Domingo, and in many other respects, a system of the most friendly accommodation to the interests of France, she ought not to hazard those advantages if there were no other objections to a rupture with us; fourth,—but there are other and much stronger objections to it,—we should come to a good understanding with England.... These considerations incline us to think that a rupture with us is an event which of all others she least seeks at the present time; and that it is only necessary to let her see distinctly that one with Spain is on the point of taking place, and will be owing altogether to her support of her pretensions, to induce France to change her policy and tone in the points depending here.”

Pursuing this train of reasoning, Monroe tested its correctness by challenging a direct issue of courage. His letter, thus inspired, reached Paris in due time, and its ideas were pressed by Armstrong on members of the French government. Their answer was prompt and final; it was instantly reported by Armstrong to Monroe in a letter[20] so pregnant with meaning that two of its sentences may be said to have decided the fate of Jefferson’s second administration:—

“On the subject of indemnity for the suspended right of deposit (professing to know nothing of the ground on which the interruption had been given) they would offer no opinion. On that of reparation for spoliations committed on our commerce by Frenchmen within the territory of his Catholic Majesty, they were equally prompt and decisive, declaring that our claim, having nothing of solidity in it, must be abandoned.

“With regard to boundary, we have, they said, already given an opinion, and see no cause to change it. To the question, What would be the course of this government in the event of a rupture between us and Spain? they answered, We can neither doubt nor hesitate,—we must take part with Spain; and our note of the 30th Frimaire [Dec. 21, 1804] was intended to communicate and impress this idea.”

This stern message left Monroe helpless. To escape from Madrid without suffering some personal mortification was his best hope; and fortunately Godoy took no pleasure in personalities. The Spaniard was willing to let Monroe escape as soon as his defeat should be fairly recorded. The month of March had nearly passed before Monroe received Armstrong’s letter; meanwhile Cevallos consumed the time in discussing the West Florida boundary. At the end of the month Monroe, fully aware at last of his situation, attempted to force an issue. March 30 he wrote to Cevallos that he was weary of delay:[21]

“It neither comports with the object of the present mission nor its duties to continue the negotiation longer than it furnishes a well-founded expectation that the just and friendly policy which produced it, on the part of the United States, is cherished with the same views by his Catholic Majesty.”

Unfortunately he had no excuse for breaking abruptly a negotiation which he had himself invited; and Cevallos meant to give him at that stage no such excuse, for the important question of the Texan boundary remained to be discussed, and Talleyrand’s instructions on that point must be placed on record by Spain.

Monroe wrote to Cevallos, April 9, that he considered “the negotiation as essentially terminated by what has already occurred.[22]... Should his Majesty’s government think proper to invite another issue, on it will the responsibility rest for the consequences. The United States are not unprepared for, or unequal to, any crisis which may occur.” Three days later he repeated the wish to “withdraw from a situation which, while it compromits the character of our government, cannot be agreeable to ourselves.”[23] Cevallos took no notice of the threats, and contented himself with repelling the idea that the blame of breaking off the negotiation should rest upon him. Nevertheless he hastened to record the opinion of his Government in regard to the last claim of the United States,—the Texan boundary.

Here again Cevallos followed the guidance of Talleyrand. The dividing-line between Louisiana and Texas, he said, ought to be decided by the line between the French and Spanish settlements. The French post of Natchitoches, on the Red River, was distant seven leagues from the Spanish post of Nuestra Señora de los Adaes; and therefore the boundary of Louisiana should run between these two points southward, along the watershed, until it reached the Gulf of Mexico between the Marmentou and the Calcasieu,—a boundary which deprived the United States not only of Texas, but of an important territory afterward included in the State of Louisiana.[24]

Eager as Monroe was to close the negotiation, he could not leave this note without reply; and accordingly he consumed another week in preparing more complaints of Cevallos’ dilatory conduct, and in proving that Texas was included in the grant made by Louis XIV. to Anthony Crozat in 1712. After disposing of that subject, he again begged for a conclusion. “As every point has been thus fully discussed, we flatter ourselves that we shall now be honored with your Excellency’s propositions for the arrangement of the whole business.”[25] He flattered himself in vain; ten days passed without an answer. May 1, at a private interview, he tried to obtain some promise of action, without better result than the usual obliging Spanish expressions; a week afterward he made another attempt, with the same reply, followed on Monroe’s part by an offer to concede even the point of dignity. “Would Señor Cevallos listen to a new and more advantageous offer on the part of the United States?” Cevallos replied that such a step would be premature, as the discussion was not yet ended.[26] Monroe had no choice but to break through the diplomatic net in which he had wound himself; and at length, May 12, 1805, he sent a general ultimatum to the Spanish government: If Spain would cede the Floridas, ratify the claims convention of August, 1802, and accept the Colorado as the Texan boundary, the United States would establish a neutral territory a hundred miles wide on the eastern bank of the Colorado, from the Gulf to the northern boundary of Louisiana; would assume the French spoliation claims, abandon the entrepôt claims, and accept the cession of West Florida from the King, thereby abandoning the claim that it was a part of Louisiana.[27]

To this note Cevallos replied three days afterward by a courteous but decided letter, objecting in various respects to Monroe’s offers, and summing up his objections in the comment that this scheme required Spain to concede everything and receive nothing; she must give up both the Floridas, half of Texas, and the claims convention, while she obtained as an equivalent for these concessions only an abandonment of claims which she did not acknowledge:[28]—

“The justice of the American government will not permit it to insist on propositions so totally to the disadvantage of Spain; and however anxious his Majesty may be to please the United States, he cannot on his part assent to them, nor can he do less than consider them as little conformable to the rights of his Crown.”

Three days later Monroe demanded his passports. For once, Cevallos showed as much promptness as Monroe could have desired. Without expressing a regret, or showing so much as a complimentary wish to continue the negotiation, Cevallos sent the passports, appointed the very next day for Monroe’s audience of leave, and bowed the American envoy out of Spain with an alacrity which contrasted strongly with the delays that had hitherto wasted five months of time most precious to the American minister at the Court of St. James. In truth, the Prince of Peace had no longer an object to gain by detaining Monroe; he had won every advantage which could be wrung from the situation, except that of proving the defeat of the United States by publishing it to the world. For this, he could trust Monroe.

After writing an angry letter to the French ambassador at Madrid, Monroe went his way, May 26, leaving Pinckney to maintain the forms of diplomatic relations with the Spanish government. Pinckney had still more to suffer before escaping from the scene of his diplomatic trials. The Spaniards began to plunder American commerce; the spoliations of 1798 were renewed; the garrisons in West Florida and Texas were reinforced; Cevallos paid no attention to complaints or threats. In October Pinckney took leave and returned to America, and George W. Erving was sent from London to take charge of the legation at Madrid. Erving made an excellent representative within the narrow field of action open to him as a mere chargé d’affaires; but he could do little to stem the current of Spanish desperation. The Prince of Peace, driven by France, England, and America nearer and nearer to the precipice that yawned for the destruction of Spain, was willing to see the world embroiled, in the hope of finding some last chance in his favor. When Erving in December, five months after Monroe’s departure, went to remonstrate against seizures of American ships in flagrant violation of the treaty of 1795, Godoy received him with the good-natured courtesy which marked his manners. “How go our affairs?” he asked; “are we to have peace or war?” Erving called his attention to the late seizures. The Prince replied that it was impossible for Spain to allow American vessels to carry English property. “But we have a treaty which secures us that right,” replied Erving. “Certainly, I know you have a treaty, for I made it with Mr. Pinckney,” rejoined Godoy; and he went on with entire frankness to announce that the “free-goods” provision of that treaty would no longer be respected. Then he continued, with laughable coolness,—

“You may choose either peace or war. ’Tis the same thing to me. I will tell you candidly, that if you will go to war this certainly is the moment, and you may take our possessions from us. I advise you to go to war now, if you think that is best for you; and then the peace which will be made in Europe will leave us two at war.”[29]

Defiance could go no further. Elsewhere the Prince openly said that the United States had brought things to such a point as to leave Spain indifferent to the consequences. In war the President could only seize Florida; and Florida was the price he asked for remaining at peace. Mexico and Cuba were beyond his reach. Meanwhile Spain not only saved the money due for the old claims, but plundered American commerce, and still preserved her title to the Floridas and Texas,—a title which, at least as concerned the Floridas, the Americans must sooner or later extinguish.

Such was the result of the President’s diplomacy in respect to Spain. War was its only natural outcome,—war with Spain; war with Napoleon, who must make common cause with King Charles; coalition with England; general recurrence to the ideas and precedents of the last Administration. Jefferson had exasperated Spain and irritated France. He must next decide whether this policy should be pursued to its natural result.

Meanwhile Monroe returned to Paris, where he passed six weeks with Armstrong and with his French acquaintances in conference on the proper course to be pursued. Talleyrand was absent in Italy with the Emperor, who May 26 received at Milan the iron crown of the Lombard kings. That Napoleon was the real element of danger was clear to both envoys. A policy which should force France to interfere on behalf of the United States was their object; and on this, as on many points, Armstrong’s ideas were more definite than those of Monroe, Madison, or Jefferson. Even before Monroe left Madrid, he received a letter from Armstrong in which the outline of a decisive plan was sketched:—

“It is simply to take a strong and prompt possession of the northern bank of the Rio Bravo, leaving the eastern limit in statu quo. A stroke of this kind would at once bring Spain to reason, and France to her rescue, and without giving either room to quarrel. You might then negotiate, and shape the bargain pretty much as you pleased.”[30]

Evidently the seizure of Texas, leaving West Florida untouched, was the only step which the President could properly take; for Texas had been bought and paid for, whereas West Florida beyond doubt had never been bought at all. Armstrong saw the weak point of Napoleon’s position, and wished to attack it. He had no trouble in bringing Monroe to the same conclusion, although in yielding to his arguments Monroe tacitly abandoned the ground he had been persuaded by Livingston to take two years before, that West Florida belonged to Louisiana.

“There is no shade of difference in our opinions,” wrote Armstrong to Madison after Monroe’s arrival at Paris,[31] “and so little in the course to be pursued with regard to Spain that it is scarcely worth noticing. The whole may be reduced to this: that instead of assailing the Spanish posts in West Florida, or even indicating an intention to do so, I would (from motives growing more particularly out of the character of the Emperor) restrict the operations to such as may have been established in Louisiana. This, with some degree of demonstration that we meditate an embargo on our commercial intercourse with Spain and her colonies, would compel this government to interpose promptly and efficiently, and with dispositions to prevent the quarrel from going further.”

Throughout these Spanish negotiations ran a mysterious note of corruption which probably came not from Cevallos, Godoy, or King Charles; for Spain was always the party to suffer, and France was always the party to profit by Spanish sacrifices. That the jobbery had its origin in Napoleon was improbable, for he too suffered from it. Neither Napoleon nor Godoy was open to bribery in such a sense; they were so high in power that small pecuniary motives had no influence on their acts. Yet the Treasuries both of France and Spain were in trouble, and were seeking resources. That Talleyrand had private motives for conniving in their expedients cannot be proved; but in 1805, as in 1798, every attempt to turn negotiation into a job came from Talleyrand’s intimate circle, the subordinates of the French Foreign Office.[32] In June, Monroe found at Paris the same hints at the influence of money which had irritated him in the preceding autumn; and he wrote to Madison in a tone which showed that he gave them weight.

“I have conferred much,” he said,[33] “with the gentleman alluded to in my letter from Bordeaux of December 16, and from what I can gather am led to believe that France has withheld her opinion on the western limits [Texas], to favor our pretensions when she thinks proper to take a part in it; that she does not think it proper so to do in the present stage, or until our Government acts so as to make Spain apply to her. He thinks she will then act; and settling the Spanish spoliation business as by the treaty of 1802, and getting all that can be got for Florida (he says eight millions of dollars are expected), promote an adjustment.”

If Jefferson’s administration cared to commit an error of colossal proportions, it had but to follow the hints of these irresponsible agents of Marbois and Talleyrand, who presumed to say in advance what motives would decide the mind of Napoleon. No man in France—neither Talleyrand nor Berthier, nor even Duroc—knew the scope of the Emperor’s ambition, or could foretell the expedients he would use or reject. Monroe’s friend was ill-informed, or deceived him. France had not withheld her opinion on the western limits; on the contrary, her opinion had been exactly followed by Spain. Not Talleyrand, much less Napoleon, but Cevallos himself had withheld that opinion from Monroe’s knowledge, doubtless because he wished to keep a weapon in reserve for use at close quarters if his antagonist should come so near. Had Monroe not been discomfited before Cevallos exhausted his arsenal, this weapon would certainly have been used for a final blow. Cevallos still held it in reserve.

Leaving the Spanish affair embroiled beyond disentanglement, Monroe recrossed the Channel, and July 23 found himself again in London. During a century of American diplomatic history a minister of the United States has seldom if ever within six months suffered, at two great Courts, such contemptuous treatment as had then fallen to Monroe’s lot. That he should have been mortified and anxious for escape was natural. He returned to England, meaning to sail as quickly as possible for America. “It was very much my wish,” he wrote.[34] Hoping to sail at latest by November 1, he selected his ship, and gave notice to the British Foreign Office. In his own interests no step could have been wiser, but it was taken too late; the time lost in Spain and at Paris had been fatal to his plan, and he could no longer avoid another defeat more serious, and even more public, than the two which had already disturbed his temper.

That the American minister in London at any time should for six months leave his post, even in obedience to instructions, was surprising; but that he should have done this in 1804, after Pitt’s return to power, was matter of amazement. Monroe expected an unfriendly change of policy in the British government. As early as June, 1804, he wrote to Madison: “My most earnest advice is to look to the possibility of such a change.”[35] Four months later, although the attitude of the British ministry had become more threatening, Monroe started for Madrid, leaving Pitt in peace, unwatched, to take his measures and to fix beyond recall his change of policy. July 23, 1805, when the American minister at last returned from his Spanish journey and arrived in London, after some weeks lost at Paris, he found a state of affairs such as might have alarmed the most phlegmatic of men.

Pitt had made good use of Monroe’s absence. During the winter of 1804–1805 Parliament passed several Acts tending to draw all the West Indian commerce into British hands. Throughout the West Indies free ports were thrown open to the enemy’s vessels, which were encouraged to bring there the produce of their colonies, receiving British merchandise in return, while the Act further provided for the importation of this enemy’s produce into Great Britain in British ships. Other Acts and Orders extended the system of licenses, by which British subjects were allowed to trade with their enemies in neutral vessels, and concluded by requiring that all their trade with the French islands should be carried on through the free ports alone.[36]

These measures were intended to force the trade of the French and Spanish colonies into a British channel; but all were secondary to a direct attack on American commerce. While Parliament and Council devised the legislation and rules necessary for taking charge of the commerce of Cuba, Martinique, and the other hostile colonies, the Lords of Appeals were engaged in providing the law necessary for depriving America of the same trade. July 23, 1805, Sir William Scott pronounced judgment in the case of the “Essex.” Setting aside his ruling in the case of the “Polly,”[37] he held that the neutral cargo which came from Martinique to Charleston, and thence to London, was good prize unless the neutral owner could prove, by something more than the evidence of a custom-house entry, that his original intention had been to terminate the voyage in an American port. In consequence of this decision, within a few weeks American ships by scores were seized without warning; neutral insurance was doubled; and the British merchantmen vied with the royal navy in applauding the energy of William Pitt.

Of the decision as a matter of morality something might be said. That Pitt should have planned such a scheme was not surprising, for his moral sense had been blunted by the desperation of his political struggle; but the same excuse did not apply to Sir William Scott. The quarrel between law and history is old, and its source lies deep. Perhaps no good historian was ever a good lawyer: whether any good lawyer could be a good historian might be equally doubted. The lawyer is required to give facts the mould of a theory; the historian need only state facts in their sequence. In law Sir William Scott was considered as one of the greatest judges that ever sat on the English bench, a man of the highest personal honor, sensitive to any imputation on his judicial independence,—a lawyer in whom the whole profession took pride. In history he made himself and his court a secret instrument for carrying out an act of piracy. The law defends him by throwing responsibility upon the political chiefs who were bound to make compensation to the plundered merchants if compensation was due. The judge’s duty began and ended by declaring what was law. Experience had proved that the evidence previously required to convince the court of a certain fact was insufficient. The judge said this, and no more. History replies that whatever may be the strictly professional aspect of this famous judgment, in its nature it was a political act, and was known by the judge to be such. As a political measure its character was equivalent to a declaration of war, and did not materially differ from the more violent seizure of the Spanish treasure-ships by Pitt’s order in the previous October. The lawyers justified that seizure also; the King’s Advocate defended it in the House of Commons by the simple explanation that England was not in the habit of declaring war, but usually began hostilities by some act of force.[38] Lord Grenville, whom Pitt had entreated, only a few months before, to join the new ministry, and who was certainly considered as, next to Pitt himself, the highest political authority in England, was not deterred by this reasoning from denouncing the seizure of the Spanish galleons as an atrocious act of barbarity, contrary to all the law of nations, which stamped indelible infamy on the English name. Lord Grey, another high authority, stigmatized it as combining violence, injustice, and bad faith. The seizure of the American ships was an act different in its nature only in so far as Sir William Scott condescended to throw over it in advance the ermine that he wore.

Monroe reached London on the very day when Sir William Scott pronounced his fatal decision in the case of the “Essex.” Lord Harrowby no longer presided over the Foreign Office; he had taken another position, making way for Lord Mulgrave. The new Foreign Secretary was, like most of Pitt’s ministers in 1805, a Tory gentleman of moderate abilities. Except as a friend of Pitt he was unknown. His character and opinions seemed wholly without importance. To Lord Mulgrave, Monroe addressed himself; and he found the Foreign Secretary as ready to discuss, and as slow to concede, as Don Pedro Cevallos had ever been.[39] “He assured me in the most explicit terms that nothing was more remote from the views of his Government than to take an unfriendly attitude toward the United States; he assured me also that no new orders had been issued, and that his Government was disposed to do everything in its power to arrange this and the other points to our satisfaction.” Yet when Monroe called his attention to the seizure of a score of American vessels in the Channel, by British naval officers who declared themselves to be acting by order, Lord Mulgrave quietly replied that the Rule of 1756 was good law, and that his Government did not mean to relax in the slightest degree from the rigor of Sir William Scott’s decision.[40]

Monroe had felt the indifference or contempt of Lord Harrowby, Talleyrand, and Cevallos: that of Lord Mulgrave was but one more variety of a wide experience. The rough treatment of Monroe by the Englishman was a repetition of that which he had accepted or challenged at the hands of the Frenchman and Spaniard. Lord Mulgrave showed no wish to trouble himself in any way about the United States. He would not discuss the questions of impressment and commerce; and his only sign of caring to explain or excuse the measures of his Government was in regard to Captain Bradley of the “Cambrian,” who had been recalled from the American station for violations of neutrality. Monroe complained that Bradley had since been given a ship of the line. Mulgrave explained that the command of a line-of-battle ship was not necessarily a promotion, especially to an active officer accustomed to the independence and prize-money of the “Cambrian’s” cruising ground.

With this result Monroe’s diplomatic activity for the year 1804–1805 came to an end. The only conclusion he drew from it was one which Jefferson seemed little likely to adopt. He urged his Government to persevere in its course, and to threaten war upon France, Spain, and England at once.[41] “We probably shall never be able to settle our concerns with either Power without pushing our just claims on each with the greatest decision.... I am strong in the opinion that a pressure on each at the same time would produce a good effect with the other.”

Nevertheless, Monroe had not yet reached the bottom of his English disaster. Neither the Acts of Parliament, the Orders in Council, nor the Judgment of the Lords of Appeal satisfied the suffering interests of England, however harsh they might seem to the interests of America. The new rules, the extension of licenses, the opening of free ports, tended to please the navy and shipping interests, but left the British colonists in a worse position than before; for as matters stood the whole produce of the West Indian Islands, French, Spanish, and British, was to be collected in a single mass and thrown on the London market. The warehouses on the Thames were to be overfilled with sugar, on the chance that neutral ships might convey it to France. For five years the colonists had insisted that their distress was due to excess in production; but how could they check production when the French and Spanish islands were encouraged to produce? Forgetting in their despair the attachment they felt to America, the colonists attributed all their troubles to American competition. The East India Company, whose warehouses were also loaded with unsalable goods, could discover no better reason than the same neutral rivalry for the cessation of Continental demand. The shipowners, not yet satisfied by Sir William Scott’s law, echoed the same cry. All the interested classes of England, except the manufacturers and merchants who were concerned in commerce with the United States, agreed in calling upon government to crush out the neutral trade. Sir William Scott had merely required an additional proof of its honesty; England with one voice demanded that, honest or not, it should be stopped.

This almost universal prayer found expression in a famous pamphlet that has rarely had an equal for ability and effect. In October, 1805, three months after the “Essex” decision, while Monroe was advising Madison to press harder than ever on all the great belligerent Powers, appeared in London a book of more than two hundred pages, with the title: “War in Disguise; or, the Frauds of the Neutral Flags.” The author was James Stephen, a man not less remarkable for his own qualities than for those which two generations of descendants have inherited from him; but these abilities, though elevating him immensely above the herd of writers who in England bespattered America with abuse, and in America befouled England, were yet of a character so peculiar as to bar his path to the highest distinction. James Stephen was a high-minded fanatic, passionately convinced of the truths he proclaimed. Two years after writing “War in Disguise,” he published another pamphlet, maintaining that the Napoleonic wars were a divine chastisement of England for her tolerance of the slave-trade; and this curious thesis he argued through twenty pages of close reasoning.[42] Through life a vehement enemy of slavery, at a time when England rang with abuse of America, which he had done much to stimulate, he had the honesty and courage to hold America up as an example before Europe, and to assert that in abolishing the slave-trade she had done an act for which it was impossible to refuse her the esteem of England, and in consequence of which he prayed that harmony between the two countries might be settled on the firmest foundation.

This insular and honest dogmatism, characteristic of many robust minds, Stephen carried into the question of neutral trade. He had himself begun his career in the West Indies, and in the prize-court at St. Kitt’s had learned the secrets of neutral commerce. Deeply impressed with the injury which this trade caused to England, he believed himself bound to point out the evil and the remedy to the British public. Assuming at the outset that the Rule of 1756 was a settled principle of law, he next assumed that the greater part of the neutral trade was not neutral at all, but was a fraudulent business, in which French or Spanish property, carried in French or Spanish ships, was by means of systematic perjury protected by the prostituted American flag.

How much of this charge was true will never be certainly known. Stephen could not prove his assertions. The American merchants stoutly denied them. Alexander Baring, better informed than Stephen and far less prejudiced, affirmed that the charge was untrue, and that if the facts could be learned, more British than enemy’s property would be found afloat under the American flag. Perhaps this assertion was the more annoying of the two; but to prove either the one or the other was needless, since from such premises Stephen was able to draw a number of startling conclusions which an English public stood ready to accept. The most serious of these was the certain ruin of England from the seduction of her seamen into this fraudulent service; another was the inevitable decay of her merchant marine; still another pointed to the loss of the Continental market; and he heightened the effect of all these evils by adding a picture of the British admiral in the decline of life raised to the peerage for his illustrious actions, and enjoying a pension from the national bounty, but still unable to spend so much money as became an English peer, because his Government had denied to him the “safe booty” of the neutral trade![43] Humor was not Stephen’s strongest quality, or he never would have caricatured the British mind so coarsely; but coarse as the drawing might be, England was not conscious of the caricature. Cobbett alone could have done justice to the pecuniary sanctity of the British peerage; but on this point humor was lost to the world, for Cobbett and Stephen were in accord.

Thus a conviction was established in England that the American trade was a fraud which must soon bring Great Britain to ruin, and that the Americans who carried on this commerce were carrying on a “war in disguise” for the purpose of rescuing France and Spain from the pressure of the British navy. The conclusion was inevitable. “Enforce the Rule of 1756!” cried Stephen; “cut off the neutral trade altogether!” This policy, which went far beyond the measures of Pitt and the decision of Sir William Scott, was urged by Stephen with great force; while he begged the Americans, in temperate and reasonable language, not to make war for the protection of so gross a fraud. Other writers used no such self-restraint. The austere and almost religious conviction of Stephen could maintain itself at a height where no personal animosity toward America mingled its bitterness with his denunciations; but his followers, less accustomed than he to looking for motives in their Bibles, said simply that the moment for going to war with the United States had come, and that the opportunity should be seized.[44]

CHAPTER III.

The Eighth Congress had hardly expired, March 3, 1805, amid the confusion and ill-temper which followed the failure of impeachment, when President Jefferson and Secretary Madison began to hear the first mutterings of European disaster. Talleyrand’s letter to Armstrong, Dec. 21, 1804, arrived with its blunt announcement that Napoleon meant to oppose every step of Monroe’s negotiation at Madrid, and with its declaration that West Florida had not been included in the retrocession of Louisiana to France, but had been refused to France by King Charles. Jefferson was then at Monticello, and thither the documents from Paris followed him. He wrote to Madison that Monroe’s case was desperate.

“I consider,” said the President,[45] “that we may anticipate the effect of his mission. On its failure as to the main object, I wish he may settle the right of navigating the Mobile, as everything else may await further peaceable proceedings; but even then we shall have a difficult question to decide,—to wit, whether we will let the present crisis in Europe pass away without a settlement.”

This letter showed that as early as the month of March, 1805, the President foresaw Monroe’s disasters, and began to speculate upon the next step to be taken. The attempt to obtain Florida through Spanish fears had failed; but his first impression was that everything might go on as before, if the Spaniards would consent to a free navigation of the Mobile. Madison was still more vague; his first impulse was to retrace his steps. He wrote to the President a singular letter of contradictions.

“I cannot entirely despair,” said he, March 27,[46] “that Spain, notwithstanding the support given by France to her claim to West Florida, may yield to our proposed arrangement, partly from its intrinsic value to her, partly from an apprehension of the interference of Great Britain; and that this latter consideration may, as soon as France despairs of her pecuniary object, transfer her weight into our scale. If she [France] should persist in disavowing her right to sell West Florida to the United States, and above all can prove it to have been the mutual understanding with Spain that West Florida was no part of Louisiana, it will place our claim on very different ground,—such probably as would not be approved by the world, and such certainly as would not with that approbation be maintained by force. If our right be good against Spain at all, it must be supported by those rigid maxims of technical law which have little weight in national questions generally, and none at all when opposed to the principles of universal equity. The world would decide that France having sold us the territory of a third party, which she had no right to sell, that party having even remonstrated against the whole transaction, the right of the United States was limited to a demand on France to procure and convey the territory, or to remit pro tanto the price, or to dissolve the bargain altogether.”

For eighteen months every French and Spanish agent in Washington, Paris, and Madrid had assured Madison, in language varying between remonstrance and insult, that Spain had not ceded West Florida to France; the records of the State Department proved that France had asked for West Florida and had been refused; Jefferson had not ventured to record a claim to West Florida when he received possession of Louisiana, and had been obliged to explain, in language which Gallatin and Randolph thought unsatisfactory, the words of the Mobile Act. In spite of this, Madison committed himself and government to the claim that West Florida was a part of Louisiana; he pressed that claim, not against France, but against Spain; he brought Monroe to a rupture with the Spanish government on that issue,—yet with these recollections fresh in his mind, he suddenly told Jefferson that if France could prove a matter of common notoriety, the world would decide that the United States had acted without regard to law or equity, while in any case the claim to West Florida as against Spain was a mistake.

That Madison should have followed a train of reasoning so singular, was less surprising than that he should have advanced so far without showing a sign that he was prepared for the next step. Knowing as early as March, 1805, that his plans were defeated, and that he might expect a repulse from Spain and France, he selected a new minister to succeed Pinckney at Madrid. This diplomatist, whose career was to be as futile if not as noisy as that of his predecessor from South Carolina, was James Bowdoin of Massachusetts, son of a celebrated governor of that State. Jefferson wrote privately to him, April 27, announcing the appointment; and the tone of the letter implied that in the month’s interval since the arrival of Talleyrand’s manifesto the President’s pacific views had suffered a change.

“Our relations with that nation are vitally interesting,” he wrote.[47] “That they should be of a peaceable and friendly character has been our most earnest desire. Had Spain met us with the same disposition, our idea was that her existence on this hemisphere and ours should have rested on the same bottom, should have swum or sunk together. We want nothing of hers, and we want no other nation to possess what is hers; but she has met our advances with jealousy, secret malice, and ill-faith. Our patience under this unworthy return of disposition is now on its last trial, and the issue of what is now depending between us will decide whether our relations with her are to be sincerely friendly or permanently hostile. I still wish, and would cherish, the former, but have ceased to expect it.”

Jefferson had the faculty, peculiar to certain temperaments, of seeing what he wished to see, and of believing what he willed to believe. Few other Americans could have seriously talked of the Spanish empire in America as swimming or sinking with that of the United States; but Jefferson, for the moment, thought that the earthen pot of Spanish dominion could trust itself to float safely under charge of the iron energy of American democracy. He could gravely say in regard to Spain, “we want nothing of hers,” when for eighteen months he had exhausted every resource, short of force, to gain Baton Rouge, Mobile, and Pensacola, not to speak of East Florida and Texas. He charged that Spain met his advances with jealousy, secret malice, and ill-faith, after his ministers had intrigued with Napoleon for nearly two years, in the constant hope of depriving her of her property. Dec. 13, 1804, he wrote to General Heath: “With Spain we shall always be bickering, but never at war till we seek it;”[48] and six months later he wrote to Bowdoin that her secret malice and ill faith were leading to permanently hostile relations. He had not much further to go; for if he meant to maintain his authority among rulers, the war that would never come till he sought it must be sought.

As Monroe’s overthrow became more and more evident, the President grew uneasy, and turned restlessly from one device to another. In the first days of August Monroe’s despatches arrived, announcing that he had left Madrid, and that all his offers had been rejected by Spain. Madison was in Philadelphia, where his wife was detained by a long and troublesome lameness. The President was at Monticello. A brisk interchange of letters took place, marking from day to day the fluctuations of feeling peculiar to the characters of the two men. One question alone was to be decided,—should they seize this moment to break with Napoleon?

Madison’s first reflections reached no result. He shrank from admitting that the government stood between war and humiliation more dangerous than war.

“The business at Madrid,” he said, August 2,[49] “has had an awkward termination, and if nothing, as may be expected, particularly in the absence of the Emperor, should alleviate it at Paris, involves some serious questions. After the parade of a mission extraordinary, a refusal of all our overtures in a haughty tone without any offer of other terms, and a perseverance in withdrawing a stipulated provision for claims admitted to be just, without ex post facto conditions manifestly unreasonable and inadmissible, form a strong appeal to the honor and sensibility of this country.”

The conclusion drawn from this somewhat mild review was not such as Monroe, Armstrong, or Livingston had recommended.

“I find that, as was apprehended from the tenor of former communications,” continued the secretary, “the military status quo in the controverted districts, the navigation of the rivers running through West Florida, and the spoliations subsequent to the convention of 1802 have never had a place in the discussions. Bowdoin may perhaps be instructed, consistently with what has passed, to propose a suspension of the territorial questions, the deposit, and the French spoliations, on condition that those points be yielded, with an incorporation of the convention of 1802 with a provision for subsequent claims. This is the utmost within the Executive purview. If this experiment should fail, the question with the Legislature must be whether or not resort is to be had to force, to what extent, and in what mode. Perhaps the instructions to Bowdoin would be improved by including the idea of transferring the sequel of business hither. This would have the appearance of an advance on the part of Spain, the more so as it would be attended with a new mission to this country, and would be most convenient for us also, if not made by Spain a pretext for delay.”

Madison, after enduring one “refusal of all our overtures in a haughty tone,” suggested that another be invited. The slightly patronizing air which characterized Jefferson’s attitude toward Madison, but which he never betrayed toward Gallatin, was explained by this want of directness in Madison’s nature, and by the habitual slowness of his decisions. The action suggested by Madison threw the control of events into the hands of France. This at least was the opinion of Jefferson, whose mind was wrought by the news from Pinckney to a state of steadily growing alarm.

“I think the status quo, if not already proposed, should be immediately offered through Bowdoin,” wrote Jefferson, August 4, before receiving Madison’s letter of August 2.[50] “Should it even be refused, the refusal to settle a limit is not of itself a sufficient cause of war, nor is the withholding a ratification worthy of such a redress. Yet these acts show a purpose, both in Spain and France, against which we ought to provide before the conclusion of a peace. I think, therefore, we should take into consideration whether we ought not immediately to propose to England an eventual treaty of alliance, to come into force whenever (within —— years) a war shall take place with Spain or France.”

Three days later he wrote again, and his alarm had increased:[51]—

“The papers now enclosed to you confirm me in the opinion of the expediency of a treaty with England, but make the offer of the status quo [to Spain] more doubtful; the correspondence will probably throw light on that question. From the papers already received I infer a confident reliance on the part of Spain on the omnipotence of Bonaparte, but a desire of procrastination till peace in Europe shall leave us without an ally.”

Ten days more passed; the whole mortification became evident; the President’s anger and alarm rose to feverishness.[52] He wrote to Madison, August 17,—

“I am anxious to receive opinions respecting our procedure with Spain, as should negotiations with England be advisable they should not be postponed a day unnecessarily, that we may lay their result before Congress before they rise next spring. Were the question only about the bounds of Louisiana, I should be for delay. Were it only for spoliations, just as this is as a cause of war, we might consider if no other expedient were more eligible for us. But I do not view peace as within our choice. I consider the cavalier conduct of Spain as evidence that France is to settle with us for her,—and the language of France confirms it,—and that if she can keep us insulated till peace, she means to enforce by arms her will, to which she foresees we will not truckle, and therefore does not venture on the mandate now. We should not permit ourselves to be found off our guard and friendless.”

The President’s plan presented difficulties which Madison could not fail to see. That Jefferson should wish Pitt to fight the battles of the United States was natural; but Pitt was little in the habit of doing gratuitous favors, and might reasonably ask what price he was to receive for conquering the Floridas and Texas for the United States. Madison’s comments on the President’s proposed British treaty pointed out this objection. Madison agreed that the Executive should take provisional measures, on which Congress might act.[53] “An eventual alliance with Great Britain, if attainable from her without inadmissible conditions, would be for us the best of all possible measures; but I do not see the least chance of laying her under obligations to be called into force at our will without correspondent obligations on our part.” Objection to the President’s plan was easy; but when the secretary came to a plan of his own, he could suggest nothing more vigorous than to renew a moderate degree of coquetry with Merry, which would have the side advantage of alarming France and Spain, “from whom the growing communication with Great Britain would not be concealed.”

Such a weapon was no doubt as effective against Napoleon as heelless slippers against Pitt; but the President thought the situation to have passed beyond such tactics. Madison’s proposed coquetry with Merry met with less favor in Jefferson’s eyes than his own proposed one-sided alliance with England had met in the eyes of Madison. Upon a treaty of alliance with England the President was for the moment bent, and he met Madison’s objections by arguments that showed lively traits of the writer’s sanguine temper. He complained that Madison had misconceived the nature of the proposed British treaty. England should stipulate not to make peace without securing West Florida and the spoliation claims to America, while American co-operation in the war would be sufficient inducement to her for making this contract.[54]

“Another motive much more powerful would indubitably induce England to go much further. Whatever ill humor may at times have been expressed against us by individuals of that country, the first wish of every Englishman’s heart is to see us once more fighting by their sides against France; nor could the King or his ministers do an act so popular as to enter into an alliance with us. The nation would not weigh the consideration by grains and scruples; they would consider it as the price and pledge of an indissoluble friendship. I think it possible that for such a provisional treaty they would give us their general guaranty of Louisiana and the Floridas. At any rate we might try them; a failure would not make our situation worse. If such a one could be obtained, we might await our own convenience for calling up the casus fœderis. I think it important that England should receive an overture as early as possible, as it might prevent her listening to terms of peace.”

If Jefferson was right in thinking that every Englishman’s heart yearned toward America, he was unfortunate in delaying his offer of indissoluble friendship until the moment when Sir William Scott delivered his opinion in the case of the “Essex.” Madison’s scheme was equally unpromising, because he had made a personal enemy of Merry, on whom the success of Madison’s tactics depended. Each of the two high authorities felt the weakness of the other, and the secretary even went so far as to hint, in courteous language, that the President’s idea was unpractical:—

“The more I reflect on the papers from Madrid, the more I feel the value of some eventual security for the active friendship of Great Britain, but the more I see at the same time the difficulty of obtaining it without a like security to her of ours. If she is to be bound, we must be so too, either to the same thing,—that is to join her in the war,—or to do what she will accept as equivalent to such an obligation. What can we offer to her? A mutual guaranty, unless so shaped as to involve us pretty certainly in her war, would not be satisfactory. To offer commercial regulations or concessions on points in the law of nations as a certain payment for aids which might never be received or required, would be a bargain liable to obvious objections of the most serious kind. Unless, therefore, some arrangement which has not occurred to me can be devised, I see no other course than such an one as is suggested in my last letter.”[55]

In this state of things, the remaining members of the Cabinet were asked for their opinions; and in the course of a few days the President received written papers from Gallatin and Robert Smith. Gallatin was annoyed at the results of Jefferson’s diplomacy. Emphatically a Northern man, he cared little for Florida; and a war with Spain would have been in his eyes a Southern war. He made no concealment of his opinion that the whole negotiation rested on a blunder; and he told Madison as much, with a bluntness which the secretary could scarcely have relished.

“The demands from Spain were too hard,” said he,[56] “to have expected, even independent of French interference, any success from the negotiation. It could only be hoped that the tone assumed by our negotiators might not be such as to render a relinquishment or suspension of some of our claims productive of some loss of reputation. If we are safe on that ground, it may be eligible to wait for a better opportunity before we again run the risk of lowering the national importance by pretensions which our strength may not at this moment permit us to support. If from the manner in which the negotiation has been conducted that effect has already been produced, how to save character without endangering peace will be a serious and difficult question.”

These words were written before he had seen Monroe’s despatches. When the whole correspondence was put into his hands he read it, and in returning it to Madison made the dry comment that the business had not ended quite so badly as he had previously supposed.[57] The phrase bore a double meaning, for even Madison must have admitted that the business could not have ended much worse.

Gallatin sent to the President a remarkable paper,[58] in substance an argument for peace, and in tenor a criticism of the grounds which Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Livingston, and Pinckney had thought proper to take in their dispute with Spain. Gallatin held that, owing to the “unpardonable oversight or indifference” of Livingston and Monroe in failing to insist on a boundary to Louisiana, the United States government was debarred from holding Spain responsible for the inevitable consequences of its own fault. Neither Spain’s qualified refusal to ratify the claims convention of 1802 nor her rejection of the French spoliation claims would justify war. As a matter of abstract justice, war was not to be defended; as a matter of policy, it could not be recommended. The expense and loss would exceed the value of Florida; the political result would entangle America in alliance with England; and, “in fine, a subversion of all our hopes must be the natural consequence.” Renewal of negotiation was the proper step, with the Sabine and Perdido as boundaries and a temporary arrangement under the status quo, acceptance of the Spanish condition precedent to ratifying the claims convention, and insistence against the new spoliations which French and Spanish privateers were daily making on American commerce in the West Indies. Pending the result of this negotiation Congress might spend some money on the militia, and might appropriate a million dollars annually to build ships of the line.

In effect, Gallatin threw his influence on the side of Madison against the President’s semi-warlike views. The opinion of Robert Smith did not weaken the force of Gallatin’s reasoning. Already a perceptible division existed in the Cabinet between the Treasury and the Navy. Hardly three months before the Spanish embarrassment, Gallatin had spoken to the President in strong terms of Robert Smith’s administration, and had added,[59]—

“On this subject,—the expense of the Navy greater than the object seemed to require, and a merely nominal accountability,—I have, for the sake of preserving perfect harmony in your councils, however grating to my feelings, been almost uniformly silent.”

Smith’s present views tended to confirm Gallatin in his irritation, and to reconcile Jefferson to abandoning his energetic schemes. The Secretary of the Navy said that throughout these negotiations Spain had presumed much on American predilection for peace, and on the want of means to annoy her either by land or by water. He urged the necessity of working on her fears, and advised that Congress be recommended to provide additional gunboats, to put all the frigates in commission, and to build twelve seventy-fours. With these means he was disposed to take a commanding attitude; and if Spain were supported by France, to make an alliance with England.[60]

Gallatin and Robert Smith agreed only on one point,—that the affair had been mismanaged. Both secretaries held that America had made pretensions which she had not strength at the moment to support. Rather than “again run the risk of lowering national importance,” Gallatin preferred to submit to the consequent loss of reputation, and return to a true peace-policy. Robert Smith wished to maintain a high tone, and to arm. All Jefferson’s instincts were with Gallatin; but the path that Gallatin proposed was hard and mortifying, and although he made it as little abrupt as possible, he could not prevent it from seeming what it was,—a severe humiliation to the President. Not without some inward struggle could a President of the United States bow his neck to such a yoke as Spain and France imposed.

At that moment, the middle of September, arrived Armstrong’s letter advising the military occupation of Texas and a cessation of intercourse with Spain. His plan was the first well-considered suggestion yet made for carrying out the policy hitherto pursued; and although contrary to Gallatin’s advice, it agreed so well with the President’s views that he caught at it with the relief of a man unable to solve his own problem, who hears another explain what to himself is inexplicable. Jefferson seized Armstrong’s idea, and uniting it with his own, announced the result to Madison as the true solution of the difficulty:[61]—

“Supposing a previous alliance with England to guard us in the worst event, I should propose that Congress should pass acts (1) authorizing the Executive to suspend intercourse with Spain at discretion; (2) to dislodge the new establishments of Spain between the Mississippi and Bravo; (3) to appoint commissioners to examine and ascertain all claims for spoliation.”

Here at length was a plan,—uncertain, indeed, because dependent on British help, but still a scheme of action which could be discussed. The President appointed October 4 as the day on which the Cabinet should reunite at Washington to consider his project, but Madison replied that he could not return so soon; and in order that the Cabinet should know his views, he explained at some length the course he advised, which differed widely from that of the President.

“With respect to Great Britain,” he said,[62] “I think we ought to go as far into an understanding on the subject of an eventual coalition in the war as will not preclude us from an intermediate adjustment, if attainable, with Spain. I see not, however, much chance that she will positively bind herself not to make peace, while we refuse to bind ourselves positively to make war,—unless, indeed, some positive advantage were yielded on our part in lieu of an engagement to enter into the war. No such advantage as yet occurs as would be admissible to us and satisfactory to her.”

In regard to England, therefore, Madison had nothing to propose except negotiation without end. Having settled this point, he went on:—

“At Paris I think Armstrong ought to receive instructions to extinguish in the French government every hope of turning our controversy with Spain into a French job, public or private; to leave them under apprehensions of an eventual connection between the United States and Great Britain; and to take advantage of any change in the French Cabinet favorable to our objects with Spain.”

To leave Bonaparte “under apprehensions” was to be the object of Madison’s diplomacy at Paris,—a task which several European governments were then employing half a million armed men to accomplish, hitherto without success, but which Madison hoped to effect by civilities to Merry.

After this decision, nothing remained but to mark out a line of conduct in regard to Spain. In the course of the summer Bowdoin, the new minister, had sailed; but on arriving in Spain, and learning the failure of Monroe’s negotiation, he went to Paris and London without visiting Madrid.

“As to Spain herself,” continued Madison, “one question is, whether Bowdoin ought to proceed or not to Madrid. My opinion is that his trip to Great Britain was fortunate, and that the effect of it will be aided by his keeping aloof until occurrences shall invite him to Spain.... The nicest question, however, is whether any, or what, steps should be taken for a communication with the Spanish government on the points not embraced by the late negotiation. On this question my reflections disapprove of any step whatever other than such as may fall within the path to be marked out for Armstrong, or as may be within the sphere of Claiborne’s intercourse with the Marquis of Casa Calvo. Perhaps the last may be the best opportunity of all for conveying to Spain the impressions we wish, without committing the government in any respect more than may be advisable. In general it seems to me proper that Claiborne should hold a pretty strong language in all cases, and particularly that he should go every length the law will warrant against Morales and his project of selling lands. If Congress should be not indisposed, proceedings may be authorized that will be perfectly effectual on that as well as other points; but before their meeting there will be time to consider more fully what ought to be suggested for their consideration.”

Having brought the government face to face with the government of Spain, in the belief that Spain and France must yield to a peremptory demand,—finding that Spain not only refused every concession, but renewed depredations on American commerce and took an attitude of indifference to threats or entreaties,—Madison proposed no more vigorous measure than to “go every length the law will warrant” against certain Spanish land-grants.

Such a course pleased no one, and threatened to create new dangers. Monroe and Armstrong urged that a supposed devotion to peace on the part of the President weighed heavily against him with Spain and France. Jefferson approved their proposed aggressive policy, as he wrote to Madison, chiefly because it would “correct the dangerous error that we are a people whom no injuries can provoke to war.”[63] He shrank from war, except under the shield of England, and yet he feared England for an ally even more than Spain for an enemy. His perplexity ended in helplessness. The Cabinet meeting was held October 4; but he reported to Madison that nothing came of it:[64]

“The only questions which press on the Executive for decision are whether we shall enter into a provisional alliance with England, to come into force only in the event that during the present war we become engaged in war with France, leaving the declaration of the casus fœderis ultimately with us; whether we shall send away Yrujo, Casa Calvo, Morales; whether we shall instruct Bowdoin not to go to Madrid till further orders. But we are all of the opinion that the first of these questions is too important and too difficult to be decided but on the fullest consideration, in which your aid and counsel should be waited for.”

Again Madison wrote back his opinion. More than six months had elapsed since the President, March 23, despaired of Monroe’s mission; every alternative had been repeatedly discussed; every advice had been taken. Congress would soon meet; something must be decided,—in reality delay was itself a decision; yet the President and Secretary of State seemed no nearer a result than they had been six months before. Meanwhile the European packets brought news that put a different face on the problem. Sir William Scott’s decision in the case of the “Essex” arrived; seizures of American ships by England began; Pitt’s great coalition with Russia and Austria against Napoleon took the field, and August 27 Napoleon broke up the camp at Boulogne and began his long-intended movement across the Rhine. Upon Madison’s mind this European convulsion acted as an additional reason for doing nothing:[65]—

“Considering the probability of an extension of the war against France, and the influence that may have on her temper toward the United States, the uncertainty of effecting with England such a shape for an arrangement as alone would be admissible, and the possible effects elsewhere of abortive overtures to her, I think it very questionable whether a little delay may not be expedient, especially as in the mean time the English pulse will be somewhat felt by the discussions now on foot by Mr. Monroe.”

Accordingly the Secretary advised that Morales, Casa Calvo, and Yrujo should be ordered out of the country, while Bowdoin should remain in England,—and so left it.

Madison’s measures and conduct toward Europe showed the habit of avoiding the heart of every issue, in order to fret its extremities. This mark of Madison’s character as a diplomatist led him into his chief difficulties at home and abroad; but the Spanish imbroglio of 1805 first brought the weakness into public notoriety, and he recovered from the subsequent revelation only after years of misfortune. The same habit of mind made him favor commercial restrictions as a means of coercion. So he disregarded Armstrong’s idea of seizing Texas, but warmly approved of his passing suggestion as to an embargo:[66]—

“The efficacy of an embargo cannot be doubted. Indeed, if a commercial weapon can be properly shaped for the Executive hand, it is more and more apparent to me that it can force all the nations having colonies in this quarter of the globe to respect our rights.”

This mental trait was closely connected with Madison’s good qualities,—it sprang from the same source as his caution, his respect for law, his instinctive sense of the dangers that threatened the Union, his curious mixture of radical and conservative tastes; but whatever its merits or defects, it led to a strange delusion when it caused him to believe that a man like Napoleon could be forced by a mere pin-prick to do Jefferson’s will.

Jefferson himself was weary of indecision. He had rested his wish for an English alliance on the belief that Napoleon meant to make peace in Europe in order to attack America; and this idea, never very reasonable, could have no weight after Napoleon had plunged into a general European war. No sooner did he receive Madison’s letter of October 16, than he again changed his plan.

“The probability of an extensive war on the continent of Europe, strengthening every day for some time past, is now almost certain,” he wrote October 23 to Madison.[67] “This gives us our great desideratum, time. In truth it places us quite at our ease. We are certain of one year of campaigning at least, and one other year of negotiation for their peace arrangements. Should we be now forced into war, it is become much more questionable than it was whether we should not pursue it unembarrassed by any alliance, and free to retire from it whenever we can obtain our separate terms. It gives us time, too, to make another effort for peaceable settlement. Where should this be done? Not at Madrid, certainly. At Paris! through Armstrong, or Armstrong and Monroe as negotiators, France as the mediator, the price of the Floridas as the means. We need not care who gets that, and an enlargement of the sum we had thought of may be the bait to France, while the Guadalupe as the western boundary may be the soother of Spain; providing for our spoliated citizens in some effectual way. We may announce to France that determined not to ask justice of Spain again, yet desirous of making one other effort to preserve peace, we are willing to see whether her interposition can obtain it on terms which we think just; that no delay, however, can be admitted; and that in the mean time should Spain attempt to change the status quo, we shall repel force by force, without undertaking other active hostilities till we see what may be the issue of her interference.”

A similar letter was sent on the same day to Gallatin; and the next day Jefferson wrote to Robert Smith, suggesting the same idea, with some characteristic additions.[68]

Jefferson’s idea that Napoleon would require two years of war seemed reasonable; for how could Jefferson know that Ulm had already surrendered, that Austerlitz would be fought within six weeks, and that peace would be restored before the new year, with the Emperor Napoleon more terrible than ever? In truth Jefferson only reverted to his policy of peace which he had seemed to abandon, but to which he really clung even when most earnest for a British alliance. His conduct in that sense was at least consistent. So much could hardly be said for Madison, even though the President apparently yielded to the secretary’s advice. Of all the points on which Madison, and Monroe in obedience to his orders, had most strongly insisted, even to the extent of offending Talleyrand, the strongest was that under no circumstances should the Florida negotiation be turned into a bribe to France. As late as September 30, in writing the opinion intended to guide the Cabinet, Madison asked authority “to extinguish in the French government every hope of turning our controversy with Spain into a French job, public or private.”[69] The President’s suggestion of October 23 avowedly turned the controversy with Spain into a French job, which must inevitably become private as well as public.

Madison made no protest. He soon returned to Washington, and there, Nov. 12, 1805, a Cabinel meeting was held, whose proceedings were recorded by the President in a memorandum, probably written at the moment. This memorandum closed a record, unusually complete, of an episode illustrating better than any other the peculiarities of Jefferson and Madison, and the traits of character most commonly alleged as their faults.[70]

“1805, Nov. 12. Present, the four secretaries; subject, Spanish affairs.—The extension of the war in Europe leaving us without danger of a sudden peace, depriving us of the chance of an ally, I proposed we should address ourselves to France, informing her it was a last effort at amicable settlement with Spain, and offer to her, or through her, (1) A sum of money for the rights of Spain east of Iberville, say the Floridas; (2) To cede the part of Louisiana from the Rio Bravo to the Guadalupe; (3) Spain to pay within a certain time spoliations under her own flag, agreed to by the convention (which we guess to be a hundred vessels, worth two millions), and those subsequent (worth as much more), and to hypothecate to us for those payments the country from Guadalupe to Rio Bravo. Armstrong to be employed. The first was to be the exciting motive with France, to whom Spain is in arrears for subsidies, and who will be glad also to secure us from going into the scale of England; the second, the soothing motive with Spain, which France would press bonâ fide, because she claimed to the Rio Bravo; the third, to quiet our merchants. It was agreed to unanimously, and the sum to be offered fixed not to exceed five million dollars. Mr. Gallatin did not like purchasing Florida under an apprehension of war, lest we should be thought in fact to purchase peace. We thought this overweighed by taking advantage of an opportunity which might not occur again of getting a country essential to our peace and to the security of the commerce of the Mississippi. It was agreed that Yrujo should be sounded through Dallas whether he is not going away, and if not, he should be made to understand that his presence at Washington will not be agreeable, and that his departure is expected. Casa Calvo, Morales, and all the Spanish officers at New Orleans are to be desired to depart, with a discretion to Claiborne to let any friendly ones remain who will resign and become citizens, as also women receiving pensions to remain if they choose.”

CHAPTER IV.

President Jefferson’s decision, in October, 1805, to retrace his steps and reverse a policy which had been publicly and repeatedly proclaimed, was the turning-point of his second Administration. No one can say what might have happened if in August, 1805, Jefferson had ordered his troops to cross the Sabine and occupy Texas to the Rio Bravo, as Armstrong and Monroe advised. Such an act would probably have been supported, as the purchase of Louisiana had been approved, by the whole country, without regard to Constitutional theories; and indeed if Jefferson succeeded to the rights of Napoleon in Louisiana, such a step required no defence. Spain might then have declared war; but had Godoy taken this extreme measure, he could have had no other motive than to embarrass Napoleon by dragging France into a war with the United States, and had this policy succeeded, President Jefferson’s difficulties would have vanished in an instant. He might then have seized Florida; his controversies with England about neutral trade, blockade, and impressment would have fallen to the ground; and had war with France continued two years, until Spain threw off the yoke of Napoleon and once more raised in Europe the standard of popular liberty, Jefferson might perhaps have effected some agreement with the Spanish patriots, and would then have stood at the head of the coming popular movement throughout the world,—the movement which he and his party were destined to resist. Godoy, Napoleon, Pitt, Monroe, Armstrong, John Randolph, and even the New England Federalists seemed combined to drag or drive him into this path. Its advantages were so plain, even at that early moment, as to overmaster for a whole summer his instinctive repugnance to acts of force.

After long hesitation, Jefferson shrank from the step, and fell back upon his old policy of conquering by peace; but such vacillations were costly. To Gallatin the decision was easy, for he had ever held that on the whole the nation could better afford a loss of dignity than a war; but even he allowed that loss of dignity would cost something, and he could not foretell what equivalent he must pay for escape from a Franco-Spanish war. Neither Jefferson nor Gallatin could expect to be wholly spared; but Madison’s position was worse than theirs, for he had still to reckon with his personal enemies,—John Randolph, Yrujo, and Merry,—and to overawe a quasi friend more dangerous than an enemy,—the military diplomat, Turreau.

Turreau during this summer kept his eye fixed on the Secretary of State, and repeatedly hinted, in a manner extremely frank, that he meant to tolerate no evasions. He wrote to Talleyrand in a tone of cool confidence. July 9 he said that the Emperor’s measures for the protection of Florida were sufficient:

“The intervention of France in the negotiations with Spain has stopped everything. They have been affected by it here, but have not shown to me any discontent at it. ‘Well,’ said Mr. Jefferson to me lately, ‘since the Emperor wishes it, the arrangement shall be adjourned to a more favorable time.’”

That Jefferson made this remark could be believed only by his enemies, for it contradicted the tenor of his letters to Madison; but although Turreau doubtless overstated the force of the words, he certainly gave to Talleyrand the impression that the President was reduced to obedience. The impression was enough; correct or not, it strengthened Napoleon’s natural taste for command.

A few weeks afterward, Turreau wrote to Madison a note in regard to General Moreau’s reception in the United States. In a tone excessively military he said:[71]—

“General Moreau ought not (ne doit point) to be, in a foreign country, the object of honors which the consideration of his services would formerly have drawn upon him; and it is proper (il convient) that his arrival and his residence in the United States should be marked by no demonstration which passes the bounds of hospitality.”

Madison was indignant at this interference, and proposed to resent it. The President encouraged him to do so, on the express ground that they had not ventured to resent the conduct of France in regard to Monroe’s negotiation:[72]—

“The style of that government in the Spanish business was calculated to excite indignation; but it was a case in which that might have done injury. But the present is a case which would justify some notice in order to let them understand we are not of those Powers who will receive and execute mandates.”

Meanwhile General Smith, who had not resented the repudiation of his niece by the Emperor, and to whom Madison showed the offensive letter, undertook to soothe the irritation. “He says,” wrote Madison in his next letter to the President,[73] “that Turreau speaks with the greatest respect, and even affection, toward the Administration; and such are the dispositions which it is certain he has uniformly manifested to me.” Upon these assurances Madison toned down the severity he had intended.

Turreau had resided hardly six months in the United States before he announced to Talleyrand the conviction of all American politicians that any war would end in driving from office the party which made it:[74]—

“To such an extent is the actual Administration convinced of this fact, that it allows itself to be outraged every day by the English, and accepts all the humiliations they care to impose; and notwithstanding the contempt generally felt here for Spain, against whom a war was last year quite openly provoked, the members of the United States government have not dared to undertake it, although sure of beginning it with public opinion in their favor. And no one need think that this indisposition to war depends only on the personal character and the philanthropic principles of Mr. Jefferson, for it is shared by all the party leaders, even by those who have most pretensions and well-founded hopes to succeed the actual President,—such as Mr. Madison.”

Turreau’s sketch of American character and ambition was long and interesting, and suggested the vulnerable point where France should throw her strength against this new people. Neither as a military nor as a naval power did he think the United States formidable. Their government made no concealment of its weakness:—

“They especially lack trained officers. The Americans are to-day the boldest and the most ignorant navigators in the universe. In brief, it seems to me that, considering the weakness of the military constitution, the Federal government, which makes no concealment of this weakness, will avoid every serious difference which might lead to aggression, and will constantly show itself an enemy to war. But does the system of encroachment which prevails here agree with a temper so pacific? Certainly not, at first sight; and yet unless circumstances change, the United States will succeed in reconciling the contradiction. To conquer without war is the first fact in their politics (Conquérir sans guerre, voilà les premiers faits politiques.)”

These reflections were written early in July, 1805, before the President and his Cabinet had begun to discuss Monroe’s failure and the policy of a Spanish war, and more than three months before the President wholly abandoned the thought of warlike measures. Turreau’s vision was keen, but he had no excuse for short-sightedness. Madison made little effort to disguise his objects or methods.

“I took occasion to express to Mr. Madison,” wrote Turreau in the same despatch, “my astonishment that the schemes of aggrandizement which the United States government appeared to have, should be always directed toward the south, while there were still in the north important and convenient territories, such as Canada, Nova Scotia, etc. ‘Doubtless!’ replied the secretary, ‘but the moment has not yet come! When the pear is ripe it will fall of itself.’”

Had Turreau asked why, then, Madison gave so violent a shaking to the Florida pear-tree, Madison must have answered, with the same candor, that he did so because he supposed the Florida pear to be ripe. The phrase was an admission and an invitation,—an admission that Florida would have been left alone if Spain had been as strong as England; and an invitation to Turreau to interpose with safety the sword of France. Turreau could not doubt the effect of his own blunt interference. So confident had the new French minister already become, in July, 1805, that he not only told Madison to stop these petty larcenies of Spanish property, but also urged Napoleon to take the Floridas and Cuba into his own hand solely to check American aggression. “I believe that France alone can arrest these American enterprises and baffle (déjouer) their plan.”

Had Turreau’s discipline stopped there, much might have been said in his favor; but in regard to still another matter he used expressions and made demands such as Madison never yet had heard from a diplomatic agent, although the secretary’s experience was already considerable. Neither Yrujo nor Merry had succeeded in giving to their remonstrances or requests the abruptness of Napoleon’s style.

The Federalist newspapers during Jefferson’s first term had found so little reason for charging him with subservience to France, that this old and stale reproach had nearly lost its weight. Neither the New England merchants whom France had plundered, and whose claims Jefferson consented to withdraw, nor the British government or British newspapers had thought it worth their while to press the charge that Jefferson was led astray by love or fear of Napoleon or the Empire. Not until the winter of 1805–1806 did the doctrine of French influence recover a certain share of strength; but as John Randolph and his friends, who detested Madison, were outraged by the conduct of France in Spanish affairs, so Timothy Pickering and the whole body of Federalists, who hated the South and the power which rested on the dumb vote of slaves, were exasperated by the conduct of France in regard to their trade with St. Domingo. In both cases Madison was the victim.

St. Domingo was still in name and in international law a colony of France. Although Rochambeau surrendered himself and his few remaining troops as prisoners of war to the English in November, 1803; although the negroes in January, 1804, proclaimed their independence, and held undisputed control of the whole French colony, while their ports were open, and not an armed vessel bearing the flag of France pretended to maintain a blockade,—yet Napoleon claimed that the island belonged to him. General Ferrand still held points in the Spanish colony for France, and defeated an invasion attempted by Dessalines; nor did any government betray a disposition to recognize the black empire, or to establish relations with Dessalines or Christophe, or with a negro republic. On the other hand, the trade of Hayti, being profitable, was encouraged by every government in turn; but because it was, even more than other West Indian trade, unprotected by law, the vessels which carried it were usually armed, and sailed in company. In the winter of 1804–1805, soon after General Turreau’s arrival at Washington, a flotilla armed with eighty cannon and carrying crews to the number of seven hundred men, set sail from New York with cargoes which included contraband of war of all kinds. Turreau remonstrated with Madison, who assured him that a law would soon be reported for correcting this abuse.

A Bill was accordingly reported; but it prohibited only the armed commerce and put the trade under heavy bonds for good behavior. To answer Turreau’s object the trade must be prohibited altogether. Dr. Logan, one of the senators from Pennsylvania, who led the Northern democrats, with the “Aurora’s” support, in hostility to the Haytian negroes, moved an amendment to the Bill when it came before the Senate. He proposed to prohibit every kind of commerce with St. Domingo; and the Senate was so closely divided as to require the casting vote of the Vice-President. Burr gave his voice against Dr. Logan’s amendment, and the Bill accordingly passed, March 3, 1805, leaving the unarmed trade still open.

Turreau duly reported these matters to his Government.[75] The facts were public, and were given needless notoriety by the merchants themselves. On the return of the Haytian flotilla to New York, they celebrated the event in a public dinner, and the company drank a health to the government of Hayti. Another expedition was reported to be preparing. General Ferrand issued severe proclamations against the trade,[76] and Madison remonstrated strongly against Ferrand. One armed American vessel, which had carried three cargoes of powder to the Haytians, was taken by a British cruiser, sent into Halifax, and there condemned by the British court as good prize for carrying on an unlawful trade.

Early in August, 1805, after Monroe’s return to London, and while Jefferson and Madison were discussing the problem of protecting themselves from French designs, the Emperor Napoleon, who had returned from Italy and gone to the camp at Boulogne, received Turreau’s despatch, and immediately wrote in his own emphatic style to Talleyrand:[77]—

“The despatch from Washington has fixed my attention. I request you to send a note to the American minister accredited to me. You will join to it a copy of the judgment [at Halifax]; and you will declare to him that it is time for this thing to stop (que cela finisse); that it is shameful (indigne) in the Americans to provide supplies for brigands and to take part in a commerce so scandalous; that I will declare good prize everything which shall enter or leave the ports of St. Domingo; and that I can no longer see with indifference the armaments evidently directed against France which the American government allows to be made in its ports.”

In this outburst of temper Napoleon’s ideas of law became confused. The American government did not dispute his right to seize American vessels trading with Hayti: the difficulty was that he did not or could not do so, and for this reason he made the demand that the American government should help him in doing what he was powerless to effect without its aid. Talleyrand immediately wrote to Armstrong a letter in which he tried to put the Emperor’s commands into a shape more diplomatic, by treating the Haytians as enemies of the human race, against whom it was right that the United States should interpose with measures of hostility:[78]—

“As the seriousness of the facts which occasion this complaint obliges his Majesty to consider as good prize everything which shall enter into the part of St. Domingo occupied by the rebels, and everything coming out, he persuades himself that the government of the United States will take on its part, against this commerce at once illicit and contrary to all the principles of the law of nations, all the repressive and authoritative measures proper to put an end to it. This system of impunity and tolerance must last no longer (ne pourrait durer davantage).”

For the third time within six months Talleyrand used the word “must” to the President of the United States. Once the President had been told that he must abandon his Spanish claims; then that he must show no public respect for Moreau; finally he was told still more authoritatively that he must stop a trade which France was unable to stop, and which would continue in British hands if Congress should obey Napoleon’s order. Talleyrand directed Turreau to repeat at Washington the Emperor’s remonstrance, and Turreau accordingly echoed in Madison’s ear the identical words, “must last no longer.”[79] His letter, to his indignation, received no answer or notice.

Thus at the moment when Congress was to meet, Dec. 2, 1805, serious problems awaited it. The conduct of Spain was hostile. At sea Spanish cruisers captured American property without regard to treaty-rights; on land Spanish armed forces made incursions from Florida and Texas at will.[80] The conduct of France was equally menacing, for Napoleon not only sustained Spain, but also pressed abrupt demands of his own such as Jefferson could not hear without indignation. As though Congress had not enough difficulty in dealing with these two Powers, Great Britain also took an attitude which could be properly met by no resistance short of a declaration of war.

During the whole year the conduct of England changed steadily for the worse. The blockade of New York by the two frigates “Cambrian” and “Leander” became intolerable, exasperating even the mercantile class, who were naturally friendly to England, and who had most to dread from a quarrel. On board the “Leander” was a young midshipman named Basil Hall, who in later years described the mode of life he led in this service, and whose account of the blockade, coming from a British source, was less liable than any American authority to the charge of exaggeration.

“Every morning at daybreak,” according to his story,[81] “we set about arresting the progress of all the vessels we saw, firing off guns to the right and left to make every ship that was running in heave to, or wait until we had leisure to send a boat on board ‘to see,’ in our lingo, ‘what she was made of.’ I have frequently known a dozen, and sometimes a couple of dozen, ships lying a league or two off the port, losing their fair wind, their tide, and worse than all their market, for many hours, sometimes the whole day, before our search was completed.”

An informality in papers, a suspicion of French ownership, a chance expression in some private letter found and opened in the search, insured seizure, a voyage to Halifax, detention for months, heavy costs, indefinite damage to vessel and cargo, and at best release, with no small chance of re-seizure and condemnation under some new rule before the ship could reach port.

Such vexations were incident to a state of war. If the merchants of New York disliked them, the merchants might always ask Government to resent them; but in truth commerce found its interest in submission. These vexations secured neutral profits; and on the whole the British frigates and admiralty courts created comparatively little scandal by injustice, while they served as a protection from the piratical privateers of Spain and France. Madison, Gallatin, and the newspapers grumbled and complained; but the profits of neutrality soothed the offended merchant, and the blockade of New York was already a fixed practice. Had the British commanders been satisfied with a moderate exercise of their power, the United States would probably have allowed the habit of neutral blockade to grow into a belligerent right by prescription. Neither the mercantile class nor the government would have risked profit or popularity on such a stake; but fortunately the British officers steadily became more severe, and meanwhile in their practice of impressment roused extreme bitterness among the seafaring classes, who had nothing to gain by submission. In Basil Hall’s words, the British officers took out of American vessels every seaman “whom they had reason, or supposed or said they had reason, to consider” a British subject, “or whose country they guessed from dialect or appearance.” By these impressments American vessels were often left short-handed, and were sometimes cast away or foundered. In such cases the owners were greatly irritated; but commonly the exasperation was most deeply felt by the laboring class and among the families of seafaring men. The severity with which impressment was enforced in 1805 excited hatred toward England among people who had at best no reason to love her. More than twenty years afterward, when Basil Hall revisited New York, he was not surprised to find the name of his old ship, the “Leander,” still held in detestation. Not only were the duties harsh, but, as he frankly admitted, they were harshly performed.

After Pitt’s return to power impressments increased until they averaged about a thousand a year. Among them were cases of intolerable outrage; but neither President, Congress, nor people, nor even the victims themselves, cared as a body to fight in defence of their rights and liberties. Where an American-born citizen had been seized who could prove his birth, Madison on receiving the documents sent them to Monroe, who transmitted them to the British Admiralty, which ordered an inquiry; and if the man had not been killed in action or died of disease and hard usage, he was likely, after a year or two of service, to obtain a release. The American-born citizen was admitted to be no subject for impressment, and the number of such persons actually taken was never so large as the number of British-born sailors who were daily impressed; but both the mercantile and the national marine of the United States were largely manned by British seamen, and could not dispense with them. According to Gallatin’s calculation,[82] American tonnage increased after 1803 at the rate of about seventy thousand tons a year; and of the four thousand two hundred men required to supply this annual increase, about two thousand five hundred were British. If the British marine lost two thousand five hundred men annually by desertion or engagement in the American service, even after recovering one thousand seamen a year by impressment, the British navy made good only a fraction of the loss. On the other hand, if the United States government went to war to protect British seamen, America would lose all her mercantile marine; and these same seamen for whom she was fighting must for the most part necessarily return to their old flag, because they would then have no other employer. The immediate result of war must strengthen the British marine by sending back to it ten thousand seamen whom America could no longer employ.

Nations rarely submit to injury without a motive. If Jefferson and the Republican party, if Timothy Pickering and George Cabot, the merchants of Boston and New York, and even the seamen themselves, rejected the idea of war, it was because they found a greater interest in maintaining peace. This interest consisted, as regarded England, in the large profits realized in neutral freights. So long as the British navy protected this source of American wealth, Americans said but little about impressments; but in the summer of 1805 Pitt thought proper to obstruct this source, and suddenly the whole American seaboard, from Machias to Norfolk, burst into excitement, and demanded that the President should do something,—they knew not what, but at moments they seemed to ask for war.

The news of Sir William Scott’s decision in the case of the “Essex” reached America in the month of September, while the President and Madison were discussing an alliance with England to protect themselves against France and Spain. The announcement that Great Britain had suddenly begun to seize American ships by scores at the moment when Jefferson counted most confidently on her willingness to oblige, was a blow to the Administration so severe that a long time elapsed before either Jefferson or Madison realized its violence. Their minds were intent on the Spanish problem; and with the question of war pressing upon them from the south, they did not at once perceive that another war was actually declared against their commerce from the north. Jefferson disliked commercial disputes, and gladly shut his eyes to their meaning; Madison felt their importance, but was never quick to meet an emergency.

Merry was near Philadelphia during the autumn, when Mrs. Madison’s illness obliged the secretary to remain in that city. Early in September Merry wrote to his Government that the complete failure of Monroe’s Spanish mission was no secret, and that Madison expected some collision with Spain in West Florida, but would wait for the meeting of Congress before taking action. “Such a determination on the part of the President,” continued Merry,[83] “is so consonant with his usual caution and temporizing system (to which the opposition here give the character of timidity and irresolution), that I cannot but be disposed to give entire credit to the information.” Shortly after the date of this despatch, news arrived that the British government had altered its rules in regard to the neutral carrying-trade, and that British cruisers were everywhere seizing American ships. Merry, who had not been forewarned by Lord Mulgrave, and who had no wish to see his own position made more uncomfortable than it already was, became uneasy. “The sensation and clamor,” he wrote,[84] “excited by this news from England (which has already caused the insurance on such cargoes to be raised to four times the usual premium) is rendered the greater by such events having been totally unexpected, and by the merchants here having, on the contrary, considered themselves as perfectly secured against them.” Merry saw that his Government had in the midst of peace taken a measure which Madison could hardly fail to denounce as an act of war. Dreading a violent explosion, the British minister waited anxiously; but, to his surprise, nothing happened. “Although I have seen Mr. Madison twice since the attention of the public has been so much engaged with this object, he has not thought proper to mention it to me.”[85] At first Merry could not account for this silence; only by degrees was he taught to connect it with the Spanish quarrel, and to understand that Madison hoped to conciliate England in order to overawe France. In this play of cross-purposes Merry’s account of Madison’s conversation was not calculated to alarm the British government:[86]—

“Before I quitted the vicinity of Philadelphia to return to this place [Washington], I had an interview with Mr. Madison, who having then received accounts from Mr. Monroe respecting the detention by his Majesty’s ships of several American vessels in consequence of their being loaded with the produce of the enemy’s colonies, brought forward that subject to me,—speaking upon it, however, with much more moderation than from his natural irritability, and the sensation which it had produced throughout this country, I could have expected on his part. It is unnecessary for me to trouble your Lordship by detailing to you the several observations which he made to me to endeavor to prove the impropriety of the principle upon which the detention of those vessels has taken place.... As I had the honor to observe in the former part of this letter, the American Secretary of State delivered his sentiments on this subject with great temper, and concluded by expressing only a wish that Mr. Monroe’s remonstrances upon it might prove so far efficacious as at least to procure the liberation of the vessels and cargoes which were already detained, as well as of those which might be stopped before the new system adopted by his Majesty’s government in regard to the trade in question should be generally known. Our conversation afterward turned upon some circumstances, the accounts of which had just been received, of the recent conduct of Spain toward this country, when Mr. Madison was much less reserved in expressing his sentiments than on former occasions, and gave me the detail of the perfidious and insolent proceedings of some of the Spanish officers who still remain at New Orleans, and of others who command in the disputed territory,—which, combined with information he had received of the departure of four hundred troops with a quantity of military stores from the Havana, supposed to be destined to reinforce the garrisons in East and West Florida, and with a report which prevailed at New Orleans of a considerable force advancing from Mexico toward Louisiana, could not, he observed, fail to render the differences subsisting between the two governments still more difficult of accommodation.”

This conversation took place about the middle of October, before the President had decided to acquiesce in the acts of Spain and France. As a result of the high tone taken toward England in the winter of 1803–1804, the secretary’s mildness might well surprise a British minister, who was not quick of comprehension, and required to be told in plain language the meaning of Madison’s manœuvres. No sooner had Merry returned to Washington than “a confidential person” was sent to him to explain the mystery:[87]—

“On this subject it has been remarked to me by a person in a confidential situation here that the detention of the American vessels by his Majesty’s ships has happened very unseasonably to divert the attention of the people of the United States and of the Government from a proper consideration of the grievances and injuries which they have experienced from Spain, and which the Government were disposed and had actually taken the measures to resent; and he conceived that when the state of the relations between the United States and other Powers should be laid by the President before Congress at their approaching meeting, the circumstance abovementioned, of what is considered to be so unfriendly a proceeding on the part of Great Britain, will have the same effect upon the resolutions of that body by blunting the feelings which would otherwise have been excited by the conduct of Spain, supported by France, against this country.”

The “confidential person” usually employed by Jefferson and Madison on such errands was either Robert or Samuel Smith; partly because both these gentlemen were a little inclined to officiousness, partly because they were men of the world, or what Pichon called “hommes fort polis.” In this instance the agent was probably the Secretary of the Navy. In telling the British minister that the President had already taken measures to resist the conduct of Spain, this agent was unwise, not so much because the assertion was incorrect, as because Merry knew better. In the same despatch, written Nov. 3, 1805, Merry informed his Government of the President’s hopes of an agreement with Spain, founded on the war in Europe,—hopes which had been entertained only ten days, since October 23. He had the best reason to be well informed on this subject, for he drew his information directly from Jefferson himself.

That Merry should have been exceedingly perplexed was no wonder. Two years had elapsed since his first arrival in Washington, when he had been harshly treated without sufficient reason, by President, Cabinet, and Congress; and on returning to the same place in this autumn of 1805, immediately after his Government had made war on United States commerce, he found himself received with surprising cordiality. Immediately on his return, about October 20, he called at the White House. Instead of finding the President in a passion, denouncing Pitt and the British nation, as he might reasonably have expected, Merry was delighted to find Jefferson in his most genial humor. Not a word was said about British outrages; his conversation assumed the existence of a close concert and alliance between England and the United States:[88]—

“Upon my seeing the President on my return to this place a fortnight ago, he spoke to me with great frankness respecting the state of affairs between this country and Spain; saying that it was possible that the accumulation of the injuries which they had sustained might produce a resolution on the part of the Congress to resent them. With a view to the hostile situation of affairs, he lamented that unfortunately [notwithstanding] the superiority of his Majesty’s naval force and the vigilance of his officers, it had not been possible to prevent the enemy’s fleet from crossing the Atlantic. He said that this experience would render it necessary for the United States to proceed with great caution and to gain time, in order to put their principal seaports in a state of defence, for which he had already given directions. In the event of hostilities he considered that East and West Florida, and successively the Island of Cuba, the possession of which was necessary for the defence of Louisiana and Florida, as being the key to the Gulf of Mexico, would, in the manner in which that island might and would be attacked, be an easy conquest to them. He, however, expressed that his individual voice would constantly be for the preservation of peace with every Power, till it could no longer be kept without absolute dishonor.”

Such speculations were not so practical as to affect Merry’s antipathy to the American government, but he reported them to Lord Mulgrave without comment, as intended to express the President’s plan in case of a Spanish war. Meanwhile the Secretary of State was engaged in composing a pamphlet, or book, to prove that the new rule adopted by Great Britain was an act of bad faith, in violation of international law. The task was not difficult.

Such was the diplomatic situation at Washington, Nov. 12, 1805, when the Cabinet adopted Jefferson’s plan of reopening negotiations for the purchase of Florida on the line so persistently recommended by the irresponsible creatures of Talleyrand, and so steadily rejected to that moment by Madison and Monroe. Congress was to meet in three weeks, and within that time the diplomatic chaos must be reduced to order.

CHAPTER V.

August 27, 1805, President Jefferson, writing to Madison from Monticello, said:[89] “Considering the character of Bonaparte, I think it material at once to let him see that we are not of the Powers who will receive his orders.” In Europe, on the same day, the Emperor broke up the camp at Boulogne and set his army in motion toward Ulm and Austerlitz. September 4 he was at Paris, busy with the thousand details of imminent war: his armies were in motion, his vast diplomatic and military plans were taking shape.

The United States minister at Paris had little to do except to watch the course of events, when during the Emperor’s absence at Boulogne he received a visit from a gentleman who had no official position, but who brought with him a memorandum, written in Talleyrand’s hand, sketching the outlines of an arrangement between the United States and Spain. The United States, said this paper, should send another note to the Government at Madrid, written in a tone and manner that would awaken Spain from her indifference. In this note the Prince of Peace should be warned of the consequences that would follow a persistence in his course, and should be encouraged to join with the United States in referring to Napoleon the matters in dispute. In case Spain would not unite in asking the good offices of France, a copy of the note must be sent by Armstrong to Talleyrand, with a request for the good offices of Napoleon. “The more you refer to the decision of the Emperor, the more sure and easy will be the settlement.” If Spain, on the Emperor’s representations, should consent to part with the Floridas, as she no doubt would do, France would propose the following terms: Commercial privileges in Florida as in Louisiana; the Rio Colorado and a line northwestwardly, including the headwaters of all those rivers which fall into the Mississippi, as the western boundary of Louisiana, with thirty leagues on each side to remain unoccupied forever; the claims against Spain, excluding the French spoliations, to be paid by bills on the Spanish colonies; and, finally, ten million dollars to be paid by the United States to Spain.

Armstrong rejected the conditions on the spot. They sacrificed, he said, the whole country between the Colorado and the Rio Bravo; abandoned the claim to West Florida, the claim to damages from the violation of entrepôt at New Orleans, and the claim, estimated at six millions, for French spoliations. They gave to Spain an accommodation for her payments beyond what she herself required; and they exacted the enormous sum of ten million dollars for a barren and expensive province.

September 4, the day of Napoleon’s return to Paris, a long conversation followed. On both sides vigorous argument was pressed; but the Frenchman closed by saying: “I see where the shoe pinches. It is ‘the enormous sum of ten million dollars;’ but say seven! Your undisputed claims on Spain amount to two and a half or three millions. The arrangement as thus altered would leave four for Spain. Is not this sum within the limits of moderation?” Armstrong replied that he had nothing to say on the money transaction, but would immediately transmit Talleyrand’s memorandum to the President. His despatch on the subject was accordingly sent, Sept. 10, 1805.[90]

Armstrong had little acquaintance with the person who brought the memorandum for his sole credential, and knew him only as a political agent of the government, who rested his claim to credit not on any authority from the Emperor, but on an unsigned document in Talleyrand’s handwriting. “This form of communication he said had been preferred on account of greater security; it was a proof of the minister’s habitual circumspection, and of nothing else.” To most Frenchmen it might have seemed rather an example of Talleyrand’s supposed taste for jobbery, and the United States government had reason to know what was likely to be the outcome of such overtures; but Armstrong was not unused to intrigue, and did not affect virtue above the comprehension of the society in which he lived.

A fortnight afterward the Emperor left Paris for his campaign in Germany. While Armstrong’s despatch was still on its way to Washington, Napoleon captured Ulm, and November 13 entered Vienna. On the same day the despatch reached the United States.

Jefferson’s Cabinet council of November 12 had barely come to its long-disputed conclusion, and decided to reopen the Florida negotiation as a French bargain, when Talleyrand’s memorandum arrived, fixing definitely his terms. Naturally, the President supposed that Florida might thenceforward be looked upon as his own. At the next Cabinet he laid Armstrong’s letter before the four secretaries; and the result of their deliberation was recorded in his own hand:[91]—

“November 19. Present the same.—Since our last meeting we have received a letter from General Armstrong containing Talleyrand’s propositions, which are equivalent to ours nearly, except as to the sum, he requiring seven million dollars. He advises that we alarm the fears of Spain by a vigorous language and conduct, in order to induce her to join us in appealing to the interference of the Emperor. We now agree to modify our propositions, so as to accommodate them to his as much as possible. We agree to pay five million dollars for the Floridas as soon as the treaty is ratified by Spain, a vote of credit obtained from Congress, and orders delivered us for the surrender of the country. We agree to his proposition that the Colorado shall be our western boundary, and a belt of thirty leagues on each side of it to be kept unsettled. We agree that joint commissioners shall settle all spoliations, and to take payment from Spain by bills on her colonies. We agree to say nothing about the French spoliations in Spanish ports which broke off the former convention. We propose to pay the five millions after a simple vote of credit, by stock redeemable in three years, within which time we can pay it. We agree to order to the commanding officer at Natchitoches to patrol the country on this side the Sabine and all the Red River as being in our possession, except the settlement of Bayou Pierre, which he is not to disturb unless they aggress; he is to protect our citizens and repel all invasions of the preceding country by Spanish soldiers; to take all offenders without shedding blood, unless his orders cannot otherwise be executed.”

At last, after more than six months of hesitation, a Spanish policy was fixed; and since it conceded every point which had been required by France, the President might reasonably hope that his difficulties were at an end. He did not venture to send instructions to Armstrong at once, because the authority of Congress was needed before pledging the government to pay so large a sum of money; but Congress was to meet within a few weeks, and Jefferson could safely assume that the instructions would not be delayed beyond the New Year.

The President was greatly relieved to see the end of this annoying imbroglio; the more, because he could no longer shut his eyes to the conduct of Great Britain. The merchants of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore were frantic with rage and despair, hearing every day of new seizures, which swelled their losses to a sum then quite appalling, and carried ruin to their fairest fortunes. The carrying-trade was not a matter about which Jefferson cared to quarrel, for he held that Americans should not meddle with a commerce which did not belong to them; yet the public anger was far stronger against England than against Spain, and although the newspapers talked incessantly of a Spanish war, Jefferson soon felt that he should find great difficulty in preserving a British peace. That he should incline to a war with Spain in alliance with England was natural; but under no circumstances, and for no object, did Jefferson wish for war with Great Britain. From the first he had relied upon his power to coerce her by peaceable means; and the time had come when some coercion must be applied. No one could longer doubt that Pitt meant to keep what he had taken, and that the British policy was preconcerted with deliberate purpose.

When Merry next called at the State Department he heard nothing more about the misconduct of Spain or the advantages of a powerful British navy.

“The lively sensation” produced by the seizures, wrote Merry to Mulgrave,[92] December 2, “appears to have increased considerably since I had the honor of writing to your Lordship by the last mail. The commercial bodies at Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Norfolk have held public meetings on this subject, and come to resolutions to transmit to the Government of the United States particular statements of the injuries they allege to be sustaining daily in their trade. I am sorry to add that those public prints which are considered as the organs of the Government ... have of late lost sight in a great measure of their complaints against Spain, with a view, as may be suspected, to excite and direct the whole national indignation against Great Britain....

“In addition, my Lord, to these circumstances, I have been sorry to find in my recent conversations with Mr. Madison that he has treated this subject in a much more serious light than he had at first represented it to me. At my last interview with him, two days ago, he said that he had flattered himself that Mr. Monroe’s remonstrances to your Lordship would not only have produced the liberation of all the vessels which should have been detained previously to the 1st November, but that, as that minister had been promised an answer in writing to his representations, the reconsideration of the matter which would probably have taken place before a written answer was given might have induced his Majesty’s government, if not to give up entirely, at least to modify to a tolerable degree, the principle upon which they acted. It was true that the answer in question had not as yet reached him, nor had he heard lately from Mr. Monroe; but he had recently received information from an authentic though not an official quarter, which gave him the strongest reason to apprehend that if any reply at all in writing should be made on the subject, it would contain nothing satisfactory.”

Madison raised his tone awkwardly. Mysterious “information from an authentic quarter” was scarcely sufficient ground for so abrupt a change, but Merry failed to press him on this point. The secretary told the British minister that the government of England had committed “an act of commercial hostility on this country, and that the citizens of the United States would have a just claim of indemnity for whatever effective losses they might sustain in consequence of it; and he feared that these would be very considerable.” He hinted that measures would be taken to seek redress; and although he did not then foreshadow these measures, Merry read two days afterward in the “National Intelligencer” the Resolutions and speech in which Madison, in the year 1794, had urged commercial restrictions as the true policy of the United States against the same British outrages. The motive of republication was plain.

At about the same time Madison finished his pamphlet called “Examination of the British Doctrine,” which in the course of the coming session was laid on the desk of every senator and member. The book was creditable to his literary and scholarly qualities. Clear, calm, convincing, it left the British government no excuse for its conduct; but, not without reason, John Randolph objected that as an argument it was but a shilling pamphlet against eight hundred British ships of war. That Pitt could occasionally be convinced of his mistakes was certain; but no reasoners except Napoleon and Moreau had ever effectually convinced him.

Meanwhile the President prepared his Message. Of all Jefferson’s writings none had a livelier interest than the Annual Message at the meeting of the Ninth Congress. The Second Inaugural, nine months before, prepared the public for new political opinions; but the Message surprised even those who looked for surprises. The Second Inaugural seemed to sweep old Republican principles to the common rubbish-heap of out-worn political toys. The Message went even further, and seemed to announce that the theory of foreign affairs on which the Republican Administration began its career must be abandoned. Jefferson intended it to carry such a meaning.

“The love of peace,” he wrote to one of his old friends,[93] “which we sincerely feel and profess, has begun to produce an opinion in Europe that our government is entirely in Quaker principles, and will turn the left cheek when the right has been smitten. This opinion must be corrected when just occasion arises, or we shall become the plunder of all nations. The moral duties make no part of the political system of those governments of Europe which are habitually belligerent.”

The Message began by an allusion to the yellow fever; from which it quickly turned to discuss the greater scourge of war:—

“Since our last meeting the aspect of our foreign relations has considerably changed. Our coasts have been infested and our harbors watched by private armed vessels; some of them without commissions, some with illegal commissions, others with those of legal form, but committing piratical acts beyond the authority of their commissions.... The same system of hovering on our coasts and harbors, under color of seeking enemies, has been also carried on by public armed ships, to the great annoyance and oppression of our commerce. New principles, too, have been interpolated into the law of nations, founded neither in justice nor the usage or acknowledgment of nations.... With Spain our negotiations for a settlement of differences have not had a satisfactory issue.... Propositions for adjusting amicably the boundaries of Louisiana have not been acceded to.... Inroads have recently been made into the territories of Orleans and the Mississippi; our citizens have been seized and their property plundered in the very parts of the former which had actually been delivered up by Spain, and this by the regular officers and soldiers of that government. I have therefore found it necessary at length to give orders to our troops on that frontier to be in readiness to protect our citizens and to repel by arms any similar aggressions in future. Other details necessary for your full information of the state of things between this country and that shall be the subject of another communication. In reviewing these injuries from some of the belligerent Powers, the moderation, the firmness, and the wisdom of the Legislature will all be called into action. We ought still to hope that time, and a more correct estimate of interest as well as of character, will produce the justice we are bound to expect; but should any nation deceive itself by false calculations, and disappoint that expectation, we must join in the unprofitable contest of trying which party can do the other the most harm. Some of these injuries may perhaps admit a peaceable remedy. Where that is competent it is always the most desirable. But some of them are of a nature to be met by force only, and all of them may lead to it.”

From this preamble the public would naturally infer that measures of force were to be the object of the special message promised in regard to Spanish aggressions. As though to leave no doubt on the subject, the President urged the fortification of seaports, the building of gunboats, the organization of militia, the prohibition of the export of arms and ammunition; and added that the materials for building ships of the line were on hand.

All this formality of belligerent language was little better than comedy. Jefferson could hardly be charged with a wish to deceive, since he could not wear the mask of deception. Both friends and enemies were amused to see how naturally he betrayed objects which his plan required should be concealed. In the first draft of the Message, sent for correction to Gallatin, the financial prospect was as pacific as the diplomatic was warlike; the Message not only announced a surplus for the coming year, but suggested the reduction of taxes. Gallatin pointed out that the English seizures alone would affect the revenue, and any measure of retaliation would still further diminish it; while the navy had increased its estimates from six hundred and fifty thousand dollars to one million and seventy thousand dollars. As for the hint at a reduction of taxes, Gallatin at once struck it out.[94] “As it relates to foreign nations, it will certainly destroy the effect intended by other parts of the Message. They never can think us serious in any intentions to resist, if we recommend at the same time a diminution of our resources.” The President made these corrections, and returned the draft for revisal, with a note:[95]—

“On reviewing what had been prepared as to Great Britain and Spain, I found it too soft toward the former compared with the latter, and that so temperate a notice of the greater enormity of British invasions of right might lessen the effect which the strong language toward Spain was meant to produce at the Tuileries. I have therefore given more force to the strictures on Britain.”

In studying “the effect which the strong language toward Spain was meant to produce at the Tuileries,” Jefferson had in mind the effect which his strong language produced at the Tuileries in 1803. He played a game of finesse hardly safe in the face of men like Godoy, Talleyrand, and Napoleon, whose finesse was chiefly used to cover force, and was not betrayed or derided by factious opposition in the press. Besides being unsafe, it was unfair to himself. Jefferson was an honest man, and in putting on the outward appearance of a Talleyrand, he resembled an amateur imitating Talma and Garrick. Gestures and tones alike were unnatural, awkward, and false; they exposed him to ridicule. If President Jefferson had taken the public into his confidence, he would have told the people that under no circumstances would he consent to war; but that if the great Powers of Europe combined to injure America, she would close her ports, abandon her commerce, shut herself within her own continent, and let the world outside murder and rob elsewhere. Such an avowal implied no disgrace; the policy it proclaimed was the alternative to war; and as the radical doctrine of the Republican party, the course was not only that which Jefferson meant to take, but it was that which he took. The avowal might have invited aggression, and have been followed by failure; but he would have done better to fail on a direct issue of principle, than to fail after evading the issue until the issue itself was lost.

To carry out his scheme, the President put forward two policies,—a public and a secret; or, as he called it, an ostensible and a real one. The warlike recommendations of the Annual Message were the public and ostensible policy; the real one was to be expressed in a secret message, announced in advance. To this coming message the President next turned his attention; but he found himself quickly involved in complications of his own creating. He had not only to recommend a double series of measures to Congress, but he had to frame a double series of replies which Congress was to return to him. He tried at first to combine the two answers in one. After writing a secret message asking for money to buy Florida, he drafted a series of Resolutions[96] which Congress was to adopt in reply to both messages at once, and in which “the citizens of the United States, by their Senate and Representatives in Congress assembled, do pledge their lives and fortunes” to maintain the line of the Sabine and the free navigation of the Mobile, pending negotiations, while the President should be authorized to take whatever unappropriated moneys might lie in the Treasury in order to carry these Resolutions into effect.

Clearly this would not do; and Gallatin undertook to set the matter right.

“The apparent difficulty in framing the Resolutions,” he wrote to the President,[97] “arises from the attempt to blend the three objects together. The same reasons which have induced the President to send two distinct messages render it necessary that the public Resolutions of Congress should be distinct from the private ones; that those which relate to the war posture of the Spanish affairs, which are intended to express the national sense on that subject, and to enable the President to take the steps which appear immediately necessary on the frontier, should not be mixed with those proceedings calculated only to effect an accommodation.”

The Secretary of the Treasury frequently corrected his chief, and still more frequently hinted a correction. Only a few days had passed since Jefferson had spoken to Gallatin of the “strong language toward Spain” as “meant to produce an effect at the Tuileries.” Gallatin ignored this object, and spoke of the strong language toward Spain as intended to express the national sense, and as restricted in its bearing to the steps immediately necessary for protecting the frontier. The difference was worth noting. Evidently Gallatin felt no great confidence in producing an effect on the Tuileries.

“The course now recommended,” he continued, “is precisely that which was followed in the Louisiana business when the deposit was withdrawn. A public Resolution ... was moved by Randolph, and adopted by the House. A committee in the mean while brought in a confidential report sufficient to support and justify the President in the purchase he was going to attempt, and to this an appropriation law in very general terms was added. To follow a similar course appears not only best, but will also, as founded on precedent, be the smoothest mode of doing the business in Congress.”

The President adopted Gallatin’s suggestions.[98] The double messages breathing war and peace were prepared. The double answers were sketched out. Congress had only to act with the same quickness and secrecy which it had shown in the Louisiana business; and of its readiness to do so, no one in the Cabinet seemed to doubt.

Yet nations could not so readily as individuals swing about on a course opposite to that which they had been led to expect. The American public had been wrought to anger against Spain. Of the negotiations little was publicly known. Monroe had come, and gone; the Marquis Yrujo had remonstrated, and had written in newspapers; but the rights and wrongs of the Spanish dispute remained a mystery to the public at large, which knew only that Spain had rejected all the offers made by the United States, had resumed her depredations on American commerce, and had taken a menacing attitude at Mobile and on the Sabine. Throughout the year the Republican press had followed hints from the Government at Washington, all looking toward a rupture with Spain. The same newspapers had shown at first a wish to make light of the late British seizures,—a course which misled the Federalist press into denunciations of England such as would never have been risked had the party in power not seemed disposed to apologize for England’s conduct. The country at large was prepared to hear the President advise a rupture with Spain, and upon that rupture to found his hope of success in negotiating with Pitt. The warlike tone of the Annual Message was certain to give additional strength to this expectation; and Jefferson might have foreseen that the sudden secret change of tone to be taken immediately afterward in the special message on Spanish affairs would produce bewilderment among his followers.

No one could doubt where the confusion would first appear. The last session had ended in a series of quarrels, in which party distinctions had been almost forgotten. The summer had done nothing to reunite the factions; on the contrary, it had done much to widen the breach. Already the “Aurora” announced that the Yazoo question was to determine “the relations, the principles, the characters, and the strength of parties in the next session of Congress;” and the public knew that the Yazoo question had passed beyond the stage of rational argument, and had become the test of personal devotion, the stepping-stone to favor or proscription with the next President. Three years before the election of 1808 Congress was already torn by a Virginia feud,—a struggle for power between John Randolph and James Madison.

As though to hurry and prolong this struggle, Jefferson announced, after his second inauguration, that he should retire at the close of his term, March 4, 1809. Without expressly recommending Madison as his successor, his strong personal attachment insured to the Secretary of State the whole weight of Executive influence. The whole weight was needed. The secretary, with all his amiable qualities, was very far from controlling the voice of Virginia. His strength lay rather among the Northern democrats, semi-Federalists, or “Yazoo men,” as they were called, who leaned toward him because he, of all the prominent Virginians, was least Virginian. His diplomatic triumph in buying Louisiana had given him an easy advantage over his rivals; but even his reputation might sink with the failure of the Spanish treaty and the aggression of England.

No one who knew the men, or who had followed the course of President Jefferson’s first Administration, could feel surprise that Madison’s character should act on John Randolph as an irritant. Madison was cautious, if not timid; Randolph was always in extremes. Madison was apt to be on both sides of the same question, as when he wrote the “Federalist” and the Virginia Resolutions of 1798; Randolph pardoned dalliance with Federalism in no one but himself. Madison was in person small, retiring, modest, with quiet malice in his humor, and with marked taste for closet politics and delicate management; Randolph was tall in stature, abrupt in manner, self-asserting in temper, sarcastic, with a pronounced taste for publicity, and a vehement contempt for those silent influences which more practical politicians called legitimate and necessary, but which Randolph, when he could not control them, called corrupt. Jefferson soon remarked, in regard to what Randolph denounced as back-stairs influence, “We never heard this while the declaimer was himself a back-stairs man.”[99] Just as the criticism was, no one could deny that Randolph seemed much out of place on the back-stairs of the White House, whereas Madison seemed to him in place nowhere else. The Spanish papers, which Randolph must read, were not likely to increase his respect for the Secretary of State; while Madison’s candidacy made a counter-movement necessary for those Virginians who would not be dragged at the heels of the Northern democracy.

Long before the month of December Randolph foresaw the coming trouble. The Yazoo men in the Ninth Congress were more numerous than ever; and they were credited with the wish to eject Speaker Macon from the chair, and to put some Northern democrat in Randolph’s place at the head of the Committee of Ways and Means. Oct. 25, 1805, Randolph wrote to Gallatin from Bizarre:—

“I look forward to the ensuing session of Congress with no very pleasant feelings. To say nothing of the disadvantages of the place, natural as well as acquired, I anticipate a plentiful harvest of bickering and blunders; of which, however, I hope to be a quiet, if not an unconcerned, spectator.... I regret exceedingly Mr. Jefferson’s resolution to retire, and almost as much the premature annunciation of that determination. It almost precludes a revision of his purpose, to say nothing of the intrigues which it will set on foot. If I were sure that Monroe would succeed him, my regret would be very much diminished.”[100]

Intrigue and dissension could not be confined to the House, but must spread to the Senate, and could hardly fail to affect even the Cabinet. While Gallatin’s personal sympathies were with Madison, his political bias was on the opposite side. The old Republicans, with John Randolph at their head, had steadily protected the Treasury from jobs and extravagance; without their help Gallatin would lie at the mercy of the Northern democrats, who were not behind the Federalists in their willingness to spend money. He might expect an alliance between the Northern democrats and the Smith faction which controlled the Navy Department. To such a combination he must have foreseen that Madison would yield.

In the face of such latent feuds nothing could be more hazardous than to spring upon Congress, in Madison’s interests, a new, tortuous, complicated Spanish policy, turning on the secret assurance that France could be bribed with five million dollars, at the moment when Congress would be required to begin a commercial war upon England. Whether Madison was responsible for these measures or not, his enemies would charge him with the responsibility; and even without such attacks from his own party, he was struggling with enemies enough to have crushed Jefferson himself.

Early in December, all the actors in the drama assembled, to play another act in a tragi-comedy of increasing interest. With his old sanguine hopes, but not with all his old self-confidence, the President watched them slowly arrive,—Democrats, Federalists, Southern Republicans, all equally ignorant of what had been done, and what they were expected to do; but more curious, better-informed, and more sharp-sighted than these, the three diplomatists, Turreau, Merry, and Yrujo, waiting with undisguised contempt to see what species of coercion was to be employed against England, France, and Spain.

To impose on hostile forces and interests the compulsion of a single will was the task and triumph of the true politician, which had been accomplished, under difficult conditions, by men of opposite characters. A political leader might be combative and despotic, or pliant and conciliatory. The method mattered little, provided it obtained success,—but success depended more on character than on manœuvres. In the winter of 1805–1806 President Jefferson dealt with a problem such as few Americans have been required to solve. Other Presidents have met with violent opposition both within and without the ranks of their party; but no other President has been obliged to face a hostile minority, together with violent factiousness in the majority, and at the same time a spirit of aggression showing itself in acts of war from three of the greatest Powers of Europe. By what resources of skill or character President Jefferson was to restrain this disorder from becoming chaos, only a prophet could foretell. If ever the Federalist “crisis” seemed close at hand, it was in December, 1805. Some energetic impulse could alone save the country from drifting into faction at home and violence abroad.

All might go well if England, France, and Spain could be obliged to respect law. To restrain these three governments was Jefferson’s most urgent need. The three envoys waited to see what act of energy he would devise to break through the net which had been drawn about him. Turreau enjoyed most of his confidence; and soon after the meeting of Congress, at the time when Jefferson was publicly using “strong language toward Spain,” meant to produce an effect at the Tuileries, Turreau wrote interesting accounts of his private conversation for the guidance of Talleyrand and Napoleon;[101]—

“One may perhaps draw some inferences in regard to the true sense of the Message from some words which escaped the President in a private conversation with me. ‘I see with pain,’ he said, ‘that our people have a tendency toward commerce which no other kind of interest will be able to balance; we should be essentially agricultural, and yet agriculture will never be more than a secondary interest here.’... In a preceding interview the President invited me to a discussion of Spanish affairs.... After some complaints about Spanish privateers, and the protection which Spain granted to ours in particular, Mr. Jefferson expanded on the griefs of the Americans in regard to some excursions of Spanish patrols beyond the limits provisionally established, and, in consequence, within the territory of Louisiana. I replied that doubtless the Spanish government had not authorized these steps, and that the mistakes of a few subalterns could not produce serious differences between the two Powers. ‘That is true; but,’ he added, ‘these Spaniards are so stupid (bêtes), their government so detested,’ etc. It was not easy to contradict him on this point. As for the English, his complaints and reproaches have been much more serious. He has assured me that they have taken five hundred American ships; that they could not have done more harm had they been at war with America; yet that England would in vain try, as against the Americans, to destroy neutral rights. ‘In that respect,’ added Mr. Jefferson, ‘we have principles from which we shall never depart; our people have commerce everywhere, and everywhere our neutrality should be respected. On the other hand, we do not want war,—and all this is very embarrassing.’”

Turreau’s comment on these words may have affected the policy of Napoleon, as it must certainly have had weight with Talleyrand:—

“If your Excellency was not already acquainted with the man and his government, this last phrase would be enough to enable you to judge the one and the other.”

CHAPTER VI.

The Ninth Congress met Dec. 2, 1805. During no period of eight years did Congress contain a smaller number of remarkable members than during the two administrations of Jefferson, from 1801 to 1809; and if the few Federalists in opposition were left out of view, the American people had in the Ninth Congress hardly a single representative, except John Randolph, capable of controlling any vote but his own. In the Senate, when George Clinton took his seat as Vice-President, he saw before him, among the thirty-four senators, not less than twenty-seven who belonged to his own party; yet among these twenty-seven Republican members of the Senate was not one whose name lived. Senator Bradley of Vermont exercised a certain influence in his day, like Dr. Mitchill of New York, or Samuel Smith of Maryland, or William B. Giles of Virginia, or Abraham Baldwin and James Jackson of Georgia. These were the leaders of the Senate, but they were men whose influence was due more to their office than to their genius; the Government gave them more weight than they could give back to it. Breckenridge of Kentucky had become attorney-general, and his seat was filled by John Adair. In the whole Senate not a Republican member could be found competent to defend a difficult financial or diplomatic measure as Gallatin or Madison could have done it, or would have wished it to be done.

In the House the Administration could count upon equally little aid. Setting aside John Randolph and Joseph Nicholson, who were more dangerous than any Federalist of New England to Government, the huge Republican majority contained no man of note. Its poverty was startling. Gallatin clung to Randolph as the only member of the House competent to conduct the public business; and no small part of Randolph’s arrogance toward his own followers was due to his sense of intellectual superiority, and to the constant proof that they could do no business without his aid. Randolph was rarely arrogant in the face of men whose abilities were superior to his own, or whose will was stronger; he domineered over those whom he thought his inferiors, but he liked no contest in which he saw an uncertain hope of victory. In the Ninth Congress he met no rival in his own party. Massachusetts sent a new member, from whose oratory much was expected,—a certain Barnabas Bidwell; “but as a popular speaker he never can stand as the rival of John Randolph,” was the comment of a Massachusetts senator on listening to him in the House.[102] New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were represented by an almost solid mass of Democrats, without a single leader. Virginia and the other Southern States sent many men of excellent character and of the best social position to Washington, but not one who made a national name or who tried to master the details of public business. Perhaps the ablest new member was Josiah Quincy of Boston, whose positive temper, marked abilities, and vehement Federalism made him troublesome to the majority rather than useful in legislation.

When the House met, it proceeded at once to the election of a Speaker; and the old feuds of the last session broke out again. Fifty-four votes were required to elect; and on the first ballot Macon had but fifty-one. Twenty-seven Republicans voted for Joseph B. Varnum of Massachusetts, besides others who threw away their votes on candidates from Virginia and Pennsylvania. Only at the third ballot did Macon get a majority, and even then he received but fifty-eight votes, while the full strength of his party was more than one hundred. His first act was to reappoint Randolph and Nicholson on the Ways and Means Committee, where a place was also given to Josiah Quincy.

The President’s Message was read December 3, and produced the effect to be expected. The country received it with applause as a proof of vigor. In Baltimore, and along the seaboard, it was regarded as equivalent to a declaration of war against Spain; it stopped trade, raised insurance, and encouraged piracy. The Federalist press throughout the country, except the “Evening Post,” affected to admire and praise it. “Federalism revived!” said the bitter “Washington Federalist;” “dignified, firm, and spirited.” “This day we have been astonished,” wrote a correspondent to the “Boston Centinel;”[103] “the President’s speech is, in principle, almost wholly on the Washington and Adams system. It has puzzled the Federalists and offended many of the Democrats. It is in perfect nonconformity to all the former professions of the party.” The Federalists exaggerated their applause in order to irritate John Randolph and his friends, who could not fail to see that the Message strengthened Madison at the expense of the old Republicans. Jefferson’s private language was not less energetic than his public message. Among the favorite ideas which the President urged was that of claiming for America the ocean as far as the Gulf Stream, and forbidding hostilities within the line of deep-sea soundings.[104] One of the Massachusetts senators to whom he argued this doctrine inquired whether it might not be well, before assuming a claim so broad, to wait for a time when the Government should have a force to maintain it. The President replied by insisting that the Government, “should squint at it;”[105] and he lost no chance of doing so. He assured his friends that no privateer would ever again be permitted to cruise within the Gulf Stream.[106]

Such an attitude, public and private, roused much interest. Congress waited anxiously for the promised special message on Spanish affairs, and did not wait long. December 6, only three days after the Annual Message was sent in, the special and secret message followed; the House closed its doors, and the members listened eagerly to a communication which they expected to be, what it actually was, a turning-point in their politics.

The Message[107] very briefly narrated the story of the unratified claims convention, ending in Monroe’s diplomatic misfortunes, and announced that the Spaniards showed every intention of advancing from Texas, until they should be repressed by force.

“Considering that Congress alone is constitutionally invested with the power of changing our condition from peace to war, I have thought it my duty to await their authority for using force in any degree which could be avoided. I have barely instructed the officers stationed in the neighborhood of the aggressions to protect our citizens from violence, to patrol within the borders actually delivered to us, and not to go out of them but when necessary to repel an inroad or to rescue a citizen or his property.”

Passing next to the conduct of Napoleon, the Message mentioned the decided part taken by France against the United States on every point of the Spanish dispute,—

“her silence as to the Western boundary leaving us to infer her opinion might be against Spain in that quarter. Whatever direction she might mean to give to these differences, it does not appear that she has contemplated their proceeding to actual rupture, or that at the date of our last advices from Paris her Government had any suspicion of the hostile attitude Spain had taken here. On the contrary, we have reason to believe that she was disposed to effect a settlement on a plan analogous to what our ministers had proposed, and so comprehensive as to remove as far as possible the grounds of future collision and controversy on the eastern as well as western side of the Mississippi. The present crisis in Europe is favorable for pressing such a settlement, and not a moment should be lost in availing ourselves of it. Should it pass unimproved, our situation would become much more difficult. Formal war is not necessary, it is not probable it will follow; but the protection of our citizens, the spirit and honor of our country, require that force should be interposed to a certain degree. It will probably contribute to advance the object of peace. But the course to be pursued will require the command of means which it belongs to Congress exclusively to yield or to deny. To them I communicate every fact material for their information, and the documents necessary to enable them to judge for themselves. To their wisdom, then, I look for the course I am to pursue, and will pursue with sincere zeal that which they shall approve.”

After the reading of this Message the House was more perplexed than ever. The few Federalists sneered. The warlike tone of the Annual Message, contradicting their theory of Jefferson’s character, had already ended, as they believed, in surrender. John Randolph was angry. He felt that the President had assumed, for Madison’s political profit, the tone of public bravado toward England and Spain, while Congress was required to overrule Madison’s bold policy and to impose on the country what would seem a crouching cowardice of its own. The Message was at once referred to a special committee of seven members, with Randolph at its head, his friend Nicholson second in the number, John Cotton Smith, a vigorous Federalist, coming third; while, whether the Speaker intended it or not, the only person in the committee on whom the President could depend for useful service was Barnabas Bidwell, the new member from Massachusetts. Bidwell’s conversion from Federalism was but recent, and neither his Federalism nor his democracy was of a kind that Randolph loved.

To this point the Louisiana precedent was closely followed, and Randolph seemed to have no excuse for refusing to do in 1805 what he had done in 1802; yet nothing could be surer than that the Randolph of 1805 was a very different man from the Randolph of three years before, as the Republican party of 1805 widely differed from the party which first elected Jefferson to the Presidency. No double-dealing, hesitation, or concealment was charged against Randolph. According to his own story, he called upon the President immediately, and learned, not without some surprise, that an appropriation of two millions was wanted to purchase Florida. He told the President without reserve “that he would never agree to such a measure, because the money had not been asked for in the Message; that he could not consent to shift upon his own shoulders or those of the House the proper responsibility of the Executive; but that even if the money had been explicitly demanded, he should have been averse to granting it, because, after the total failure of every attempt at negotiation, such a step would disgrace us forever,”—with much more to the same effect, which was mildly combated by Jefferson.[108]

The next day, December 7, the committee met, and Randolph, as he probably expected, found that Bidwell alone intended to support the Administration. Bidwell did not venture to act as the direct mouthpiece of the President, but undertook on his own authority to construe the Message as a demand for money, and proposed a grant to that effect. The rest of the committee gravely followed Randolph in professing to find no such meaning in the Message; Bidwell’s motion had no supporter, and was promptly overruled. Jefferson’s labored Resolutions, which Nicholson carried in his pocket for the committee to adopt, were suppressed; Nicholson returned them the next day to Gallatin, with a brief expression of his own decided disapproval.[109]

The committee separated, not to meet again for a fortnight; but during the following week Randolph had several interviews with the President and Secretary of State. Madison told him “that France would not permit Spain to adjust her differences with us; that France wanted money, and that we must give it to her, or have a Spanish and French war.”[110] If Madison said this he told the truth. Randolph made an unfair use of the confidential words; for he proclaimed them as his excuse for declaring a public and personal war on the Secretary of State, which he waged thenceforward in a temper and by means so revolting as in the end to throw the sympathies of every unprejudiced man on the side of his victim.

“From the moment I heard that declaration,” said Randolph afterward, “all the objections I originally had to the procedure were aggravated to the highest possible degree. I considered it a base prostration of the national character to excite one nation by money to bully another nation out of its property; and from that moment, and to the last moment of my life, my confidence in the principles of the man entertaining those sentiments died, never to live again.”

These words would have carried more conviction had Randolph’s quarrel with Madison not been of much older date. In truth he wanted a means to break down the secretary’s chance of election as President, and he thought to find it here. As he said openly in Congress and in the press, “his confidence in the Secretary of State had never been very high, but now it was gone forever.”[111]

The serious charge against Madison was one which Madison alone could reveal. Down to October 23 he had held Randolph’s view and had protested against turning the Spanish negotiation into a French job. He could hardly blame Randolph for adhering to an opinion which had been held by President and Cabinet until within a few weeks, when they had abandoned it without explanation or excuse.

Stubbornly refusing to act, Randolph, December 14, mounted his horse and rode to Baltimore, leaving the President for the moment helpless. Every hour’s delay shook party discipline, and imperilled Armstrong’s success. The President appealed to Nicholson; but Nicholson also disliked the intended policy, and could be persuaded to use his influence only so far as would enable the committee to act, with the understanding that its action would be adverse to the President’s wishes. Although the situation was still secret, it threatened to become scandalous, and soon became so altogether.

December 21 Randolph returned. As he dismounted at the Capitol, he was received by Nicholson, who told him of the irritation which his delay had caused. The committee was instantly called together. As Randolph went to the committee-room he was met by Gallatin, who put into his hands a paper headed, “Provision for the purchase of Florida.” Although Gallatin’s relations with Randolph were friendly, they did not save the Secretary of the Treasury from a sharp rebuff. Randolph broke out roughly; he would not vote a shilling for the purchase of Florida; the President should not be allowed to throw upon Congress the odium “of delivering the public purse to the first cut-throat that demanded it;” on the record the Executive would appear as recommending manly and vigorous measures, while Congress would appear as having forced him to abandon them, when in fact it was acting all the while at Executive instigation; “I do not understand this double set of opinions and principles,—the one ostensible, the other real: I hold true wisdom and cunning to be utterly incompatible.” With this sweeping censure of President, Cabinet, and party, Randolph turned his back on Gallatin and walked to the committee-room. There he had no trouble in carrying matters with a high hand. Instead of recommending an appropriation, the committee instructed Randolph to write to the Secretary of War asking his opinion what force was needed to protect the Southern frontier.

Christmas was then at hand, and not a step had yet been taken. Unless the spirit of faction could be crushed, not only was the fate of Madison sealed, but the career of Jefferson himself must end in failure. Nothing could be done with Randolph, who in a final interview at the White House, flatly declared “that he too had a character to support and principles to maintain,” and avowed his determined opposition to the whole scheme of buying Florida of France. Jefferson, little as he liked to quarrel, accepted the challenge. Negotiations then ceased, and a party schism began.

If Randolph could not be overcome in debate, he might at least be overborne by numbers; if the best part of the old Republican party went with him, the rank and file of Northern and Western democrats would remain to support the Administration. Once more the committee was called together. Bidwell moved to appropriate two millions for foreign relations; the majority rejected his motion and adopted a report echoing the warlike tone of the President’s public message, and closing with a Resolution to raise troops for the defence of the Southern frontier “from Spanish inroad and insult, and to chastise the same.” This report was laid before the House by Randolph Jan. 3, 1806, when two additional Resolutions were immediately moved,—one appropriating money for extraordinary expenses in foreign intercourse, the other continuing the Mediterranean Fund for a new term of years; and the three Resolutions were referred to the House in Committee of the Whole, with closed doors.

Monday, Jan. 6, 1806, the debate began; and throughout the following week the House sat in secret session, while Randolph strained every nerve to break the phalanx of democrats which threatened to overwhelm him. Perpetually on the floor, he declaimed against the proposed negotiation at Paris; while Nicholson, unwillingly consenting to vote for the two millions, said openly that he hoped in God the negotiation would fail. When at length a vote could be reached, the Administration carried its point,—seventy-two members supporting the President, against a minority of fifty-eight; but in this minority was included no small number of the most respectable Republicans. Twelve of the twenty-two Virginia members broke away from the President; and for the first time in a struggle vital to Jefferson’s credit, more than half the majority consisted of Northern men.

The House having recovered control of the matter, thrust Randolph aside, rapidly passed a Bill appropriating two million dollars for extraordinary expenses in foreign relations, and Jan. 16, 1806, sent it to the Senate by a vote of seventy-six to fifty-four. It was accompanied by a secret message explaining that the money was intended for the purchase of Spanish territory east of the Mississippi. The Senate closed its doors, and with the least possible debate, Feb. 7, 1806, passed the bill, which, February 13, received the President’s approval. Not until March 13,[112] six months after Armstrong’s despatch had been written, did Madison at length send to Paris a public authority for Armstrong to offer France five million dollars for Florida and Texas to the Colorado,—an authority which should have been secret and prompt, to be worth sending at all.

Jefferson carried his point; he won a victory over Randolph, and silenced open resistance within the party; but his success was gained at a cost hitherto unknown in his experience. The men who were most obedient in public to his will growled in private almost as fiercely as Randolph himself. Senator Bradley made no secret of his disgust. Senator Anderson of Tennessee frankly said that he wished the Devil had the Bill; that the opposition did not half know how bad it was; that it was the most pernicious measure Jefferson had ever taken; “but so it was, so he would have it, and so it must be!”[113] Three Republican Senators—Bradley, Logan, and Mitchill—absented themselves at the final vote; four more—Adair, Gilman, Stone, and Sumter—voted against the Bill, which on its third reading obtained only seventeen voices in its favor against eleven in opposition. Worse than this, the malcontents felt that for the first time in the history of their party the whip of Executive power had been snapped over their heads; and, worst of all, the New England Federalists took for granted that Jefferson had become a creature of Napoleon. Of all political ideas that could gain a lodgment in the public mind, this last was the most fatal!

That either Jefferson or Madison was led by French sympathies has been shown to be untrue. Both of them submitted to the violence of all the belligerents alike, and their eagerness for Florida caused them by turns to flatter and to threaten Spain, France, and England; but not even for the sake of Florida would they have taken either a direct or an indirect part with France. Their unwillingness to offend Napoleon rose not from sympathy with him, but from the conviction that he alone could give Florida to the United States without the expense and losses inevitable in a war. Unhappily the public knew little of what President Jefferson had done or was doing; and another piece of legislation, carried through Congress at the same moment with the “Two-million Act,” went far to fix the Federalists in their belief that the Administration obeyed the beck and call of the French Emperor.

The Annual Message made no allusion to St. Domingo; no public announcement had been given that the Executive wished for further legislation in regard to its trade, when, Dec. 18, 1805, Senator Logan of Pennsylvania brought forward a Bill to prohibit the trade altogether. That he acted without concert with Madison was not to be conceived. Logan privately admitted as his only object the wish of enabling Madison to tell the French government that the trade was forbidden, and that the merchants who carried it on did so at their own peril.[114] The Federalist senators opposed the Bill, and were joined by several Republicans. General Smith and Dr. Mitchill spoke against it. The opposition showed that the measure would sacrifice several hundred thousand dollars of revenue; that it would close the last opening which the new British policy left for American commerce with the West Indies; that it would throw the commerce with St. Domingo wholly into British hands; that it was an attempt to carry out French objects by American legislation, which would endanger the property and lives of American citizens in the island; and finally, that it was done in obedience to Napoleon’s orders. December 27 the Senate called for the diplomatic correspondence on the subject, and the President communicated the extraordinary notes in which Talleyrand and Turreau declared that the commerce “must” not continue. The Senate received this mandate without protest or remonstrance; and after a long debate passed the Bill, Feb. 20, 1806, by a party vote of twenty-one to eight. Of the twenty-seven Republican senators, Stone of North Carolina alone voted against it. Amid execrations against the Haytian negroes, the Bill was next forced through the House almost without debate, and Feb. 28, 1806, received the President’s signature.

This law,[115] limited to one year, declared that any American vessel “which shall be voluntarily carried, or shall be destined to proceed” to St. Domingo should be wholly forfeited, ship and cargo. Passed in consequence of Napoleon’s positive order, communicated by the President to Congress as though to overawe objection, the Act violated the principles of international law, sacrificed the interests of Northern commerce, strained the powers of the Constitution as formerly construed by the party of States-rights, and, taken in all its relations, might claim distinction among the most disgraceful statutes ever enacted by the United States government. Nevertheless, this measure, which bore on its face the birth-mark of Napoleonic features, did in fact owe its existence chiefly to a different parentage. In truth, the Southern States dreaded the rebel negroes of Hayti more than they feared Napoleon. Fear often made them blind to their own attitudes; in this instance it made them indifferent to the charge of servility to France. The opportunity to declare the negroes of Hayti enemies of the human race was too tempting to be rejected; and not only did the Southern Republicans eagerly seize it, but they persuaded their Northern allies to support them. John Randolph himself, though then wearying the House day after day with cries that Madison had sold the honor of the United States to France, never alluded to this act of subservience, which would have made any other Administration infamous, and quietly absented himself at the vote, that he might seem neither to obey Bonaparte’s mandate nor to oppose the Bill. Of the twenty-six voices against it, nearly all were Federalists; yet in this curious list, side by side with Josiah Quincy, Samuel Dana, and John Cotton Smith, stood the names of Jacob Crowninshield and Matthew Lyon, democrats of the deepest dye and objects of John Randolph’s bitterest sneers.

The “Two-million Act” and the Act forbidding commerce with St. Domingo were measures equally necessary for the success of the Florida purchase. Without conciliating Napoleon at St. Domingo, Jefferson could not expect his help at Paris. These measures, together with some appearance of military activity, completed the Executive scheme of foreign policy in regard to France and Spain; the more difficult task remained of dealing with England.

When the first news of Sir William Scott’s decision in the case of the “Essex” arrived in America, the merchants were indignant; and their anger steadily rose as the confiscation of American ships became more general, until at length, in December, 1805, Stephen’s pamphlet, “War in Disguise,” arrived, and was reprinted in the newspapers. By the close of the year 1805 no one could longer doubt that Great Britain had, so far as suited her purposes, declared war against the United States.

The issue was simple. The United States might make war in return, or submit. Any measure short of open hostilities had unquestionably been taken into Pitt’s account, and would produce no effect on his policy. War alone could move him from his purpose; but war would destroy American commerce and ruin Federalist resources, while any retaliation short of war would not only prove ineffective, but would injure the American merchants alone. Their dilemma was so unavoidable that they could not fail to be caught in it. George Cabot saw their danger from the first. Much against his will the merchants of Boston placed him upon a committee to draw a remonstrance to Congress against the British doctrine of neutral trade. “Our friend Cabot,” wrote Fisher Ames,[116] “is much, too much, mortified that he is one of them. He hates hypocrisy, and respects principles; and he dreads lest the popular feeling should impel the committee to deny what he believes to be true, or to ask for what he knows to be mischievous.” The Boston “Memorial,”[117] drawn by James Lloyd, was as cautious as popular feeling would tolerate, and asked no action from Government except the appointment of a special mission to strengthen the hands of Monroe at London; but Cabot signed it with extreme reluctance, and only with the understanding that it did not represent his personal views. The Philadelphia “Memorial” closed with stronger language, suggesting that war must be the result if Great Britain refused redress. The Baltimore “Memorial,” drawn by William Pinkney, spoke in strong tones, but offered no advice. Toward the middle of January, 1806, these memorials, together with others, were sent to Congress by the President, with a Message inviting the Legislature to take the matter in hand, but offering no opinion as to the proper course to pursue.[118]

The fears of George Cabot were quickly justified. He chiefly dreaded the theories of the Republican party, which in his opinion were more destructive to American commerce than the British doctrines themselves or the demands of James Stephen. Jefferson and Madison were bent on testing the theory of the first Inaugural Address,—that commerce was the handmaid of agriculture; but in the harshest application of the slave-code of South Carolina or Georgia such treatment as agriculture proposed to her handmaid would have been rejected as inhuman, for it was a slow torture.

The theory of peaceable coercion, on which Jefferson relied, had often been explained as a duel in which either side counted upon exhausting its opponent by injuring itself. As Madison once said of the British manufacturers: “There are three hundred thousand souls who live by our custom: let them be driven to poverty and despair, and what will be the consequence?” The question was more easily asked than answered, for in the actual condition of Europe economical laws were so violently disturbed that no man could venture to guess what fresh extravagance might result from new delirium; but while the three hundred thousand Englishmen were starving, three hundred thousand Americans would lose the profit on their crops, and would idly look at empty warehouses and rotting ships. English laborers had for many generations been obliged to submit to occasional suffering; Americans were untrained to submission. Granting that the Boston merchant, like the injured Brahmin, should seat himself at the door of the British offender, and slowly fast to death in order that his blood might stain the conscience of Pitt, he could not be certain that Pitt’s conscience would be stimulated by the sacrifice, for the conscience of British Tories as regarded the United States had been ever languid. Cabot saw no real alternative between submission to Great Britain and the entire sacrifice of American commerce. He preferred submission.

The subject in all its bearings quickly came before Congress. Jan. 15, 1806, the Senate referred to a special committee that part of the President’s Message which related to the British seizures. February 5, General Smith reported on behalf of the committee a series of Resolutions denouncing these seizures as an encroachment on national independence, and recommending the prohibition of British woollens, linens, silks, glass-wares, and a long list of other articles. On this Resolution the debate began, and soon waxed hot.

CHAPTER VII.

Nothing in Jefferson’s life was stranger to modern ideas of politics than the secrecy which as President he succeeded in preserving. For two months the people of the United States saw their representatives go day after day into secret session, but heard not a whisper of what passed in conclave. Angry as Randolph was, and eager as the Federalists were to make mischief, they revealed not even to the senators or the foreign ministers what was passing in the House; and the public at large, under their democratic government, knew no more than Frenchmen of their destinies of war and peace. Such a state of things was contrary to the best traditions of the Republican party: it could not last, but it could end only in explosion.

When the debate on Smith’s non-importation Resolutions began in the Senate February 12, the previous struggle which had taken place over the Spanish policy and the “Two-million Act” was still a secret; Randolph’s schism was unknown beyond the walls of the Capitol; the President’s scheme of buying West Florida from France after having, as he maintained, bought it once already, was kept, as he wished, untold. The world knew only that some mysterious business was afoot; and when Senator Samuel Smith’s attack on trade began, the public naturally supposed it to be in some way connected with the measures so long discussed in secret session.

The President’s attitude became more and more uneasy. Jefferson disliked and dreaded the point in dispute with England. The Spanish policy was his own creation, and he looked upon it with such regard as men commonly bestow upon unappreciated inventions,—he depended on its success to retrieve defeats elsewhere; but for the very reason that he exhausted his personal influence to carry the Spanish policy against opposition, he left British questions to Congress and his party. Where England was to be dealt with, Madison took the lead which Jefferson declined. For many years past Madison had been regarded as the representative of a policy of commercial restriction against Great Britain. To revive his influence, his speeches and resolutions of 1794[119] were reprinted in the “National Intelligencer” as a guide for Congress; his pamphlet against the British doctrines of neutral trade was made a political text-book; while his friends took the lead in denouncing England and in calling for retaliation. He himself lost no chance of pressing his views, even upon political opponents. “I had considerable conversation with Mr. Madison,” wrote one of them February 13, “on the subjects now most important to the public. His system of proceeding toward Great Britain is to establish permanent commercial distinctions between her and other nations,—a retaliating navigation act, and aggravated duties on articles imported from her.”[120] By his own choice, and in a manner almost defiant of failure, Madison’s political fortunes were united with the policy of coercing England through restrictions of trade.

At first much was said of an embargo. Senator Jackson of Georgia, Dec. 20, 1805, declared with his usual vehemence in favor of this measure. “Not a nation,” said he, “exists which has West Indian colonies but is more or less dependent on us, and cannot do without us; they must come to our terms, or starve. On with your embargo, and in nine months they must lie at your feet!” John Randolph, sure to oppose whatever Madison wished, also looked with favor on this course. “I would (if anything) have laid an embargo,” he said.[121] The embargo party at best was small, and became smaller when toward the close of December, 1805, news arrived that Admiral Nelson had fought a great naval battle, October 21, against the combined French and Spanish fleets, off Cape Trafalgar, ending in a victory so complete as to leave England supreme upon the ocean. The moral effect of Nelson’s triumph was great. Embargo was the last step before war, and few Americans cared to risk war with England under any circumstances; with harbors undefended and without an ally on the ocean, war was rashness which no one would face. Madison’s more gentle plan of partial restrictions in trade became the Republican policy.

Even before Senator Samuel Smith reported his Resolutions, February 5, to the Senate, the British minister Merry wrote to his Government that the members most opposed to commercial restrictions, despairing of effectual resistance, would endeavor only to limit the number of articles to be prohibited, and to postpone the date on which the law should take effect, in order to send a special mission to England and negotiate an amicable arrangement. Merry added that a special mission had been under discussion from the first:—

“But I now learn that it has been, and continues to be, opposed by the President, who wishes that Mr. Monroe ... should continue to carry on the negotiation alone. Matters, however, being now brought to a disagreeable crisis by the clamor of the nation and the instigation of the Administration, some of the members of the Senate are, I find, endeavoring to engage the rest of their body to join them in exercising their constitutional privilege of advising the President on the occasion; and that their advice to him will be to suspend any step that can have a hostile tendency until the experiment has been tried of an extraordinary mission.”[122]

Merry was exactly informed as to the fate of General Smith’s Resolutions even before they had been reported to the Senate. They were three in number; but only the third, which recommended non-importation, was drawn by Smith. The first and second, the work of Senator Adams of Massachusetts, were not wholly welcome either to the Administration or to the minority. The first declared the British seizures “an unprovoked aggression,” a “violation of neutral rights,” and an “encroachment upon national independence.” The second requested the President to “demand and insist upon” indemnity, and to make some arrangement about impressments. The first Resolution, although fatal to future Federalist consistency, was unanimously adopted by the Senate, February 12, almost without debate,—even Timothy Pickering recording his opinion that the British government had encroached upon national independence. The second Resolution was criticised as an attempt at dictation to the Executive, which would give just cause of offence to the President. By this argument the Senate was induced to strike out the words “and insist;” but although the Resolution, thus altered, was weak, seven Republican senators voted against it as too strong.

The reason of this halting movement had been explained by Merry to Lord Mulgrave nearly two weeks before. The Senate stumbled over the important personality of James Monroe. The next Presidential election, some three years distant, warped the national policy in regard to a foreign encroachment. Senator Samuel Smith, ambitious to distinguish himself in diplomacy, having failed to obtain the mission to Paris, wished the dignity of a special envoy to London, and was supported by Wilson Cary Nicholas. The friends of Madison were willing to depress Monroe, whom John Randolph was trying to elevate. Even Mrs. Madison, in the excitement of electioneering, allowed herself to talk in general society very slightingly of Monroe;[123] and there were reasons which made interference from Mrs. Madison peculiarly irritating to Monroe’s friends.[124] Dr. Logan, the senator from Pennsylvania, while helping Madison to satisfy Napoleon in regard to St. Domingo, was prominent in suggesting that it would be well to set Monroe gently aside.[125] This coalition of Madison, Smith, Logan, and Wilson Cary Nicholas was so strong as to control the Senate.

The second Resolution was adopted Feb. 14, 1806; and a week afterward, General Smith and Dr. Mitchill were appointed a committee to carry the two Resolutions to the White House. Two years later, in response to Monroe’s complaints, President Jefferson explained how these senators managed to impose on the Executive a policy of their own.

“After delivering the Resolutions,” said Jefferson[126] in an aggrieved tone, “the committee entered into free conversation, and observed that although the Senate could not in form recommend any extraordinary mission, yet that as individuals there was but one sentiment among them on the measure, and they pressed it. I was so much averse to it, and gave them so hard an answer, that they felt it and spoke of it. But it did not end here. The members of the other House took up the subject and set upon me individually, and these the best friends to you as well as myself, and represented the responsibility which a failure to obtain redress would throw on us both, pursuing a conduct in opposition to the opinion of nearly every member of the Legislature. I found it necessary at length to yield my own opinion to the general sense of the national council, and it really seemed to produce a jubilee among them.”

Jefferson saw his most devoted followers waver in their allegiance, and was reduced to temporize in order to avoid worse evils. General Smith in the Senate seemed interested in embarrassing him. If Smith could not be minister to England, he was bent upon becoming minister to France. Armstrong had challenged attack by his management of American claims before the French commission, and had written to the French government an indiscreet letter against a certain claim made by a firm of Nicklin & Griffith, of Philadelphia. When the President nominated him as special minister, with Bowdoin, to conduct the new Florida negotiation, a strong opposition appeared in the Senate, at the head of which was General Smith. March 17 the vote was taken; the Senate was equally divided, fifteen to fifteen, and Vice-President Clinton’s voice alone saved Armstrong from rejection. Had the Senate been left to follow out its own aims, the President’s authority might perhaps have been shaken, and a period of faction might have followed; but fortunately for the President and for the Secretary of State, among the enemies with whom they had to deal was one whose temper passed the bounds of common-sense.

Until the month of March, 1806, Randolph’s opposition was confined to Spanish affairs in secret session. The House was even slower than the Senate to take up the matter of British relations. Dec. 4, 1805, the subject was referred to the Committee of Ways and Means. Jan. 17, 1806, another message was sent to the same committee; but day after day passed without bringing a report from Randolph, until Smilie of Pennsylvania moved to discharge the Committee of Ways and Means in order to bring the subject before the House in Committee of the Whole. Randolph was ill and absent when the House, Jan. 29, 1806, decided to take the matter from his hands.

On the same day Andrew Gregg, a member from Pennsylvania, moved a Resolution forbidding the importation of all goods the growth or product or manufacture of Great Britain. Still the House left the subject without decision or discussion. February 10 Joseph Nicholson introduced another Resolution, which came probably from Gallatin. Gregg’s non importation measure would cost the Treasury five million dollars a year, and Gallatin preferred a less sweeping prohibition. Even Senator Smith’s scheme was too strong for Nicholson, who pointed out that coarse woollens, Jamaica rum, Birmingham hardware, and salt were necessities with which America could not supply herself, nor could any nation except England supply her. Nicholson’s Resolution prohibited only such British goods as might be replaced by other nations than England, or might be produced at home,—manufactures of leather, tin, brass, hemp, flax, silk; high-priced woollens; woollen hosiery; glass, silver, and plated ware, paper, pictures, prints,—a formidable list of articles, which if not, like Jamaica rum, necessary to America, were essentials to civilized existence.

Other Resolutions were introduced, but those of Gregg and Nicholson by common consent maintained pre-eminence; and between the policies marked by them as complete or partial non-importation Congress had to decide. Although the subject was before the House, the month of February passed without debate. Not until March 5, 1806, did Gregg call up his Resolution. In doing so, he made a speech studiously moderate. He seemed disinclined to defend the carrying-trade, and abstained from treating the British seizures as cause for war, but rather threw the weight of his argument on the manifest outrage of impressments; yet even this he treated as though it were a question of unfriendly fiscal regulation.

“I have no apprehension whatever of a war,” he said, “Great Britain is too well versed in the business of calculation, and too well acquainted with her own interest, to persevere in this lawless system at the hazard of losing customers whose annual purchases of her manufactures and other merchandise exceeds, I believe, thirty millions of dollars.”

Gregg would not endanger peace, but he would say to Great Britain,—

“in this mild and moderate, though manly and firm, language: ‘You have insulted the dignity of our country by impressing our seamen and compelling them to fight your battles against a Power with whom we are at peace; you have plundered us of much property by that predatory war which you authorize to be carried on against our commerce. To these injuries, insults, and oppression we will submit no longer.... If you persist in your hostile measures, if you absolutely refuse acceding to any propositions of compromise, we must slacken those bonds of friendship by which we have been connected. You must not expect hereafter to find us in your market purchasing your manufactures to so large an amount.’ This is their vulnerable part; by attacking them in their warehouses and workshops, we can reach their vitals.”