THE FIRST ADMINISTRATION
OF
JAMES MADISON
1809–1813

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

BY

HENRY ADAMS.

Vols. I. and II.—The First Administration of Jefferson. 1801–1805.

Vols. III. and IV.—The Second Administration of Jefferson. 1805–1809.

Vols. V. and VI.—The First Administration of Madison. 1809–1813.

Vols. VII., VIII., and IX.—The Second Administration of Madison. 1813–1817. With an Index to the Entire Work. (In Press.)

HISTORY
OF THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DURING THE FIRST ADMINISTRATION OF

JAMES MADISON

By HENRY ADAMS

Vol. V.

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1890

Copyright, 1890
By Charles Scribner’s Sons.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

CONTENTS OF VOL. V.

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

CHAPTER I.

The “National Intelligencer,” which called public attention only to such points of interest as the Government wished to accent, noticed that President Madison was “dressed in a full suit of cloth of American manufacture” when he appeared at noon, March 4, 1809, under escort of the “troops of cavalry of the city and Georgetown,” amid a crowd of ten thousand people, to take the oath of office at the Capitol. The suit of American clothes told more of Madison’s tendencies than was to be learned from the language of the Inaugural Address, which he delivered in a tone of voice so low as not to be heard by the large audience gathered in the new and imposing Representatives’ Hall.[1] Indeed, the Address suggested a doubt whether the new President wished to be understood. The conventionality of his thought nowhere betrayed itself more plainly than in this speech on the greatest occasion of Madison’s life, when he was required to explain the means by which he should retrieve the failures of Jefferson.

“It is a precious reflection,” said Madison to his anxious audience, “that the transition from this prosperous condition of our country to the scene which has for some time been distressing us, is not chargeable on any unwarrantable views, nor as I trust on any voluntary errors, in the public councils. Indulging no passions which trespass on the rights or the repose of other nations, it has been the true glory of the United States to cultivate peace by observing justice, and to entitle themselves to the respect of the nations at war by fulfilling their neutral obligations with the most scrupulous impartiality. If there be candor in the world, the truth of these assertions will not be questioned; posterity at least will do justice to them.”

Since none of Madison’s enemies, either abroad or at home, intended to show him candor, his only hope was in posterity; yet the judgment of posterity depended chiefly on the course which the new President might take to remedy the misfortunes of his predecessor. The nation expected from him some impulse toward the end he had in mind; foreign nations were also waiting to learn whether they should have to reckon with a new force in politics; but Madison seemed to show his contentment with the policy hitherto pursued, rather than his wish to change it.

“This unexceptionable course,” he continued, “could not avail against the injustice and violence of the belligerent Powers. In their rage against each other, or impelled by more direct motives, principles of retaliation have been introduced equally contrary to universal reason and acknowledged law. How long their arbitrary edicts will be continued, in spite of the demonstrations that not even a pretext for them has been given by the United States, and of the fair and liberal attempt to induce a revocation of them, cannot be anticipated. Assuring myself that under every vicissitude the determined spirit and united councils of the nation will be safeguards to its honor and essential interests, I repair to the post assigned me, with no other discouragement than what springs from my own inadequacy to its high duties.”

Neither the actual world nor posterity could find much in these expressions on which to approve or condemn the policy of Madison, for no policy could be deduced from them. The same iteration of commonplaces marked the list of general principles which filled the next paragraph of the Address. Balancing every suggestion of energy by a corresponding limitation of scope, Madison showed only a wish to remain within the limits defined by his predecessor. “To cherish peace and friendly intercourse with all nations having corresponding dispositions” seemed to imply possible recourse to war with other nations; but “to prefer in all cases amicable discussion and reasonable accommodation of differences to a decision of them by an appeal to arms” seemed to exclude the use of force. “To promote by authorized means improvements friendly to agriculture, to manufactures, and to external as well as internal commerce” was a phrase so cautiously framed that no one could attack it. “To support the Constitution, which is the cement of the Union, as well in its limitations as in its authorities,” seemed a duty so guarded as to need no further antithesis; yet Madison did not omit the usual obligation “to respect the rights and authorities reserved to the States and to the people, as equally incorporated with, and essential to, the success of the general system.” No one could object to the phrases with which the Address defined Executive duties; but no one could point out a syllable implying that Madison would bend his energies with sterner purpose to maintain the nation’s rights.

At the close of the speech Chief-Justice Marshall administered the oath; the new President then passed the militia in review, and in the evening Madison and Jefferson attended an inauguration ball, where “the crowd was excessive, the heat oppressive, and the entertainment bad.”[2] With this complaint, so familiar on the occasion, the day ended, and President Madison’s troubles began.

About March 1, Wilson Cary Nicholas had called on the President elect to warn him that he must look for serious opposition to the expected appointment of Gallatin as Secretary of State. Nicholas had the best reason to know that Giles, Samuel Smith, and Leib were bent on defeating Gallatin.

“I believed from what I heard he would be rejected,” wrote Nicholas two years afterward;[3] “and that at all events, if he was not, his confirmation would be by a bare majority. During my public service but one event had ever occurred that gave me as much uneasiness: I mean the degradation of the country at that very moment by the abandonment of [the embargo].”

The two events were in fact somewhat alike in character. That Gallatin should become Secretary of State seemed a point of little consequence, even though it were the only remaining chance for honorable peace; but that another secretary should be forced on the President by a faction in the Senate, for the selfish objects of men like Samuel Smith and Giles, foreboded revolution in the form of government. Nicholas saw chiefly the danger which threatened his friends; but the remoter peril to Executive independence promised worse evils than could be caused even by the overthrow of the party in power at a moment of foreign aggression.

The effort of Giles and Smith to control Madison had no excuse. Gallatin’s foreign birth, the only objection urged against him, warranted doubt, not indeed of his fitness, but of difficulty in obliging European powers to deal with a native of Geneva, who was in their eyes either a subject of their own or an enemy at war; but neither Napoleon nor King George in the year 1809 showed so much regard to American feelings that the United States needed to affect delicacy in respect to theirs; and Gallatin’s foreign birth became a signal advantage if it should force England to accept the fact, even though she refused to admit the law, of American naturalization. Gallatin’s fitness was undisputed, and the last men who could question it were Giles and Samuel Smith, who had been his friends for twenty years, had trusted their greatest party interests in his hands, had helped to put the Treasury under his control, and were at the moment keeping him at its head when they might remove him to the less responsible post of minister for foreign affairs. Any question of Gallatin’s patriotism suggested ideas even more delicate than those raised by doubts of his fitness. A party which had once trusted Burr and which still trusted Wilkinson, not to mention Giles himself, had little right to discuss Gallatin’s patriotism, or the honesty of foreign-born citizens. Even the mild-spoken Wilson Cary Nicholas almost lost his temper at this point. “I honestly believe,” he wrote in 1811, “if all our native citizens had as well discharged their duty to their country, that we should by our energy have extorted from both England and France a respect for our rights, and that before this day we should have extricated ourselves from all our embarrassments instead of having increased them.” The men who doubted Gallatin’s patriotism were for the most part themselves habitually factious, or actually dallying with ideas of treason.

Had any competent native American been pressed for the Department of State, the Senate might still have had some pretext for excluding Gallatin; but no such candidate could be suggested. Giles was alone in thinking himself the proper secretary; Samuel Smith probably stood in the same position; Monroe still sulked in opposition and discredit; Armstrong, never quite trusted, was in Paris; William Pinkney and J. Q. Adams were converts too recent for such lofty promotion; G. W. Campbell and W. H. Crawford had neither experience nor natural fitness for the post. The appointment of Gallatin not only seemed to be, but actually was, necessary to Madison’s Administration.

No argument affected the resistance of Giles and Samuel Smith, and during the early days of March Madison could see no means of avoiding a party schism. From that evil, at such a stage, he shrank. While the subject still stood unsettled, some unknown person suggested a new idea. If Robert Smith could be put in the Treasury, his brother Samuel would vote to confirm Gallatin as Secretary of State. The character of such a transaction needed no epithet; but Madison went to Robert Smith and offered him the Treasury.[4] He knew Smith to be incompetent, but he thought that with Gallatin’s aid even an incompetent person might manage the finances; and perhaps his astuteness went so far as to foresee what was to happen,—that he should deal with the Smiths on some better occasion in a more summary manner. Madison’s resemblance to a cardinal was not wholly imaginary.[5]

While Robert Smith went to inquire into the details of Treasury business before accepting the offered post, the President consulted with Gallatin, who rejected the scheme at once. He could not, he said, undertake the charge of both departments; the President would do better to appoint Robert Smith Secretary of State, and leave the Treasury as it was. Madison seized this outlet of escape. He returned to Robert Smith with the offer of the State Department, which Smith accepted. In making this arrangement Madison knew that he must himself supply Smith’s deficiencies; but stronger wills than that of Madison had yielded to party discontent, and he gained much if he gained only time.

The true victim of the bargain was Gallatin, who might wisely have chosen the moment for retiring from the Cabinet; but after declining an arrangement in his favor, he could not fairly desert the President, who had offered to sacrifice much for him, and he was too proud to avow a personal slight as the motive of his public action. Weakened already by the unexpected decline of his influence in the Senate, his usefulness was sure to be still further lessened by the charge of clinging to office; but after weighing the arguments for retirement he decided to remain,[6] although he could not, even if he would, forget that the quarrel which had been forced upon him must be met as vigorously as it was made.

The War and Navy Departments remained to be filled. Dearborn, who had continued in the War Department chiefly to oblige President Jefferson, retired in the month of February to become Collector of the port of Boston. As his successor, Madison selected William Eustis, of Boston, who had served in Congress during Jefferson’s first Administration. Eustis was about fifty-six years old; in the Revolutionary War he had filled the post of hospital surgeon, and since the peace he had practised his profession in Boston. Little could be said of the appointment, except that no other candidate was suggested who seemed better qualified for the place.[7]

To succeed Robert Smith at the Navy Department, Madison selected Paul Hamilton, of South Carolina. Nothing was known of Hamilton, except that he had been governor of his State some ten years before. No one seemed aware why he had attracted the President’s attention, or what qualities fitted him for the charge of naval affairs; but he appeared in due time at Washington,—a South Carolinian gentleman, little known in society or even to his colleagues in the government, and little felt as an active force in the struggle of parties and opinions.

From the outset Madison’s Cabinet was the least satisfactory that any President had known. More than once the Federalist cabinets had been convulsed by disagreements, but the Administration of Madison had hardly strength to support two sides of a dispute. Gallatin alone gave it character, but was himself in a sort of disgrace. The Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Navy, overshadowed in the Cabinet by Gallatin, stood in a position of inevitable hostility to his influence, although they represented neither ideas nor constituents. While Gallatin exacted economy, the army and navy required expenditures, and the two secretaries necessarily looked to Robert Smith as their friend. Toward Robert Smith Gallatin could feel only antipathy, which was certainly shared by Madison. “We had all been astonished at his appointment,” said Joel Barlow two years afterward;[8] “we all learned the history of that miserable intrigue by which it was effected.” Looking upon Robert Smith’s position as the result of a “miserable intrigue,” Gallatin could make no secret of his contempt. The social relations between them, which had once been intimate, wholly ceased.

To embroil matters further, the defalcation of a navy agent at Leghorn revealed business relations between the Navy Department and Senator Samuel Smith’s mercantile firm which scandalized Gallatin and drew from him a sharp criticism. He told Samuel Smith that the transactions of the firm of Smith and Buchanan were the most extraordinary that had fallen within his knowledge since he had been in the Treasury, and had left very unfavorable impressions on his mind.[9] Smith was then struggling for a re-election to the Senate, and felt the hand of Gallatin as a chief obstacle in his way. The feud became almost mortal under these reciprocal injuries; but Samuel Smith gained all his objects, and for the time held Gallatin and Madison at his mercy. Had he been able to separate them, his influence would have had no bounds, except his want of ability.

Yet Madison was always a dangerous enemy, gifted with a quality of persistence singularly sure in its results. An example of this persistence occurred at the moment of yielding to the Smiths’ intrigues, when, perhaps partly in the hope of profiting by his sacrifice, he approached the Senate once more on the subject of the mission to Russia. February 27, the nomination of William Short to St. Petersburg had been unanimously rejected. March 6, with the nominations of Robert Smith and William Eustis to the Cabinet, Madison sent the names of J. Q. Adams as minister at St. Petersburg, and of Thomas Sumter as minister to Brazil. He asked the Senate to establish two new missions at once. March 7 the Senate confirmed all the other nominations, but by a vote of seventeen to fifteen, adhered to the opinion that a mission to Russia was inexpedient. Both Giles and Samuel Smith supported the Government; but the two senators from Pennsylvania, the two from Kentucky, together with Anderson of Tennessee and William H. Crawford, persisted in aiding the Federalists to defeat the President’s wish. Yet the majority was so small as to prove that Madison would carry his point in the end. Senators who rejected the services of Gallatin and John Quincy Adams in order to employ those of Robert Smith, Dr. Eustis, and Governor Hamilton could not but suffer discredit. Faction which had no capacity of its own, and which showed only dislike of ability in others, could never rule a government in times of danger or distress.

After thus embarrassing the President in organizing his service the Senate rose, leaving Madison in peace until May 22, when the Eleventh Congress was to meet in special session. The outlook was more discouraging than at the beginning of any previous Administration. President Jefferson had strained his authority to breaking, and the sudden reaction threw society as well as government into disorder. The factiousness at Washington reflected only in a mild form the worse factiousness elsewhere. The Legislature of Massachusetts, having issued its Address to the People, adjourned; and a few days afterward the people, by an election which called out more than ninety thousand votes, dismissed their Republican governor, and by a majority of two or three thousand chose Christopher Gore in his place. The new Legislature was more decidedly Federalist than the old one. New Hampshire effected the same revolution. Rhode Island followed. In New York the Federalists carried the Legislature, as they did also in Maryland.

Even in Pennsylvania, although nothing shook the fixed political character of the State, the epidemic of faction broke out. While the legislatures of Massachusetts and Connecticut declared Acts of Congress unconstitutional, and refused aid to execute them, the legislature of Pennsylvania authorized Governor Snyder to resist by armed force a mandate of the Supreme Court; and when the United States marshal attempted to serve process on the person of certain respondents at the suit of Gideon Olmstead, he found himself stopped by State militia acting under orders.

In a country where popular temper had easier means of concentrating its violence, government might have been paralyzed by these proofs of low esteem; but America had not by far reached such a stage, and dark as the prospect was both within and without, Madison could safely disregard dangers on which most rulers had habitually to count. His difficulties were only an inheritance from the old Administration, and began to disappear as quickly as they had risen. At a word from the President the State of Pennsylvania recovered its natural common-sense, and with some little sacrifice of dignity gave way. The popular successes won by the Federalists were hardly more serious than the momentary folly of Pennsylvania. As yet, the Union stood in no danger. The Federalists gained many votes; but these were the votes of moderate men who would desert their new companions on the first sign of a treasonable act, and their presence tended to make the party cautious rather than rash. John Henry, the secret agent of Sir James Craig, reported with truth to the governor-general that the Federalist leaders at Boston found disunion a very delicate topic, and that “an unpopular war ... can alone produce a sudden separation of any section of this country from the common head.”[10] In public, the most violent Federalists curbed their tongues whenever the Union was discussed, and instead of threatening to dissolve it, contented themselves by charging the blame on the Southern States in case it should fall to pieces. Success sobered them; the repeal of the embargo seemed so great a triumph that they were almost tempted into good humor.

On the people of New England other motives more directly selfish began to have effect. The chief sources of their wealth were shipping and manufactures. The embargo destroyed the value of the shipping after it had been diminished by the belligerent edicts; the repeal of the embargo restored the value. The Federalist newspapers tried to prove that this was not the case, and that the Non-intercourse Act, which prohibited commerce with England, France, or their dependencies, was as ruinous as embargo itself; but the shipping soon showed that Gottenburg, Riga, Lisbon, and the Spanish ports in America were markets almost as convenient as London or Havre for the sale of American produce. The Yankee ship-owner received freights to Europe by circuitous routes, on the accumulations of two years in grain, cotton, tobacco, and timber, of the whole United States, besides the freights of an extended coast-trade. Massachusetts owned more than a third of the American registered tonnage, and the returns for 1809 and 1810 proved that her profits were great. The registered tonnage of Massachusetts employed in foreign trade was 213,000 tons in 1800, and rose to 310,000 tons in 1807 before the embargo; in 1809 it rose again to 324,000; in 1810 it made another leap to 352,000 tons. The coasting trade employed in 1807 about 90,000 tons of Massachusetts shipping which was much increased by the embargo, and again reduced by its repeal; but in 1809 and 1810 this enrolled shipping still stood far above the prosperous level of 1807, and averaged 110,000 tons for the two years.[11]

Such rapid and general improvement in shipping proved that New England had better employment than political factiousness to occupy the thoughts of her citizens; but large as the profits on freights might be, they hardly equalled the profits on manufactures. In truth, the manufactories of New England were created by the embargo, which obliged the whole nation to consume their products or to go without. The first American cotton mills, begun as early as 1787, met with so little success that when the embargo was imposed in 1807, only fifteen mills with about eight thousand spindles were in operation, producing some three hundred thousand pounds of yarn a year. These eight thousand spindles, representing a capital of half a million dollars, were chiefly in or near Rhode Island.

The embargo and non-importation Acts went into effect in the last days of 1807. Within less than two years the number of spindles was increased, or arrangements were made for increasing it, from eight thousand to eighty thousand.[12] Nearly four million dollars of capital were invested in mills, and four thousand persons were in their employ, or expected soon to be employed in them. The cotton cost about twenty cents a pound; the yarn sold on an average at about $1.12½ a pound. Besides these mills, which were worked mostly by water but partly by horsepower, the domestic manufacture of cotton and linen supplied a much larger part of the market. Two thirds of the clothing and house-linen used in the United States outside of the cities was made in farm-houses, and nearly every farmer in New England sold some portion of the stock woven every year by the women of his household. Much of this coarse but strong flaxen material, sold at about fifteen or twenty cents a yard by the spinner, was sent to the Southern States.[13]

While the cotton and linen industries of the North became profitable, the manufactures of wool lagged little behind. William Whittemore, who owned the patent for a machine which manufactured wool and cotton cards, reported from Cambridge in Massachusetts, Nov. 24, 1809, that only the want of card-wire prevented him from using all his machines to the full extent of their power.[14] “Since the obstructions to our foreign trade, the manufactures of our country have increased astonishingly,” he wrote. “The demand for wool and cotton cards the present season has been twice as great as it has been any year preceding.” Scarcity of good wool checked the growth of this industry, and the demand soon roused a mania among farmers for improving the breed of sheep. Between one hundred and three hundred per cent of profit attended all these industries, and little or no capital was required.

All the Northern and Eastern States shared in the advantages of this production, for which Virginia with the Western and Southern States paid; but in the whole Union New England fared best. Already the development of small industries had taken place, which, by making a varied aggregate, became the foundation and the security of Yankee wealth. Massachusetts taxed her neighbors on many small articles of daily use. She employed in the single manufacture of hats four thousand persons,—more than were yet engaged in the cotton mills. More than a million and a half of hats were annually made, and three fourths of these were sold beyond the State; between three and four million dollars a year flowed into Massachusetts in exchange for hats alone.[15] At Lynn, in Massachusetts, were made one hundred thousand pairs of women’s shoes every year. The town of Roxbury made eight hundred thousand pounds of soap. Massachusetts supplied the country with cut-iron nails to the value of twelve hundred thousand dollars a year. Connecticut supplied the whole country with tin-ware.

New industries sprang up rapidly on a soil and in a climate where the struggle of life was more severe than elsewhere in the Union, and where already capital existed in quantities that made production easy. One industry stimulated another. Women had much to do with the work, and their quickness and patience of details added largely to the income of New England at the cost of less active communities. Their hands wove most of the cotton and woollen cloths sent in large quantities to the West and South; but they were inventors as well as workmen. In 1801, when English straw-bonnets were in fashion, a girl of Wrentham, not far from Boston, found that she could make for herself a straw-hat as good as the imported one. In a few months every girl in the county of Norfolk made her own straw-bonnet; and soon the South and West paid two hundred thousand dollars a year to the county of Norfolk for straw hats and bonnets.[16]

At no time could such industries have been established without the stimulus of a handsome profit; but when Virginia compelled Massachusetts and the Northern States to accept a monopoly of the American market, the Yankee manufacturer must have expected to get, and actually got, great profits for his cottons and woollens, his hats, shoes, soap, and nails. As though this were not more than enough, Virginia gave the Northern shipowners the whole freight on Southern produce, two thirds of which in one form or another went into the hands of New England shipbuilders, shippers, and merchants. Slowly the specie capital of the Union drifted towards the Banks of Boston and New Haven, until, as the story will show, the steady drain of specie eastward bankrupted the other States and the national government. Never, before or since, was the country so racked to create and support monopolies as in 1808, 1809, and 1810, under Southern rule, and under the system of the President who began his career by declaring that if he could prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretence of protecting them, they must become happy.[17] The navy and army of the United States were employed, and were paid millions of dollars, during these years in order to shut out foreign competition, and compel New England at the cannon’s mouth to accept these enormous bribes.

The Yankee, however ill-tempered he might be, was shrewd enough to see where his profit lay. The Federalist leaders and newspapers grumbled without intermission that their life-blood was drained to support a negro-slave aristocracy, “baser than its own slaves,” as their phrase went; but they took the profits thrust upon them; and what they could not clutch was taken by New York and Pennsylvania, while Virginia slowly sank into ruin. Virginia paid the price to gratify her passion for political power; and at the time, she paid it knowingly and willingly. John Randolph protested almost alone. American manufactures owed more to Jefferson and Virginians, who disliked them, than to Northern statesmen, who merely encouraged them after they were established.

These movements and tendencies were rather felt than understood amid the uproar of personal and local interests; but the repeal of the embargo had the effect intended by the Virginians,—it paralyzed Pickering and the party of forcible resistance. New England quickly turned from revolutionary thoughts while she engaged in money-making; and as though the tide of fortune had at last set in Madison’s favor, a stroke of his diplomacy raised the tottering Administration to a sudden height of popularity such as Jefferson himself had never reached.

CHAPTER II.

When Napoleon, Aug. 3, 1808, heard at Bordeaux that the Spaniards had captured Dupont’s army at Baylen and Rosily’s ships at Cadiz, and had thrown eighty thousand French troops back upon the Pyrenees, his anger was great; but his perplexity was much greater. In a character so interesting as that of Napoleon, the moments of perplexity were best worth study; and in his career no single moment occurred when he had more reason to call upon his genius for a resource than when he faced at Bordeaux the failure of his greatest scheme. From St. Petersburg to Gibraltar every shopkeeper knew that England had escaped, and all believed that no combination either of force or fraud could again be made with reasonable hope of driving her commerce from its channels. On this belief every merchant, as well as every government in the world, was actually shaping calculations. Napoleon also must shape his calculations on theirs, since he had failed to force theirs into the path of his own. The escape of England made useless the machinery he had created for her ruin. Spain, Russia, and Austria had little value for his immediate object, except as their control was necessary for the subjection of England; and the military occupation of Spain beyond the Ebro became worse than a blunder from the moment when Cadiz and Lisbon, Cuba and Mexico, Brazil and Peru threw themselves into England’s arms.[18]

More than once this history has shown that Napoleon never hesitated to throw aside a plan which had miscarried. If he did not in the autumn of 1808 throw aside his Spanish schemes, the reason could only be that he saw no other resource, and that in his belief his power would suffer too much from the shock of admitting failure. He showed unusual signs of vacillation, and of a desire to escape the position into which his miscalculations had led him. Instead of going at once to Spain and restoring order to his armies, he left his brother helpless at Vittoria while he passed three months in negotiations looking toward peace with England. In September he went to Germany, where he met the Czar of Russia at Erfurt, and induced Alexander, or consented to his inducement, to join in an autograph letter to the King of England, marked by the usual Napoleonic character, and offering the principle of uti possidetis as the preliminary to a general peace. England regarded this advance as deceptive, and George Canning was never more successful than in the gesture of self-restrained contempt with which he tossed back the letter that Napoleon and Alexander had presumed to address to a constitutional King of England; but even Canning could hardly suppose that Napoleon would invite an insult without a motive. From whatever side Napoleon approached the situation he could invent no line of conduct which did not imply the triumph of England. Study the problem as he might, he could not escape from the political and military disadvantages he incurred from the Spanish uprising. Without the consent of England he could neither free his civil government from the system of commercial restriction, nor free his military strength from partial paralysis in Spain; and England refused to help him, or even to hear reason from Alexander.

Thenceforward a want of distinct purpose showed itself in Napoleon’s acts. Unable either to enforce or to abandon his Continental system, he began to use it for momentary objects,—sometimes to weaken England, sometimes to obtain money, or as the pretext for conquests. Unable to hold the Peninsula or to withdraw from it, he seemed at one time resolved on conquest, at another disposed toward retreat. In the autumn of 1808 both paths ran together, for his credit required him to conquer before he could honorably establish any dynasty on the throne; and during the months of September and October he marched new French armies across the Pyrenees and massed an irresistible force behind the Ebro. A year before, he had thought one hundred thousand men enough to occupy all Spain and Portugal; but in October, 1808, he held not less than two hundred and fifty thousand men beyond the Pyrenees, ready to move at the moment of his arrival.

October 25, after his return from Germany, the Emperor pronounced a speech at the opening of his legislative chambers; and the embarrassment of his true position was evident under the words in which he covered it.

“Russia and Denmark,” he said, “have united with me against England. The United States have preferred to renounce commerce and the sea rather than recognize their slavery. A part of my army marches against those that England has formed or disembarked in Spain. It is a special benefit of that Providence which has constantly protected our arms, that passion has so blinded English councils as to make them renounce the protection of the sea and at last present their armies on the Continent. I depart in a few days to place myself at the head of my army, and with God’s aid to crown the King of Spain in Madrid, and plant my eagles on the forts of Lisbon.”

He left Paris October 29, and ten days later, November 9, began the campaign which still attracts the admiration of military critics, but which did not result in planting his eagles on the forts of Lisbon. “To my great astonishment,” he afterward said,[19] “I had to fight the battles of Tudela, Espinosa, Burgos, and Somo Sierra, to gain Madrid, which, in spite of my victories, refused me admission during two days.” After disposing in rapid succession of all the Spanish armies, he occupied Madrid December 4, and found himself at the end of his campaign. The conquest of Lisbon and Cadiz required more time, and led to less military result than suited his objects. At that moment he learned that an English army under Sir John Moore had ventured to march from Portugal into the north of Spain, and had already advanced so far toward Burgos as to make their capture possible. The destruction of an English army, however small, offered Napoleon the triumph he wanted. Rapidly collecting his forces, he hurried across the Guadarrama Mountains to cut off Moore’s retreat; but for once he was out-generalled. Sir John Moore not only saved his own army, but also led the French a long and exhausting chase to the extreme northwestern shore of Spain, where the British fleet carried Moore’s army out of their reach.

Napoleon would not have been the genius he was had he wasted his energies in following Moore to Corunna, or in trying to plant his eagles on the forts of Lisbon or Cadiz. A year earlier, Lisbon and Cadiz had been central points of his scheme; but in December, 1808, they were worth to him little more than any other seaports without fleets or colonies. For Spain and Portugal Napoleon showed that he had no further use. The moment he saw that Moore had escaped, which became clear when the Emperor reached Astorga, Jan. 2, 1809, throwing upon Soult the task of marching one hundred and fifty miles to Corunna after Moore and the British army, Napoleon stopped short, turned about, and with rapidity unusual even for him, quitted Spain forever. “The affairs of Spain are finished,” he wrote January 16;[20] although Joseph had the best reason to know and much cause to tell how his brother left nothing finished in Spain. “The circumstances of Europe oblige me to go for three weeks to Paris,” he wrote to Joseph early in the morning of January 15; “if nothing prevents, I shall be back again before the end of February.”[21] With characteristic mixture of harshness and tenderness toward his elder brother, he wrote at noon the same day another account, equally deceptive, of his motives and intentions:—

“You must say everywhere, and make the army believe, that I shall return in three or four weeks. In fact, my mere presence at Paris will make Austria shrink back to her nullity; and then, before the end of October, I will be back here. I shall be in Paris in five days. I shall go at full speed, day and night, as far as Bordeaux. Meanwhile everything will go on quieting itself in Spain.”[22]

Giving out that the conduct of Austria required his presence at Paris, he succeeded in imposing this fiction upon Europe by the empire of his will. Europe accepted the fable, which became history; but although the Emperor soon disposed of Austria, and although Spain was a more difficult problem than Austria ever was, Napoleon never kept his word to Joseph, and never again ventured within sight of the mistakes he could no longer correct.

Meanwhile Armstrong, disgusted with the disappointments and annoyances of his residence at Paris, had become anxious to escape without further loss of credit. His letters to Madison, published by Congress, returned to terrify his French acquaintance, and to close his sources of information. He could see no hope of further usefulness. As early as Oct. 25, 1808, when the Emperor was addressing his legislative chambers before setting out for Spain, Armstrong wrote to Madison that no good could come from keeping an American minister at Paris.[23] Yet in the enforced idleness of the month when Napoleon was in Spain, Armstrong found one ally whose aid was well worth seeking. After the Czar Alexander accepted, at Tilsit, the ascendency of Napoleon, he appointed as his minister of foreign relations the Count Nicholas Roumanzoff. The Czar was still a young man in his thirty-first year, while Roumanzoff, fifty-four years old, had the full powers of maturity. Together they shaped a Russian policy, in the traditional direction of Russian interests, founded upon jealousy of British maritime tyranny. Lord Howick’s and Spencer Perceval’s Orders in Council served to sharpen Russian as well as American antipathies, and brought the two distant nations into a sympathy which was certainly not deep, but which England had reason to fear. In the autumn of 1808 Count Roumanzoff came to Paris to arrange with Champagny the details of their joint diplomacy; and at the same time, in the month of November, William Short arrived in Paris secretly accredited as minister plenipotentiary at St. Petersburg, but waiting confirmation by the Senate before going to his post. When Armstrong told Roumanzoff that an American minister would soon be on his way to St. Petersburg, the count was highly pleased, and promised at once to send a full minister to replace André Daschkoff, the chargé at Washington. “Ever since I came into office,” he said to Armstrong,[24] “I have been desirous of producing this effect; for in dissolving our commercial connections with Great Britain it became necessary to seek some other power in whom we might find a substitute; and on looking round I could see none but the United States who were at all competent to this object.” So far as concerned England, the alliance promised great advantages; but Armstrong’s chief anxiety affected France, and when he attempted to enlist Roumanzoff in resistance to Napoleon’s robberies, he found no encouragement. Roumanzoff had already tried his influence with Napoleon on behalf of the Danes, who wanted compensation for their plundered commerce. “Give them a civil answer,” replied Napoleon,[25] “but of course one never pays for this sort of thing,—On ne paye jamais ces choses-là, n’est-ce pas?” From Roumanzoff’s refusal, Armstrong inferred that no change need be hoped in Napoleon’s conduct.

“On the contrary,” he wrote to Madison, the day when Napoleon abandoned the pursuit of Sir John Moore,[26] “their anti-neutral system is more rigidly observed; the embargo on ships of the United States found here before the imperial decrees were issued is continued; every ship of ours coming into a port of France or of her allies is immediately seized and sequestered; cargoes regularly admitted to entry by the custom-houses are withheld from their owners; ships most obviously exceptions to the operation of the Decrees have been recently condemned; and—what in my view of the subject does not admit of aggravation—the burning of the ship ‘Brutus’ on the high seas, so far from being disavowed, is substantially justified.”

Had this been all, perhaps President Madison and Congress might have waited with courtesy, if not with hope, for Napoleon’s pleasure; but grievances equally serious ran back to the year 1803, and not one of them had been redressed by France.

“It is now three years since one of her admirals, on the principle of self-preservation, burnt four of our ships at sea, and the Emperor immediately acknowledged the debt and repeatedly promised to discharge it; but not a shilling has yet been paid, nor is it probable that a shilling ever will be paid. Besides this breach of justice in the first instance and of promise in the last, we have to complain that bills of exchange drawn to the order of citizens of the United States by the public functionaries of France, to the amount of many millions of dollars, and for articles of the first necessity, and drawn many years ago, are not only not paid, but are officially denounced as not payable.”

Armstrong’s temper, bad in the winter, became worse in the spring, until his letters to the Department of State seemed to leave no remedy but war for the grievances he described. The angry tone of his despatches was not counteracted by fair words in the instructions sent by Champagny to Turreau, which were calculated to irritate President Madison beyond patience.

“You cannot too much call attention to the grievances of the Americans against England in order to make them more sensibly felt,” wrote Champagny to Turreau, after the Emperor went to Spain.[27] “The Americans would like France to grant them commercial privileges which no nation at present enjoys.... But ... hitherto it has not seemed proper, in the execution of general measures, to introduce exceptions which would have really destroyed their effect. If the rules adopted against English commerce had not been made common, that commerce would continue through every opening left to it; England would preserve the same resources as before for supporting the war. A system of exception for one people would turn the rule into an injustice toward all others; all would have right to complain of a privilege granted to the Federal government which themselves would not enjoy.”

Unanswerable as this reasoning was from the Napoleonic standpoint, it was open to the objection of placing Madison among the belligerents at war with England, and of obliging him not only to accept the rules imposed by Napoleon on the allies of France, but also to admit the corresponding right of British retaliation, even to the point of war. Until President Madison made up his mind to war with England, he could hardly be induced by Napoleon’s diplomacy to overlook his causes of war with France.

Had Napoleon acted according to rules of ordinary civilization, he would at least have softened the harshness of his commercial policy toward America by opening to the American President some vista of compensation elsewhere. Florida seemed peculiarly suited for this object, and no one so well as Napoleon knew the anxiety of the late Administration to obtain that territory, which, for any legitimate purpose, was useless and worthless to France. In December, 1808, Napoleon could have retained little or no hope of controlling the Spanish colonies by force; yet he ordered the American government to leave them alone, as he ordered it to adopt the French system of commercial restraint. “I venture to presume,” continued Champagny to Turreau, “that if his Majesty has no reason to complain of the disposition shown by the United States toward him, he will show himself more and more inclined to treat them favorably. What will most influence his course will be the conduct pursued by the United States toward the Spanish colonies, and the care that shall be taken to do nothing in regard to them which can contravene the rights of the mother-country.”

Thus from Turreau’s attitude as well as from Armstrong’s letters, the government at Washington was advised that neither favor nor justice need be expected from Napoleon. This impression, strengthened by all the private advices which arrived from France during the winter of 1808–1809, even though partly balanced by the bulletins of the Emperor’s splendid Spanish campaign, had much to do with the refusal of Congress to declare a double war, which, however general in terms, must in effect be waged against England alone. Anger with France affected Republicans almost as strongly as fear of Napoleon excited Federalists. When the final struggle took place in Congress over the embargo, no small share of the weakness shown by the Administration and its followers was due to their consciousness that the repeal of the embargo would relieve them from appearing to obey an imperial mandate.

Turreau understood the repeal in no other light, and was extremely irritated to see the decline of his influence. Men who had given him pledge upon pledge that the embargo should be withdrawn only when war against England should be declared, could plead no better excuse for failing to keep their promise than that Napoleon had forfeited his claim to their support. March 19, two weeks after Congress rose, Turreau wrote from Baltimore to Champagny,[28]—

“You will have judged from my last despatches that the Embargo Law would be repealed. It has been so, in fact, despite my efforts to maintain it, and notwithstanding the promise of quite a large number of influential Representatives, especially among the senators, who had guaranteed to me its continuance till the next Congress, and who have voted against their political conscience. I had informed your Excellency of the disunion projects shown by some of the Northern States. Their avowed opposition to the continuance of the embargo, and their threats to resist its execution, terrified Congress to such a degree that the dominant party became divided, and the feebleness (faiblesse) of Mr. Jefferson sanctioned the last and the most shameful act of his Administration.... I say it with regret,—and perhaps I have said it too late,—I am convinced there is nothing to hope from these people.”

Erskine, whose persistent efforts to conciliate had also something to do with the action of Congress, made Turreau’s anger the subject of a despatch, doubtless hoping it might guide Canning’s thoughts toward the wisdom of conciliation.[29] “The French minister it seems is so much offended at the Non-intercourse Law which has been lately passed, and is so little pleased with the general disposition, as he conceives it, of the new Administration of the United States toward France, that he has quitted this city, having previously given up his house and removed all his furniture, without calling either upon the new President or any of the members of the Administration, as was his uniform custom in former years, and as is always done by foreign ministers.” Robert Smith informed Erskine that the Government would consider it to be their duty, which he was sure they would feel no disposition to shrink from, to recommend to the new Congress to enter upon immediate measures of hostility against France in the event of Great Britain giving way as to her Orders so far as to afford an opportunity to the United States to assert their rights against France.

During the month of March, Turreau watched the workings of the Non-intercourse Act, but found little encouragement. “Generally the ventures have not been so numerous as was to be expected from the well-known avidity of American merchants, and the privations they have suffered from the embargo.”[30] Most of the outgoing vessels had cleared for the West Indies or the Azores, “but the French government may rest assured that among a hundred ships leaving the ports of the Union for the high seas, ninety of them will have the real object of satisfying the wants and demands of England.” Such a commerce was in his opinion fair prey. England had gained the upper-hand in America; English superiority could no longer be contested; and to France remained only the desperate chances of the political gambler.

“To-day not only is the separation of New England openly talked about, but the people of those five States wish for this separation, pronounce it, openly prepare it, will carry it out under British protection, and probably will meet with no resistance on the part of the other States. Yet this project, which is known and avowed; the last proceedings of Congress, which are blamed; the progress of the Federalists; the alarms of commerce; the feebleness of the highest authorities (des premiers pouvoirs), and the doubts regarding the capacity and the party views of the new President,—cause a ferment of public opinion; and perhaps the moment has come for forming a party in favor of France in the Central and Southern States, whenever those of the North, having given themselves a separate government under the support of Great Britain, may threaten the independence of the rest.”[31]

Turreau’s speculations might show no great sagacity, but they opened a glimpse into his mind, and they were the chief information possessed by Napoleon to form his estimate of American character. Nothing could more irritate the Emperor than these laments from his minister at Washington over the victory of English interests in the United States. The effect of such reports on Napoleon was likely to be the more decided because Turreau saw everything in darker colors than the facts warranted. Deceived and defeated in the case of the embargo, he imagined himself also in danger on the other main point of his diplomacy,—the Spanish colonies. The old Spanish agents, consular and diplomatic, mostly patriots, were still officially recognized or privately received at Washington. Rumor said that troops were collecting at New Orleans to support a movement of independence in Florida; that General Wilkinson, on his way to take command in Louisiana, had stopped at Havana and Pensacola; that President Jefferson, on the eve of quitting the Presidency, had been heard to say, “We must have the Floridas and Cuba.” Anonymous letters, believed by Turreau to be written by one of the clerks in the State Department, warned him against the intrigues of the Federal government in the Spanish colonies. So much was he troubled by these alarms, that April 15 he addressed an unofficial note on the subject to Robert Smith.[32]

The President, having no wish to quarrel with the French minister, and probably aware of his irritation, asked Gallatin, on his way northwards, to call on Turreau at Baltimore and make to him such soothing explanations as the case seemed to require. The interview took place during the last week of April, and Turreau’s report threw another ray of light into the recesses of Jefferson’s councils.[33]

“‘I am specially charged,’ said Gallatin, ‘to assure you that whatever proceedings of General Wilkinson may seem to warrant your suspicions must not be attributed to the Executive, but solely to the vanity, the indiscretion, and the ordinary inconsistencies of that General, whom you know perhaps as well as we.... We are and we wish to be strangers to all that passes in the Floridas, in Mexico, and also in Cuba. You would be mistaken if you supposed that Mr. Madison wishes the possession of the Floridas. That was Mr. Jefferson’s hobby (marotte),—it has never been the wish of his Cabinet; and Mr. Madison values to-day the possession of the Floridas only so far as they may be thought indispensable to prevent every kind of misunderstanding with Spain, and to secure an outlet for the produce of our Southern States. We have had no part in the meetings which have taken place in the Floridas, and we could not know that General Wilkinson has been ill received there.’ (This is true.) ‘As for the possession of Cuba, this was also a new idea of Mr. Jefferson which has not been approved by the Executive council; and I am authorized to protest to you that even if Cuba were offered us as a gift, we would not accept it. We are also opposed to every step which would tend, under the pretext of commerce, to involve us in the politics of France and Spain, and we shall see to it that any persons undertaking such enterprises are properly dealt with. I flatter myself therefore that you will believe the Cabinet to be firmly resolved carefully to avoid every disturbance of the good understanding between the United States and France.’”

Gallatin was a persistent enemy of the Florida intrigue, and doubtless believed that Madison held opinions like his own; but Madison’s opinions on this subject, as on some others, were elusive,—perhaps no clearer to himself than to readers of his writings; and Gallatin had yet to learn that the instinct which coveted Florida could not be controlled by a decision of the Cabinet. Yet he said only what he seemed authorized to say; and his reference to the marotte of President Jefferson was significant. For the moment the weakness seemed cured. Gallatin gave Turreau to understand that President Madison would not intrigue in Florida or Cuba, and to that extent he was doubtless expressly authorized by the President. Perhaps only on his own authority he went a step further, by hinting that Napoleon need no longer dangle Florida before Madison’s eyes.

A rupture with France seemed certain. Turreau expected it and hoped only to delay it. In his eyes the Emperor had suffered an indignity that could not be overlooked, although he asked that retaliation should be delayed till autumn. “However dissatisfied the French government may be by the last measures adopted by Congress, I believe it would be well to await the result of the next session two months hence before taking a severer course against the Americans. This opinion, which I express only with doubt, is yet warranted by advices which I have received within a few days, and which have been given me by men who know the Executive intentions, and who at least till now have not deceived me.” Turreau believed that when the Emperor learned what the late Congress had done, he would strike the United States with the thunderbolt of his power. Doubtless the same impression was general. Even after Napoleon’s character has been the favorite study of biographers and historians for nearly a hundred years, the shrewdest criticism might fail in the effort to conjecture what shape the Emperor’s resentment took. This story has shown many of his processes from the time when he met the resistance of the Haytian negroes in 1803 to the time when he met the uprising of the Spanish patriots in 1809; but even with the advantage of his own writings as a guide, neither friend nor enemy could test theories of his character better than by attempting to divine the conduct he was to pursue toward the United States after their defiance of his wishes in the repeal of the embargo.

As though to remove the last doubt of rupture with Napoleon, the President startled the country by suddenly announcing a settlement of his disputes with England. April 7 Erskine received new instructions from London, and during the next two weeks he was closeted with the President and the Cabinet. April 21 the “National Intelligencer” announced the result of their labors.

CHAPTER III.

In Canning’s note to Pinkney of Sept. 23, 1808,—the same paper which expressed his Majesty’s regret for the embargo “as a measure of inconvenient restriction upon the American people,”—a paragraph easily overlooked had been inserted to provide for future chances of fortune:—

“It is not improbable, indeed, that some alterations may be made in the Orders of Council as they are at present framed,—alterations calculated, not to abate their spirit or impair their principle, but to adapt them more exactly to the different state of things which has fortunately grown up in Europe, and to combine all practicable relief to neutrals with a more severe pressure upon the enemy. But of alterations to be made with this view only it would be uncandid to take any advantage in the present discussion, however it might be hoped that in their practical effect they might prove beneficial to America, provided the operation of the embargo were not to prevent her from reaping that benefit.”

This intended change in the orders depended on the political change which converted Spain from an enemy into an ally. Spencer Perceval did not care to press the cause of British commerce so far as to tax American wheat and salt-fish on their way to Spain and Portugal, where he must himself provide money to pay for them after they were bought by the army commissaries. Accordingly, in December, 1808, a new Order in Council appeared, doing away with the export duties lately imposed by Parliament on foreign articles passing through England. Thenceforward American wheat might be shipped at Liverpool for the Spanish peninsula without paying ten shillings a quarter to the British Treasury,[34] if only the embargo did not prevent American wheat from entering Liverpool at all.

In a short note, dated December 24, Canning enclosed to Pinkney a copy of the new order; and while taking care to explain that this measure conceded nothing in principle, he offered it as a step toward removing the most offensive, if not the most oppressive, restraint imposed on American commerce by the Orders of 1807:—

“As I have more than once understood from you that the part of the Orders in Council which this order goes to mitigate is that which was felt most sorely by the United States, I have great pleasure in being authorized to communicate it to you.”

Pinkney was in no humor to bear more of what he considered Canning’s bad taste, and he could have but one opinion of the measure which Canning announced. “This order is a shadow,” he wrote to Madison,[35] “and if meant to conciliate us, ridiculous.” His reply to Canning verged for the first time on abruptness, as though the moment were near when he meant to speak another language.

“It is perfectly true,” began Pinkney’s acknowledgment of Dec. 28, 1808,[36] “as the concluding paragraph of your letter supposes me to believe, that the United States have viewed with great sensibility the pretension of this Government (which, as a pretension, the present order reasserts without much if at all modifying its practical effect) to levy imposts upon their commerce, outward and inward, which the Orders in Council of the last year were to constrain to pass through British ports. But it is equally true that my Government has constantly protested against the entire system with which that pretension was connected, and has in consequence required the repeal, not the modification, of the British Orders in Council.”

This reception roused the temper of Canning, who could not understand, if Pinkney honestly wished harmony, why he should repel what might be taken as a kindness; yet the same reasons which induced him to make the advance impelled him to bear with the American minister’s roughness. The moment was ill adapted for more quarrels. Napoleon had occupied Madrid three weeks before, and was driving Sir John Moore’s army in headlong flight back to England; the dreams of midsummer had vanished; the overthrow of France was no nearer than before the Spanish uprising; the United States were seriously discussing war, and however loudly a few interested Englishmen might at times talk, the people of England never wanted war with the United States. Canning found himself obliged to suppress his irritation, and so far from checking the spirit of concession to America, was drawn into new and more decided advances. Spencer Perceval felt the same impulse, and of his own accord proposed other steps to his colleague, after Pinkney’s letter of December 28 had been read and considered by the Cabinet. With the impression of that letter fresh in the minds of both, Canning wrote to Perceval on the last day of the year:[37]—

“We have given quite proof enough of our determination to maintain our principle to enable us to relax, if in other respects advisable, without danger of being suspected of giving way. The paragraph in my letter to Pinkney, of September 23, prepares the world for any relaxations that we may think fit to make, provided they are coupled with increased severity against France; and though this last consideration is something impaired by my last communication to Pinkney, yet the manner in which he has received that communication (with respect to which reception I partake of the fury which you describe as having been kindled in Hammond) leaves us quite at liberty to take any new steps without explanation, and exempts us from any hazard of seeing them too well received.”

The year 1809 began with this new spirit of accommodation in British councils. The causes which produced it were notorious. From the moment Europe closed her ports, in the autumn of 1807, articles commonly supplied from the Continent rose to speculative prices, and after the American embargo the same effect followed with American produce. Flax, linseed, tallow, timber, Spanish wool, silk, hemp, American cotton doubled or trebled in price in the English markets during the years 1807 and 1808.[38] Colonial produce declined in the same proportion. Quantities of sugar and coffee overfilled the warehouses of London, while the same articles could not be bought at Amsterdam and Antwerp at prices three, four, and five times those asked on the Royal Exchange. Under the Orders in Council, the whole produce of the West Indies, shut from Europe by Napoleon and from the United States by the embargo, was brought to England, until mere plethora stopped accumulation.

Debarred from their natural outlets, English merchandise and manufactures were forced into every other market which seemed to offer a hope of sale or barter. When Portugal fell into Napoleon’s hands, and the royal family took refuge in Brazil under British protection, English merchants glutted Brazil with their goods, until the beach at Rio Janeiro was covered with property, which perished for want of buyers and warehouses. The Spanish trade, thrown open soon afterward, resulted in similar losses. In the effort to relieve the plethora at home, England gorged the few small channels of commerce that remained in her control.

These efforts coincided with a drain of specie on government account to support the Spanish patriots. The British armies sent to Spain required large sums in coin for their supplies, and the Spaniards required every kind of assistance. The process of paying money on every hand and receiving nothing but worthless produce could not long continue without turning the exchanges against London; yet a sudden call for specie threatened to shake the foundations of society. Never was credit so rotten. Speculation was rampant, and inflation accompanied it. None of the familiar signs of financial disaster were absent. Visionary joint-stock enterprises flourished. Discounts at long date, or without regard to proper security, could be obtained with ease from the private banks and bankers who were competing for business; and although the Bank of England followed its usual course, neither contracting nor expanding its loans and issues, suddenly, at the close of 1808, gold coin rose at a leap from a nominal rate of 103 to the alarming premium of 113. The exchanges had turned, and the inevitable crash was near.

The political outlook took the same sombre tone as the finances. The failure of the Spaniards and the evacuation of Spain by the British army after the loss of Sir John Moore at Corunna, January 16, destroyed confidence in all political hopes. Lord Castlereagh, as war-secretary, was most exposed to attack. Instead of defending him, Canning set the example of weakening his influence. Aware that the Administration had not the capacity to hold its own, Canning undertook to reform it. As early as October, 1808, he talked freely of Castlereagh’s incompetence, and made no secret of his opinion that the Secretary for War must go out.[39] Whether his judgment of Castlereagh’s abilities were right or wrong was a matter for English history to decide; but Americans might at least wonder that the Convention of Cintra and the campaign of Sir John Moore were not held to be achievements as respectable as the American diplomacy of Canning or the commercial experiments of Spencer Perceval. Canning himself agreed that Perceval was little, if at all, superior to Castlereagh, and he saw hope for England chiefly in his own elevation to the post of the Duke of Portland.

Although no one fully understood all that had been done by the Portland ministry, enough was known to render their fall certain; and Canning saw himself sinking with the rest. He made active efforts to secure his own safety and to rise above the misfortunes which threatened to overwhelm his colleagues. Among other annoyances, he felt the recoil of his American policy. The tone taken by Pinkney coincided with the warlike threats reported by Erskine, and with the language of Campbell’s Report to the House of Representatives. Erskine’s despatch of November 26, in which Campbell’s Report was enclosed, and his alarming despatches of December 3 and 4 were received by Canning about the middle of January,[40] at a time when the Ministry was sustained only by royal favor. The language and the threats of these advices were such as Canning could not with dignity overlook or with safety resent; but he overlooked them. January 18, at a diplomatic dinner given by him on the Queen’s birthday, he took Pinkney aside to tell him that the Ministry were willing to consider the Resolutions proposed in Campbell’s Report as putting an end to the difficulties which prevented a satisfactory arrangement.[41] Pinkney, surprised by Canning’s “more than usual kindness and respect,” suggested deferring the subject to a better occasion; and Canning readily acquiesced, appointing January 22 as the day for an interview.

The next morning, January 19, Parliament met, and American affairs were instantly made the subject of attack on ministers. In the Lords, Grenville declared that “the insulting and sophistical answer” returned by Canning to the American offer, persuaded him “that the intention of the King’s government is to drive things to extremity with America.” Lord Hawkesbury the Home Secretary, who had succeeded his father as Earl of Liverpool, replied in the old tone that ministers felt no disposition to irritate America, but that national dignity and importance were not to be sacrificed “at the very moment when America seemed so blind to her own interest, and betrayed so decided a partiality in favor of France.”[42] In the Commons, Whitbread and the other leaders of opposition echoed the attack, but Canning did not echo the reply.

“The same infatuation,” said Whitbread,[43] “seems now to prevail that existed in the time of the late American war. There were the same taunts, the same sarcasms, and the same assertions that America cannot do without us.” Only a few weeks earlier or later, Canning would have met such criticisms in his loftiest tone, and with more reason than in 1807 or in 1808. In his desk were Erskine’s latest despatches, announcing impending war in every accent of defiance and in many varieties of italics and capital letters; fresh in his memory was his own official pledge that “no step which could even mistakenly be construed into concession should be taken” while a doubt existed whether America had wholly abandoned her attempt at commercial restriction. Yet instead of maintaining England’s authority at the moment when for the first time it was threatened by the United States, Canning became apologetic and yielding. Repeating the commonplaces of the newspapers that America had sided with France, and even going so far as to assert, what he best knew to be an error, that the Orders in Council had not been the cause of the embargo, and “it was now a notorious fact that no such ground had been laid for the embargo;” after declaring the exclusion of British war-vessels from American harbors to have been the chief obstacle to the compromise offered by America,—treading, with what seemed a very uncertain foot, among these slippery and ill-balanced stepping-stones, he reached the point where he meant to rest. The “Chesapeake” Proclamation, which excluded British war-ships from American harbors, being his chief grievance, any settlement which removed that grievance would be so far satisfactory; and for this reason the measures proposed in Campbell’s Report, though clothed in hostile language, might, if made known to the British government in amicable terms, have led to the acceptance of the compromise proposed, since they excluded French as well as English ships of war from American ports.

Canning next turned to Pinkney to ascertain how much concession would be safe. The interview took place January 22; but Pinkney’s powers had been withdrawn, and he neither could nor would furnish Canning with any assurance on which a concession could be offered with the certainty either that it would be accepted, or that it would be refused. Canning seemed particularly anxious to know how the embargo could be effectually enforced against commerce with France, after being removed in regard to England.[44] He “presumed that the government of the United States would not complain if the naval force of this country should assist in preventing such a commerce.”[45] Pinkney felt many doubts of Canning’s good faith,[46] and had every reason for avoiding committal of himself or of his Government. According to his own account, he declined to enter into the discussion of details, and confined himself to general encouragement of Canning’s good disposition.[47]

After experimenting upon Pinkney, much as he had sounded Parliament, Canning lost not an hour in composing the new instructions to Erskine. Four in number, all bearing the same date of January 23, they dealt successively with each of the disputed points; but in order to understand the embroilment they caused, readers must carry in mind, even at some effort of memory, precisely what Canning ordered Erskine to do, and precisely what Erskine did.

The first instruction dealt with the “Chesapeake” affair, and the Proclamation occasioned by it. Accepting Gallatin’s idea that the Proclamation being merged in the general non-intercourse would cease to exist as a special and separate provision of law, Canning instructed Erskine that if French ships of war should be excluded from American ports, and if the Proclamation should be tacitly withdrawn, he need no longer insist upon the formal recall. Further, Gallatin had suggested that Congress was about to exclude foreign seamen by law from national ships; and Canning admitted also this evasion of his demand that the United States should engage not to countenance desertions. Finally, he withdrew the demand for disavowals which had wrecked Rose’s mission.

Evidently the British government wished to settle the “Chesapeake” affair. Had Canning in like manner swept away his old conditions precedent to withdrawal of the Orders in Council, his good faith would have been above suspicion; but he approached that subject in a different spirit, and imposed one condition after another while he adopted the unusual course of putting each new condition into the mouth of some American official. He drew from Erskine’s despatches the inference that Madison, Smith, and Gallatin were willing to recognize in express terms the validity of the British “Rule of 1756.”[48] For this misunderstanding Erskine was to blame,[49] but Canning was alone responsible for the next remark, that “Mr. Pinkney has recently, but for the first time, expressed to me his opinion that there will be no indisposition on the part of his Government to the enforcement, by the naval power of Great Britain,” of the Act of Congress declaring non-intercourse with France. On the strength of these supposed expressions of William Pinkney, Madison, Smith, and Gallatin, none of which was official or in writing, Canning concluded:—

“I flatter myself that there will be no difficulty in obtaining a distinct and official recognition of these conditions from the American government. For this purpose you are at liberty to communicate this despatch in extenso to the American government.”

The chief interest of these instructions lay in the question whether Canning meant in good faith to offer on any conditions a withdrawal of the Orders in Council. The course of his own acts and of Perceval’s measures, suggested that he did not intend to offer any terms which the United States could accept. His remark to Perceval three weeks before, that they were quite at liberty to take new steps without “any hazard of seeing them too well received,” pointed in the same direction. Yet motives were enigmas too obscure for search, and the motives of Canning in this instance were more perplexing than usual. If he was serious in hoping an agreement, how could he insist on requiring official recognition of the right of Great Britain to enforce the municipal laws of the United States when he afterward admitted that such a claim “could not well find its way into a stipulation; that he had nevertheless believed it proper to propose the condition to the United States; that he should have been satisfied with the rejection of it; and that the consequence would have been that they should have intercepted the commerce to which it referred, if any such commerce should be attempted”?[50] In the instructions to Erskine he imposed the condition as essential to the agreement,—the same condition which he thought “could not well find its way into a stipulation,” and which “he should have been satisfied” to see rejected.

For two years Canning had lost no opportunity of charging the American government with subservience to Napoleon; even in these instructions he alleged Jefferson’s “manifest partiality” to France as a reason why England could entertain no propositions coming from him. He had in his hands Madison’s emphatic threats of war; how then could he conceive of obtaining from Madison an express recognition of the British Rule of 1756, which Madison had most deeply pledged himself to resist?

On the other hand, Canning showed forbearance and a wish for peace, by leaving Erskine minister at Washington as well as by passing unnoticed Madison’s threats of war; and he betrayed a singular incapacity to understand the bearing of his own demands when he directed Erskine to communicate his instructions in extenso to the American government. Had he intelligently acted in bad faith, he would not have given the President, whose attachment to France he suspected, the advantage of seeing these instructions, which required that America should become a subject State of England.

Perhaps a partial clew to these seeming contradictions might be found in the peculiar traits of Canning’s character. He belonged to a class of men denied the faculty of realizing the sensibilities of others. At the moment when he took this tone of authority toward America, he gave mortal offence to his own colleague Lord Castlereagh, by assuming a like attitude toward him. He could not understand, and he could never train himself to regard, the rule that such an attitude between States as between gentlemen was not admitted among equals.

Whatever was the reason of Canning’s conduct, its effect was that of creating the impression of bad faith by offering terms intended to be refused. The effect of bad faith was the more certain because the instructions closed by giving Erskine some latitude, not as to the conditions which were to be distinctly and officially recognized, but as to the form in which the recognition might be required:—

“Upon the receipt here of an official note containing an engagement for the adoption of the three conditions above specified, his Majesty will be prepared on the faith of such engagement,—either immediately, if the repeal shall have been immediate in America or on any day specified by the American government for that repeal,—reciprocally to recall the Orders in Council.”

The form of the required engagement was left to Erskine’s discretion; and in case Erskine failed, Canning would be still at liberty to claim, as he afterward did, that his conditions were not so rigorously meant as Erskine should have supposed them to be.

Meanwhile the Government of England was falling to pieces. Day by day the situation became more alarming. For months after these despatches were sent, the Commons passed their time in taking testimony and listening to speeches intended to prove or disprove that the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the army, was in the habit of selling officers’ commissions through the agency of his mistress, a certain Mrs. Clarke; and although the Duke protested his innocence, the scandal drove him from his office. The old King, blind and infirm, was quite unfit to bear the shame of his son’s disgrace; while the Prince of Wales stood no better than the Duke of York either in his father’s esteem or in public opinion. The Ministry was rent by faction; Perceval, Castlereagh, and Canning were at cross purposes, while the Whigs were so weak that they rather feared than hoped their rivals’ fall. Whatever might be the factiousness of Congress or the weakness of government at Washington, the confusion in Parliament was worse, and threatened worse dangers.

“All power and influence of Perceval in the House is quite gone by,” wrote a Whig member, February 16.[51] “He speaks without authority and without attention paid to him; and Canning has made two or three such rash declarations that he is little attended to. You may judge the situation of the House, when I tell you we were last night nearly three quarters of an hour debating about the evidence of a drunken footman by Perceval suggesting modes of ascertaining how to convict him of his drunkenness,—Charles Long [one of the Administration], near whom I was sitting telling me at the time what a lamentable proof it was of the want of some man of sense and judgment to lead the House. There is no government in the House of Commons,—you may be assured the thing does not exist; and whether they can ever recover their tone of power remains to be proved. At present Mr. Croker, Mr. D. Brown, and Mr. Beresford are the leaders.... The Cintra Convention, or the general campaign, or the American question, are minor considerations, and indeed do not enter into the consideration of any one.”

The House of Lords maintained more appearance of dignity; and there, February 17, four-and-twenty hours after Colonel Fremantle wrote this letter, Lord Grenville began a debate on American affairs. As a test of Tory sincerity in view of what Erskine was soon to do at Washington, the debate—as well as all else that was said of American affairs during the session—deserved more than ordinary notice, if only in justice to the British ministry, whose language was to receive a commentary they did not expect.[52]

The most significant speech came from Lord Sidmouth. The conservatism of this peer stood above reproach, and compared closely with that of Spencer Perceval. Rather than abandon the “established principle” of the Rule of 1756, he far preferred an American war. He proved his stubborn Tory consistency too clearly, both before and after 1809, to warrant a suspicion of leanings toward liberal or American sympathies; but his speech of February 17 supporting Grenville, and charging ministers with bad faith, was long and earnest. He called attention to the scandal that while the Government professed in the speech from the Throne a persuasion “that in the result the enemy will be convinced of the impolicy of persevering in a system which retorts upon himself, in so much greater proportion, those evils which he endeavors to inflict,” yet instead of retorting those evils, Perceval licensed the export and import both with France and Holland of the very articles which those countries wished to sell and buy, while Canning at the same moment rejected the American offers of trade because he thought it “important in the highest degree that the disappointment of the hopes of the enemy should not have been purchased by any concession.”

Ministers might disregard Grenville’s furious denunciation of the orders as an act of the most egregious folly and the most unexampled ignorance that ever disgraced the councils of a State; they might even close their ears to Sidmouth’s charge that the folly and ignorance of the orders were surpassed by their dishonesty,—but not even Spencer Perceval could deny or forget that while a year before, Feb. 15, 1808, forty-eight peers voted against him, on Feb. 17, 1809, seventy lords, in person or by proxy, supported Grenville. While the opposition gained twenty-two votes, the government gained only nine.

The impression of weakness in the ministry was increased by the energy with which the authors of the orders stood at bay in their defence. When Whitbread in the House of Commons renewed the attack, and the House, March 6, entered on the debate, James Stephen came forward as the champion of his own cause. Stephen’s speech,[53] published afterward as a pamphlet, was intended to be an official as well as a final answer to attacks against the orders, and was conclusive in regard to the scope and motives of Perceval’s scheme. Neither Canning nor Liverpool spoke with personal knowledge to be compared with that of Stephen. Canning in particular had nothing to do with the orders except as a subject of diplomatic evasion. Stephen, Perceval, and George Rose were the parents of commercial restriction, and knew best their own objects. With frankness creditable to him, but contrasting with the double-toned language of Perceval and Canning, Stephen always placed in the foreground the commercial objects he wanted and expected to attain. His speech of March 6, 1809, once more asserted, in language as positive as possible, that the orders had no other purpose than to stop the American trade with France because it threatened to supplant British trade. The doctrine of retaliation, or the object of retorting evils on France, had nothing to do with Stephen’s scheme. His words were clear, for like a true enthusiast he was wholly intent on the idea in which he thought safety depended.

Canning also planted himself on advanced ground. The question, he said, was between England and France; not between England and America. On the principles of international law he had no defence to offer for the Orders in Council as between England and America. “He was willing to admit that it was not upon the poor pretence of the existing law of nations, but upon the extension of that law (an extension just and necessary), that his Majesty’s ministers were to rely, in the present instance, for justification.” This extension rested on the excuse that France had first discarded the law of nations; and America, in attempting to give to Great Britain the priority in wrong, had incurred this censure,—“that she had brought a false charge, and persisted in it.” In his opinion, the American offer to withdraw the embargo in favor of England and to enforce it against France, “was illusory; he might add, in the language of Mr. Madison, ‘it was insulting.’” Those who accused ministers of a disinclination to adopt pacific measures respecting America had lost sight of the facts. “We had rather gone too far than done too little. We twice offered to negotiate; yet the Non-importation Act was not revoked.”

If this was Canning’s true state of mind, his instructions to Erskine less than a month before, offering to abandon the Orders in Council, seemed to admit no defence. Still less could be explained how President Madison, after reading these speeches, should have expected from Canning the approval of any possible arrangement. Yet the irritation of Canning’s tone showed him to be ill at ease,—he felt the ground slipping under his feet. The public had become weary of him and his colleagues. The commercial system they had invented seemed to create the evils it was made to counteract. The press began to complain. As early as January 13 the “Times” showed signs of deserting the orders, which it declared to be no “acts of retaliation,” but “measures of counteraction,” complicated by transit duties doubtful either in expediency or justice. “If America will withdraw her Embargo and Non-importation Acts as far as they relate to England, provided we rescind the Orders in Council, we cannot consider this as a disgraceful concession on our part.” After the debate of March 6, the “Times” renewed its complaints. Every day increased the difficulties of ministers, until mere change became relief.

At length, April 26, the reality of the weakness of Perceval and Canning became clear. On that day a new Order in Council[54] appeared, which roused great interest because it seemed to abandon the whole ground taken in the Orders of November, 1807, and to return within the admitted principles of international law. The machinery of the old orders was apparently discarded; the machinery of blockade was restored in its place. The Order of April 26, 1809, declared that the old orders were revoked and annulled except so far as their objects were to be attained by a general blockade of all ports and places under the government of France. The blockade thus declared was to extend northward as far as Ems, and was to include on the south the ports of northern Italy. Of course the new blockade was not even claimed to be effective. No squadrons were to enforce its provisions by their actual presence before the blockaded ports. In that respect the Order of April 26, 1809, was as illegal as that of Nov. 11, 1807; but the new arrangement opened to neutral commerce all ports not actually ports of France, even though the British flag should be excluded from them,—retaliating upon France only the injury which the French decrees attempted to inflict on England.

Pinkney was greatly pleased, and wrote to Madison in excellent spirits[55] that the change gave all the immediate benefits which could have arisen from the arrangement proposed by him in the previous August, except the right to demand from France the recall of her edicts. “Our triumph is already considered as a signal one by everybody. The pretexts with which ministers would conceal their motives for a relinquishment of all which they prized in their system are seen through, and it is universally viewed as a concession to America. Our honor is now safe; and by management we may probably gain everything we have in view.” Canning said to Pinkney: “If these alterations did not do all that was expected, they at least narrowed extremely the field of discussion, and gave great facilities and encouragement to reviving cordiality.”[56] Government took pains to impress the idea that it had done much, and wished to do more for conciliation; yet the doubt remained whether Government was acting in good faith. Pinkney overestimated its concessions. If the British navy was to blockade Holland, France, and northern Italy only in order that British commerce might be forced, through the blockade and license system, into the place of neutral commerce, the new system was only the old one in disguise. Under a blockade, in good faith, licenses seemed to have no place. In that case, the Order in Council of April 26 might lead to a real settlement; but how was it possible that Perceval, George Rose, and James Stephen should have given up what they believed to be the only hope for England’s safety?

If one frank and straightforward man could be found among the ministerial ranks, James Stephen had a right to that distinction, and to his language one might hope to look with confidence for the truth; yet Stephen seemed for once not to understand himself. In publishing his speech of March 6, he added an appendix on the new order, and closed his remarks by a prayer that seemed meant to open the way for the full admission of American offers:—

“It is not strange that a measure so indulgent [as the new Order] should be generally approved by the American merchants and agents resident in England. The most eminent of the gentlemen of that description who opposed the Orders of November have openly professed their satisfaction at this important change. May the same sentiment prevail on notice of it beyond the Atlantic! Or, what would be still better, may an amicable arrangement there have already terminated all the differences between us and our American brethren on terms that will involve a complete revocation of our retaliatory orders, and impose on America herself, by her own consent, the duty of vindicating effectually the rights of neutrality against the aggressions of France!”

CHAPTER IV.

Early in February, when Congress refused to support Madison’s war-policy,—the mere shadow of which brought Perceval and Canning almost to their senses,—Canning’s instructions were despatched from the Foreign Office. April 7, more than a month after the Tenth Congress had expired, amidst political conditions altogether different from those imagined by Canning, the instructions reached Washington; and Erskine found himself required to carry them into effect.

A cautious diplomatist would have declined to act upon them. Under pretext of the change which had altered the situation he would have asked for new instructions, while pointing out the mischievous nature of the old. The instructions were evidently impossible to execute; the situation was less critical than ever before, and Great Britain was master of the field.

On the other hand, the instructions offered some appearance of an advance toward friendship. They proved Canning’s ignorance, but not his bad faith; and if Canning in good faith wanted a settlement, Erskine saw every reason for gratifying him. The arrogance of Canning’s demands did not necessarily exclude further concession. The great governments of Europe from time immemorial had used a tone of authority insufferable to weaker Powers, and not agreeable to one another; yet their tone did not always imply the wish to quarrel, and England herself seldom resented manners as unpleasant as her own. Used to the rough exchange of blows, and hardened by centuries of toil and fighting, England was not sensitive when her interests were at stake. Her surliness was a trick rather than a design. Her diplomatic agents expected to enjoy reasonable liberty in softening the harshness and in supplying the ignorance of their chiefs of the Foreign Office; and if such latitude was ever allowed to a diplomatist, Erskine had the best right to use it in the case of instructions the motives of which he could not comprehend.

Finally, Erskine was the son of Lord Erskine, and owed his appointment to Charles James Fox. He was half Republican by education, half American by marriage; and probably, like all British liberals, he felt in secret an entire want of confidence in Canning and a positive antipathy to the Tory commercial system.

Going at once to Secretary Robert Smith, Erskine began on the “Chesapeake” affair, and quickly disposed of it. The President abandoned the American demand for a court-martial on Admiral Berkeley, finding that it would not be entertained.[57] Erskine then wrote a letter offering the stipulated redress for the “Chesapeake” outrage, and Madison wrote a letter accepting it, which Robert Smith signed, and dated April 17.

Two points in Madison’s “Chesapeake” letter attracted notice. Erskine began his official note[58] by alluding to the Non-intercourse Act of March 1, as having placed Great Britain on an equal footing with the other belligerents, and warranting acknowledgment on that account. The idea was far-fetched, and Madison’s reply was ambiguous:—

“As it appears at the same time, that in making this offer his Britannic Majesty derives a motive from the equality now existing in the relations of the United States with the two belligerent Powers, the President owes it to the occasion and to himself to let it be understood that this equality is a result incident to a state of things growing out of distinct considerations.”

If Madison knew precisely what “distinct considerations” had led Congress and the country to that state of things to which the Non-intercourse Act was incident, he knew more than was known to Congress; but even though he owed this statement to himself, so important an official note might have expressed his ideas more exactly. “A result incident to a state of things growing out of distinct considerations” was something unusual, and to say the least wanting in clearness, but seemed not intended to gratify Canning.

The second point challenged sharper criticism.

“With this explanation, as requisite as it is frank,” Smith’s note continued, “I am authorized to inform you that the President accepts the note delivered by you in the name and by the order of his Britannic Majesty, and will consider the same with the engagement therein, when fulfilled, as a satisfaction for the insult and injury of which he has complained. But I have it in express charge from the President to state that while he forbears to insist on the further punishment of the offending officer, he is not the less sensible of the justice and utility of such an example, nor the less persuaded that it would best comport with what is due from his Britannic Majesty to his own honor.”

According to Robert Smith’s subsequent account, the last sentence was added by Madison in opposition to his secretary’s wishes.[59] One of Madison’s peculiarities showed itself in these words, which endangered the success of all his efforts. If he wished a reconciliation, they were worse than useless; but if he wished a quarrel, he chose the right means. The President of the United States was charged with the duty of asserting in its full extent what was due to his own honor as representative of the Union; but he was not required, either by the laws of his country or by the custom of nations, to define the conduct which in his opinion best comported with what was due from his Britannic Majesty to the honor of England. That Erskine should have consented to receive such a note was matter for wonder, knowing as he did that Kings of England had never smiled on servants who allowed their sovereign’s honor to be questioned; and the public surprise was not lessened by his excuse.

“It appeared to me,” he said,[60] “that if any indecorum could justly be attributed to the expressions in the official notes of this Government, the censure due would fall upon them; and that the public opinion would condemn their bad taste or want of propriety in coldly and ungraciously giving up what they considered as a right, but which they were not in a condition to enforce.”

Under the impression that no “intention whatever existed in the mind of the President of the United States to convey a disrespectful meaning toward his Majesty by these expressions,” Erskine accepted them in silence, and Madison himself never understood that he had given cause of offence.

Having thus disposed of the “Chesapeake” grievance, Erskine took up the Orders in Council.[61] His instructions were emphatic, and he was in effect ordered to communicate these instructions in extenso to the President, for in such cases permission was equivalent to order. He disobeyed; in official sense he did not communicate his instructions at all. “I considered that it would be in vain,” he afterward said. This was his first exercise of discretion; and his second was more serious. After reading Canning’s repeated and positive orders to require from the American government “a distinct and official recognition” of three conditions, he decided to treat these orders as irrelevant. He knew that the President had no Constitutional power to bind Congress, even if Madison himself would patiently bear a single reading of three such impossible requirements, and that under these circumstances the negotiation had better never begin than end abruptly in anger. Erskine would have done better not to begin it; but he thought otherwise. Under more favorable circumstances, Monroe and Pinkney had made the same experiment in 1806.

Canning offered to withdraw the Orders in Council, on three conditions precedent:—

(1) That all interdicts on commerce should be revoked by the United States so far as they affected England, while they were still to be enforced against France. When Erskine submitted this condition to Robert Smith, he was assured that the President would comply with it, and that Congress would certainly assert the national rights against France, but that the President had no power to pledge the government by a formal act. Erskine decided to consider Canning’s condition fulfilled if the President, under the eleventh section of the Non-intercourse Act, should issue a proclamation renewing trade with Great Britain, while retaining the prohibition against France. This settlement had the disadvantage of giving no guarantee to England, while it left open the trade with Holland, which was certainly a dependency of France.

(2) Canning further required that the United States should formally renounce the pretension to a colonial trade in war which was not permitted in time of peace. To this condition, which Erskine seems to have stated as applying only to the direct carrying-trade to Europe, Robert Smith replied that it could not be recognized except in a formal treaty; but that it was practically unimportant, because this commerce, as well as every other with France or her dependencies, was prohibited by Act of Congress. Erskine accepted this reasoning, and left the abstract right untouched.

(3) Canning lastly demanded that the United States should recognize the right of Great Britain to capture such American vessels as should be found attempting to trade with any of the Powers acting under the French Decrees. To this suggestion Secretary Smith replied that the President could not so far degrade the national authority as to authorize Great Britain to execute American laws; but that the point seemed to him immaterial, since no citizen could present to the United States government a claim founded on a violation of its own laws. Erskine once more acquiesced, although the trade with Holland was not a violation of law, and would probably give rise to the very claims which Canning meant to preclude.

Having thus disposed of the three conditions which were to be distinctly and officially recognized, Erskine exchanged notes with Robert Smith, bearing date April 18 and 19, 1809, chiefly admirable for their brevity, since they touched no principle. In his note of April 18, Erskine said that the favorable change produced by anticipation of the Non-intercourse Act had encouraged his Government to send out a new envoy with full powers; and that meanwhile his Majesty would recall his Orders in Council if the President would issue a Proclamation renewing intercourse with Great Britain. Secretary Smith replied on the same day that the President would not fail in doing so. April 19, Erskine in a few lines announced himself “authorized to declare that his Majesty’s Orders in Council of January and November, 1807, will have been withdrawn as respects the United States on the 10th of June next.” Secretary Smith answered that the President would immediately issue his Proclamation. Two days afterward the four notes and the Proclamation itself were published in the “National Intelligencer.”

The United States heard with delight that friendship with England had been restored. Amid an outburst of joy commerce resumed its old paths, and without waiting for June 10 hurried ships and merchandise to British ports. No complaints were heard; not a voice was raised about impressments; no regret was expressed that war with France must follow reconciliation with England; no one found fault with Madison for following in 1809 the policy which had raised almost a resolution against President Washington only fourteen years before. Yet Madison strained the law, besides showing headlong haste, in acting upon Erskine’s promises without waiting for their ratification, and without even asking to see the British negotiator’s special powers or instructions. The haste was no accident or oversight. When Turreau remonstrated with Gallatin against such precipitate conduct contrary to diplomatic usage, Gallatin answered,—

“The offers could not be refused.”

“But you have only promises,” urged Turreau; “and already twelve hundred vessels, twelve thousand sailors, and two hundred million [francs] of property have left your ports. May not the English take all this to serve as a guarantee for other conditions which their interest might care to impose?”

“We would like it!” replied the Secretary of the Treasury. “Perhaps our people may need such a lesson to cure them of British influence and the mania of British commerce.”[62]

Impatient at the conduct of Congress and the people, Madison was glad to create a new situation, and preferred even hostilities to the Orders in Council. Erskine’s conduct was unusual, yet Great Britain had shown no such regard for Madison’s feelings that Madison should hesitate before the eccentricities of British diplomacy. Perplexed to account for Canning’s sudden change, the President and his friends quieted their uneasiness by attributing their triumph to their own statesmanship. The Republican newspapers, the “National Intelligencer” at their head, announced that England had been conquered by the embargo, and taunted not only the Federalists but also the Northern Republicans with the triumph. While nothing could be more positive than the language thus encouraged by the Government, the error was partly redeemed by the tenderness with which it was used to soothe the wounded feelings of Jefferson.

“The bright day of judgment and retribution has at length arrived,” said the “National Intelligencer” of April 26, “when a virtuous nation will not withhold the tribute of its warmest thanks from an Administration whose sole ambition has ever been to advance the happiness of its constituents, even at the sacrifice of its present popularity. Thanks to the sage who now so gloriously reposes in the shades of Monticello, and to those who shared his confidence!... It may be boldly alleged that the revocation of the British Orders is attributable to the embargo.”

President Madison wrote to Jefferson somewhat more cautiously:[63] “The British Cabinet must have changed its course under a full conviction that an adjustment with this country had become essential.” Accepting quietly a turn of fortune that would have bewildered the most astute diplomatist, Madison made ready to meet the special session of Congress.

The Eleventh Congress differed little in character from its predecessor, but that little difference was not to its advantage. G. W. Campbell of Tennessee, David R. Williams of South Carolina, Joseph Clay of Pennsylvania, Joseph Story of Massachusetts, and Wilson Cary Nicholas of Virginia disappeared from the House, and no one of equal influence stepped into their places. The mediocrity of the Tenth Congress continued to mark the character of the Eleventh. John W. Eppes became chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means. Varnum was again chosen Speaker, while Vice-President George Clinton still presided over the deliberations of thirty-four men whose abilities were certainly not greater than those of any previous Senate.

May 23 President Madison’s first Annual Message was read. No objection could be made to its brief recital of the steps which led to the arrangement with Erskine; but the next paragraph not only provoked attack, it threatened the country also with commercial wars to the end of time:—

“Whilst I take pleasure in doing justice to the councils of his Britannic Majesty which, no longer adhering to the policy which made an abandonment by France of her Decrees a prerequisite to the revocation of the British Orders, have substituted the amicable course which has issued thus happily, I cannot do less than refer to the proposal heretofore made on the part of the United States, embracing a like restoration of the suspended commerce, as a proof of the spirit of accommodation which has at no time been intermitted, and to the result which now calls for our congratulations as corroborating the principles by which the public councils have been guided during a period of the most trying embarrassments.”

When Madison spoke of the “principles by which the public councils have been guided,” he meant to place at their head the principles of embargo and non-intercourse,—a result of Erskine’s arrangement hardly more agreeable to commercial America than to despotic England; but however England might resent what Canning would certainly think an offence, Americans were in no humor for fault-finding, and they received Madison’s allusions with little protest. The remainder of the Message contained nothing that called for dispute.

The Federalist minority—strong in numbers, flushed by victory over Jefferson, and full of contempt for the abilities of their opponents—found themselves suddenly deprived by Erskine and Madison of every grievance to stand upon. For once, no one charged that Madison’s act was dictated from the Tuileries. The Federalist newspapers, like their Republican rivals, advanced the idea that their success was the natural result of their own statesmanship. Their efforts against the embargo had opened the path for Canning’s good-will to show itself, and the removal of Jefferson’s sinister influence accounted for the brilliancy of Madison’s success. The attempt to approve Erskine’s arrangement without approving Jefferson’s system, required ingenuity as great as was shown in the similar attempt of Madison to weigh down Erskine’s arrangement by coupling it with the embargo. These party tactics would hardly deserve notice had not John Randolph, in drawing a sharp line between Jefferson and Madison, enlivened the monotony of debate by comments not without interest.

“Without the slightest disposition to create unpleasant sensations,” said he, “to go back upon the footsteps of the last four years, I do unequivocally say that I believe the country will never see such another Administration as the last. It had my hearty approbation for one half of its career; as for my opinion of the remainder of it, it has been no secret. The lean kine of Pharaoh devoured the fat kine; the last four years, with the embargo in their train, ate up the rich harvest of the first four; and if we had not had some Joseph to have stepped in and changed the state of things, what would have been now the condition of the country? I repeat it,—never has there been any Administration which went out of office and left the country in a state so deplorable and calamitous as the last.”

Not satisfied with criticising Jefferson, Randolph committed himself to the opinion that Canning had been influenced by the same antipathy, and had been withheld from earlier concessions only by Jefferson’s conduct:—

“Mr. Canning obtained as good a bargain from us as he could have expected to obtain; and those gentlemen who speak of his having heretofore had it in his power to have done the same, did not take into calculation the material difference between the situation in which we now stand and the situation in which we before stood.”

In the virulence of temper with which Randolph blackened the Administration of Jefferson, he could not help committing himself to unqualified support of Madison; and even Barent Gardenier, whose temper was at least as indiscreet as Randolph’s, seemed to revel in the pleasure of depressing the departed President in order to elevate the actual Executive, whose eight years of coming power were more dangerous to the opposition than the eight years of Jefferson had ever been.

“I am pretty well satisfied,” said Barent Gardenier,[64] “that when the secret history of the two last years is divulged, it will be found that while the former President was endeavoring to fan the flames of war, the Secretary of State ... was smoothing the way for the happy discharge of his Presidential duties when he should come to the chair. I think it did him honor.... It is for the promptitude and frankness with which the President met the late overture that I thank him most cordially for my country. I approve it most heartily.... And it is now in proof before us, as I have said and contended, that nothing was wanting but a proper spirit of conciliation, and fair and honorable dealing on the part of this country, to bring to a happy issue all the fictitious differences between this country and Great Britain.”

Political indiscretion could go no further. The rule that in public life one could never safely speak well of an opponent, was illustrated by the mistake of the Federalists in praising Madison merely to gratify their antipathy to Jefferson. Had they been silent; or had they shown suspicion, they would have been safe; but all admitted that French influence and hostility to England had vanished with Jefferson; all were positive that England had gained what she had sought, and that Canning had every reason to be satisfied. For the moment Madison was the most popular President that ever had met Congress. At no session since 1789 had such harmony prevailed as during the five weeks of this political paradise, although not one element had changed its character or position, and the harmony, like the discord, was a play of imagination. Congress passed its bills with unanimity altogether new. That which restored relations of commerce with England passed without discussion, except on the point whether French ships of war should be admitted to American ports. Somewhat to the alarm of the Eastern men, Congress decided not to exclude French national vessels,—a decision which threw some doubt on Madison’s wish to push matters to a head with Napoleon. Yet care was taken to avoid offence to Great Britain. Little was said and nothing was done about impressments. An attempt to increase the protective duties was defeated. Not a voice was raised on behalf of France; not a fear of Napoleon’s revenge found tongue.

Although no one ventured to avow suspicion that Canning would refuse to ratify Erskine’s act, news continued to arrive from England which seemed hard to reconcile with any immediate thought, in the British ministry, of giving up their restrictive system. June 10, the day when amid universal delight the new arrangement went into effect, the public pleasure was not a little disturbed by the arrival of news that on April 26 the British government had issued a very important Order in Council, revoking the order of Nov. 11, 1807, and establishing in its place a general blockade of Holland, France, and Italy. This step, though evidently a considerable concession,—which would have produced its intended effect in checking hostile feeling if Erskine had not intervened,—roused anxiety because of its remote resemblance to Erskine’s arrangement, which it seemed to adopt by means that the United States could not admit as legal or consistent with the terms of Erskine’s letters.

“The new Orders,” wrote Madison to Jefferson,[65] ... “present a curious feature in the conduct of the British Cabinet. It is explained by some at the expense of its sincerity. It is more probably ascribed, I think, to an awkwardness in getting out of an awkward situation, and to the policy of withholding as long as possible from France the motive of its example to have advances on her part toward adjustment with us. The crooked proceeding seems to be operating as a check to the extravagance of credit given to Great Britain for the late arrangement with us, and so far may be salutary.”

Such reasoning was soon felt to be insufficient. The more the new order was studied, the less its motive was understood. How could Canning in January have authorized Erskine to withdraw the orders of 1807 without reserve, when in April, without waiting to hear from Erskine, he himself withdrew those orders only to impose another that had every mark of permanence? How could Erskine, April 18, have been authorized to throw open the ports of Holland, when his Government, April 26, was engaged in imposing a new blockade upon them? So rapidly did the uneasiness of Congress increase that Erskine was obliged to interpose. June 15 he wrote an official note to the Secretary of State, which the President sent the same day to Congress.[66]

“I have the honor,” said Erskine, “to enclose a copy of an Order of his Majesty in Council issued on the 26th of April last. In consequence of official communications sent to me from his Majesty’s government since the adoption of that measure, I am enabled to assure you that it has no connection whatever with the overtures which I have been authorized to make to the government of the United States; and that I am persuaded that the terms of the agreement so happily concluded by the recent negotiation will be strictly fulfilled on the part of his Majesty.”

The expressions of this letter, if carefully read, still left cause for doubt; and Madison saw it, although he clung to what he thought he had gained. June 20 he wrote again to Jefferson:[67]—

“The ‘Gazette’ of yesterday contains the mode pursued for reanimating confidence in the pledge of the British government given by Mr. Erskine in his arrangement with this government. The puzzle created by the Order of April struck every one. Erskine assures us that his Government was under such impressions as to the views of this, that not the slightest expectation existed of our fairly meeting its overtures, and that the last order was considered as a seasonable mitigation of the tendency of a failure of the experiment. This explanation seems as extraordinary as the alternative it shows. The fresh declarations of Mr. Erskine seem to have quieted the distrust which was becoming very strong, but has not destroyed the effect of the ill grace stamped on the British retreat, and of the commercial rigor evinced by the new and insidious duties stated in the newspapers. It may be expected, I think, that the British government will fulfil what its minister has stipulated; and that if it means to be trickish, it will frustrate the proposed negotiation, and then say their orders were not permanently repealed but only withdrawn in the mean time.”

Madison had chosen to precipitate a decision, with a view to profiting in either case, whether England consented or refused to have her hands thus forced. Indeed, if he had not himself been old in the ways of diplomacy, Turreau was on the spot to warn him, and lost no chance of lecturing the Administration on the folly of trusting Erskine’s word.

Meanwhile Turreau so far lost his temper as to address to Secretary Smith a long letter complaining of the persistently unfriendly attitude of the United States government toward France. So strong was the language of the letter that Turreau was obliged to withdraw it.[68] Robert Smith attempted to pacify him by assurances that the new Administration would respect the Spanish possessions more strictly than the old one had done.

“The Secretary of State did not deny that there might have been some attempt in that direction,” reported Turreau, June 14,[69] “but at the same time, while himself alluding to the affair of Miranda, he attributed these events to causes independent of the actual Administration and anterior to its existence, and especially to the weakness and the indiscretions of Mr. Jefferson; that he [Smith] was then in the Cabinet, and knew better than any one how much the want of vigor (mollesse), the uncertainty, and absence of plan in the Executive head had contributed to the false steps of the Federal government.”

The new Administration meant to show vigor. Every act and expression implied that its path was to be direct to its ends. The President and Congress waited with composure for the outcome of Erskine’s strange conduct.

No new measure was suggested, after June 10, to provide for the chance that Erskine’s arrangement might fail, and that the Order in Council of April 26, 1809, might prove to be a permanent system. Congress seemed disposed to indulge the merchants to the utmost in their eagerness for trade. The nearest approach to suspicion was shown in the House by appropriating $750,000 for fortifications. Randolph, Macon, Eppes, and Richard M. Johnson tried to reduce the amount to $150,000. The larger appropriation was understood to mean an intention of preparing for attack, and eighty-four members sustained the policy against a minority of forty-seven; but notwithstanding this vote and the anxiety caused by the new Order in Council, Congress decided to stop enlistments for the army; and by an Act approved June 28 the President was authorized, “in the event of a favorable change in our foreign relations,” to reduce the naval force, although the words of the Act implied doubt whether the favorable change would take place.

Nothing could be happier for Madison than this situation, where all parties were held in check not only by his success but by his danger. So completely was discipline restored, that June 27 he ventured to send the name of J. Q. Adams a second time to the Senate as minister to Russia; and nineteen Republicans confirmed the nomination, while but one adhered to the opinion that the mission was unnecessary. The power of England over America was never more strikingly shown than by the sudden calm which fell on the country, in full prospect of war with France, at a word from a British minister. As Canning frowned or smiled, faction rose to frenzy or lay down to slumber throughout the United States. No sooner did the news of Erskine’s arrangement reach Quebec May 1, than Sir James Craig recalled his secret agent, John Henry, from Boston, where he still lingered. “I am cruelly out of spirits,” wrote Secretary Ryland to Henry,[70] “at the idea of Old England truckling to such a debased and accursed government as that of the United States;” but since this was the case, Henry’s services could no longer be useful. He returned to Montreal early in June.

June 28 Congress adjourned, leaving the Executive, for the first time in many years, almost without care, until the fourth Monday in November.

CHAPTER V.

Erskine’s despatches were received by Canning May 22, and the “Morning Post” of the next day printed the news with approval: “Upon this pleasing event we sincerely congratulate the public.” The “Times” of May 24 accepted the arrangement: “We shall not urge anything against the concessions.” May 25, with “considerable pain though but little surprise,” the same newspaper announced that Erskine was disavowed by the Government.

Canning’s abrupt rejection of Erskine’s arrangement without explanation must have seemed even to himself a high-handed course, at variance with some of his late professions, certain to injure or even to destroy British influence in America, and likely to end in war. To the settlement as a practical measure no objection could be alleged. No charge of bad faith could be supported. No shadow of law or reason could be devised for enforcing against America rights derived from retaliation upon France, when America enforced stronger measures of retaliation upon France than those imposed by the Orders in Council. Neither the Non-importation Act of 1806, nor the “Chesapeake” proclamation of 1807, nor the embargo, nor the Non-intercourse Act of March, 1809, could be used to justify the rejection of an arrangement which evaded or removed every British grievance. Even the subject of impressments had been suppressed by the American government. Madison flung himself into Canning’s arms, and to fling him back was an effort of sheer violence.

Perhaps the effort gave to Canning’s conduct an air that he would not naturally have cared to betray; for his manner was that of a man irritated by finding himself obliged to be brutal. In the want of a reason for rejecting the American arrangement, he was reduced to rejecting it without giving a reason. The process of disciplining Erskine was simple, for Erskine had disregarded instructions to an extent that no government could afford to overlook; but President Madison was not in the employ of the British king, and had a right to such consideration at least as one gentleman commonly owes to another.

Canning addressed himself first to the simpler task. May 22, a few hours after receiving the despatches from Washington, he wrote a despatch to Erskine in regard to the “Chesapeake” arrangement.[71] He reminded Erskine that his instructions had required the formal exclusion of French war-vessels and the formal withdrawal of the “Chesapeake” proclamation before any arrangement should be concluded. Not only had these conditions been neglected, but two other less serious errors had been made.

Variations from the rigor of instructions might be ground for reproving Erskine, but could hardly excuse a disavowal of the compact; yet the compact was disavowed. An impression was general that the Ministry were disposed to ratify it, but were withheld by the paragraph in Robert Smith’s letter defining what was due from his Britannic Majesty to his own honor. Milder Foreign Secretaries than George Canning would have found themselves obliged to take notice of such a reflection, and Canning appeared at his best when his adversaries gave him an excuse for the lofty tone he liked to assume.

“It remains for me,” he continued, “to notice the expressions, so full of disrespect to his Majesty, with which that note concludes; and I am to signify to you the displeasure which his Majesty feels that any minister of his Majesty should have shown himself so far insensible of what is due to the dignity of his sovereign as to have consented to receive and transmit a note in which such expressions were contained.”

Canning was hardly the proper person to criticise Robert Smith’s disrespectful expressions, which, whatever their intention, failed to be nearly as offensive as many of his own; but this was a matter between himself and Erskine. Even after granting the propriety of his comment, diplomatic usage seemed to require that some demand of explanation or apology from the American government should precede the rejection of an engagement otherwise satisfactory; but no such step was in this case taken through Erskine. His settlement of the “Chesapeake” outrage was repudiated without more words, and the next day Canning repudiated the rest of the arrangement.

Nothing could be easier than to show that Erskine had violated his instructions more plainly in regard to the Orders in Council than in regard to the “Chesapeake” affair. Of the three conditions imposed by Canning, not one had been fulfilled. The first required the repeal of all Non-intercourse Acts against England, “leaving them in force with respect to France;” but Erskine had doubly failed to secure it:[72]—

“As the matter at present stands before the world in your official correspondence with Mr. Smith, the American government would be at liberty to-morrow to repeal the Non-intercourse Act altogether, without infringing the agreement which you have thought proper to enter into on behalf of his Majesty; and if such a clause was thought necessary to this condition at the time when my instructions were written, it was obviously become much more so when the Non-intercourse Act was passed for a limited time. You must also have been aware at the time of making the agreement that the American government had in fact formally exempted Holland, a Power which has unquestionably ‘adopted and acted under the Decrees of France,’ from the operation of the Non-intercourse Act,—an exemption in direct contravention of the condition prescribed to you, and which of itself ought to have prevented you from coming to any agreement whatever.”

Here, again, sufficient reasons were given for punishing Erskine; but these reasons were not equally good for repudiating the compact with the United States. No American vessels could enter a Dutch port so long as the British blockade lasted; therefore the exemption of Holland from the non-intercourse affected England only by giving to her navy another chance for booty, and to the Americans one more empty claim. Canning himself explained to Pinkney[73] “that the exemption of Holland from the effect of our embargo and non-intercourse would not have been much objected to by the British government” if the President had been willing to pledge himself to enforce the non-intercourse against France; but for aught that appeared to the contrary, “the embargo and non-intercourse laws might be suffered without any breach of faith to expire, or might even be repealed immediately, notwithstanding the perseverance of France in her Berlin and other edicts; and that Mr. Erskine had in truth secured nothing more, as the consideration of the recall of the Orders in Council, than the renewal of American intercourse with Great Britain.”

Thus Canning justified the repudiation of Erskine’s arrangement by the single reason that the United States government could not be trusted long enough to prove its good faith. The explanation was difficult to express in courteous or diplomatic forms; but perhaps its most striking quality, next to its want of courtesy, was its evident want of candor. Had the American government evaded its obligation, the British government held the power of redress in its own hands. Clearly the true explanation was to be sought elsewhere, in some object which Canning could not put in diplomatic words, but which lay in the nature of Perceval’s system. Even during the three days while the decision was supposed to be in doubt, alarmed merchants threw themselves in crowds on the Board of Trade, protesting that if American vessels with their cheaper sugar, cotton, and coffee were allowed to enter Amsterdam and Antwerp, British trade was at an end.[74] The mere expectation of their arrival would create such a fall in prices as to make worthless the accumulated mass of such merchandise with which the warehouses were filled, not only in London, but also in the little island of Heligoland at the mouth of the Elbe, where a system of licensed and unlicensed smuggling had been established under the patronage of the Board of Trade. Deputations of these merchants waited on Earl Bathurst to represent the danger of allowing even those American ships to enter Holland which might have already sailed from the United States on the faith of Erskine’s arrangement. Somewhat unexpectedly ministers refused to gratify this prayer. An Order in Council of May 24, while announcing the Royal repudiation of Erskine’s arrangement, declared that American vessels which should have cleared for Holland between April 19 and July 20 would not be molested in their voyage.

The chief objection to Erskine’s arrangement, apart from its effect on British merchants, consisted in the danger that by its means America might compel France to withdraw her decrees affecting neutrals. The chance that Erskine’s arrangement might involve America in war with Napoleon was not worth the equal chance of its producing in the end an amicable arrangement with Napoleon which would sacrifice the last defence of British commerce and manufactures. Had the British government given way, Napoleon, to whom the most solemn pledges cost nothing, would certainly persuade President Madison to lean once more toward France. The habit of balancing the belligerents—the first rule of American diplomacy—required the incessant see-saw of interest. So many unsettled questions remained open that British ministers could not flatter themselves with winning permanent American favor by partial concession.

To Canning’s despatch repudiating the commercial arrangement, Erskine made a reply showing more keenness and skill than was to be found in Canning’s criticism.

“It appears from the general tenor of your despatches,” wrote Erskine[75] on receiving these letters of May 22 and 23, “that his Majesty’s government were not willing to trust to assurances from the American government, but that official pledges were to have been required which could not be given for want of power, some of them also being of a nature which would prevent a formal recognition. Had I believed that his Majesty’s government were determined to insist upon these conditions being complied with in one particular manner only, I should have adhered implicitly to my instructions; but as I collected from them that his Majesty was desirous of accomplishing his retaliatory system by such means as were most compatible with a good understanding with friendly and neutral Powers, I felt confident that his Majesty would approve of the arrangement I had concluded as one likely to lead to a cordial and complete understanding and co-operation on the part of the United States, which co-operation never could be obtained by previous stipulations either from the government of the United States, who have no power to accede to them, or from Congress, which would never acknowledge them as recognitions to guide their conduct.”

This reply, respectful in form, placed Secretary Canning in the dilemma between the guilt of ignorance or that of bad faith; but the rejoinder of a dismissed diplomatist weighed little except in history, and long before it was made public Erskine and his arrangement had ceased to interest the world. Canning disposed of both forever by a third despatch, dated May 30, enclosing to Erskine an Order in Council disavowing his arrangement and ordering him back to England.

When the official disavowal appeared in the newspapers of May 25, Canning had an interview with Pinkney.[76] At great length and with much detail he read the instructions he had given to Erskine, and commented on the points in which Erskine had violated them. He complained of unfriendly expressions in the American notes; but he did not say why the arrangement failed to satisfy all the legitimate objects of England, nor did he suggest any improvement or change which would make the arrangement, as it existed, agreeable to him. On the other hand, he announced that though Erskine would have to be recalled, his successor was already appointed and would sail for America within a few days.

If Canning showed, by his indulgence to American vessels and his haste to send out a new minister, the wish to avoid a rupture with the United States, his selection of an agent for that purpose was so singular as to suggest that he relied on terror rather than on conciliation. In case Erskine had obeyed his instructions, which ordered him merely to prepare the way for negotiation, Canning had fixed upon George Henry Rose as the negotiator.[77] Considering the impression left in America by Rose on his previous mission, his appointment seemed almost the worst that could have been made; but bad as the effect of such a selection would have been, one man, and perhaps only one, in England was certain to make a worse; and him Canning chose. The new minister was Francis James Jackson. Whatever good qualities Jackson possessed were overshadowed by the reputation he had made for himself at Copenhagen. His name was a threat of violence; his temper and manners were notorious; and nothing but his rank in the service marked him as suitable for the post. Pinkney, whose self-control and tact in these difficult circumstances could hardly be too much admired, listened in silence to Canning’s announcement, and rather than risk making the situation worse, reported that Jackson was, he believed, “a worthy man, and although completely attached to all those British principles and doctrines which sometimes give us trouble will, I should hope, give satisfaction.” The English press was not so forbearing. The “Morning Chronicle” of May 29 said that the appointment had excited general surprise, owing to “the character of the individual;” and Pinkney himself, in a later despatch, warned his Government that “it is rather a prevailing notion here that this gentleman’s conduct will not and cannot be what we all wish, and that a better choice might have been made.”[78]

Jackson himself sought the position, knowing its difficulties. May 23, the day of his appointment, he wrote privately to his brother in Spain: “I am about to enter upon a most delicate—I hope not desperate—enterprise.”[79] At a later time, embittered by want of support from home, he complained that Canning had sent him on an errand which he knew to be impossible to perform.[80] So well understood between Canning and Jackson was the nature of the service, that Jackson asked and received as a condition of his acceptance the promise that his employment should last not less than twelve months.[81] The delicate enterprise of which he spoke could have been nothing more than that of preventing a rupture between England and America; but until he studied his instructions, he could hardly have known in its full extent how desperate this undertaking would be.

Canning made no haste. Nearly two months elapsed before Jackson sailed. After correcting Erskine’s mistake and replacing the United States in their position under the Orders in Council of April 26, Canning, June 13, made a statement to the House of Commons. Declining to touch questions of general policy for the reason that negotiations were pending, he contented himself with satisfying the House that Erskine had acted contrary to instructions and deserved recall. James Stephen showed more clearly the spirit of Government by avowing the opinion “that America in all her proceedings had no wish to promote an impartial course with respect to France and this country.” The Whigs knew little or nothing of the true facts; Erskine’s conduct could not be defended; no one cared to point out that Canning left to America no dignified course but war, and public interest was once more concentrated with painful anxiety on the continent of Europe. America dropped from sight, and Canning’s last and worst acts toward the United States escaped notice or knowledge.

The session of Parliament ended June 21, a week before the special session of Congress came to an end; and while England waited impatiently for news from Vienna, where Napoleon was making ready for the battle of Wagram, Canning drew up the instructions to Jackson,—the last of the series of papers by which, through the peculiar qualities of his style even more than by the violence of his acts, he embittered to a point that seemed altogether contrary to their nature a whole nation of Americans against the nation that gave them birth. If the famous phrase of Canning was ever in any sense true,—that he called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old,—it was most nearly true in the sense that his instructions and letters forced the United States into a nationality of character which the war of the Revolution itself had failed to give them.

The instructions to Jackson[82]—five in number—were dated July 1, and require careful attention if the train of events which brought the United States to the level of war with England is to be understood.

The first instruction began by complaint of Erskine’s conduct, passing quickly to a charge of bad faith against the American government, founded on “the publicity so unwarrantably given” to Erskine’s arrangement:—

“The premature publication of the correspondence by the American government so effectually precluded any middle course of explanation and accommodation that it is hardly possible to suppose that it must not have been resorted to in a great measure with that view.

“The American government cannot have believed that such an arrangement as Mr. Erskine consented to accept was conformable to his instructions. If Mr. Erskine availed himself of the liberty allowed to him of communicating those instructions on the affair of the Orders in Council, they must have known that it was not so; but even without such communication they cannot by possibility have believed that without any new motive, and without any apparent change in the dispositions of the enemy, the British government could have been disposed at once and unconditionally to give up the system on which they have been acting, and which they had so recently refused to relinquish, even in return for considerations which though far from being satisfactory were yet infinitely more so than anything which can be supposed to have been gained by Mr. Erskine’s arrangement.”

Canning attributed this conduct to a hope held by President Madison that the British government would feel itself compelled, however reluctantly, to sanction an agreement which it had not authorized. In this case the American government had only itself to blame for the consequences:—

“So far, therefore, from the American government having any reason to complain of the non-ratification of Mr. Erskine’s unauthorized agreement, his Majesty has on his part just ground of complaint for that share of the inconvenience from the publication which may have fallen upon his Majesty’s subjects, so far as their interests may have been involved in the renewed speculations of their American correspondents; and his Majesty cannot but think any complaint, if any should be made on this occasion in America, the more unreasonable, as the government of the United States is that government which perhaps of all others has most freely exercised the right of withholding its ratification from even the authorized acts of its own diplomatic agents.”

In this spirit Jackson was to meet any “preliminary discussion” which might arise before he could proceed to negotiation. Canning did not touch on the probability that if Jackson met preliminary discussion in such a spirit as this, he would run something more than a risk of never reaching negotiation at all; or if Canning considered this point, he treated it orally. The other written instructions given to Jackson dealt at once with negotiation.

The “Chesapeake” affair came first in order, and was quickly dismissed. Jackson was to require from the President a written acknowledgment that the interdict on British ships was annulled before any settlement could be made. The Orders in Council came next, and were the subject of a long instruction, full of interest and marked by many of Canning’s peculiarities. Once more he explained that Erskine had inverted the relation of things by appearing to recall the orders as an inducement to the renewal of trade,—“as if in any arrangement, whether commercial or political, his Majesty could condescend to barter objects of national policy and dignity for permission to trade with another country. The character even more than the stipulations of such a compact must under any circumstances have put out of question the possibility of his Majesty’s consenting to confirm it.” He related the history of the orders, which he called “defensive retaliation,” and explained why Erskine’s arrangement failed to effect the object of that system:—

“In the arrangement agreed to by Mr. Erskine the incidental consequence is mistaken for the object of the negotiation. His Majesty is made by his minister to concede the whole point in dispute by the total and unconditional recall of the Orders in Council; and nothing is done by the United States in return except to permit their citizens to renew their commercial intercourse with Great Britain. Whereas, before his Majesty’s consent to withdraw or even to modify the Orders in Council was declared, the United States should have taken upon themselves to execute in substance the objects of the Orders in Council by effectually prohibiting all trade between their citizens and France, or the Powers acting under her decrees, and by engaging for the continuance of that prohibition so long as those decrees should continue unrepealed.”

As in the “Chesapeake” affair, so in regard to the orders,—Canning’s objection to Erskine’s arrangement was stated as one of form. That the “Chesapeake” proclamation was no longer in force; that Congress had effectually prohibited trade with France; and that the President had engaged as far as he could to continue that prohibition till the French Decrees were repealed,—these were matters of notoriety. England took the ground that the United States were liable to the operation of the British retaliatory orders against France, even though Congress should have declared war upon France, unless the declaration of war was regularly made known to the British minister at Washington, and unless “the United States should have taken upon themselves,” by treaty with England, to continue the war till France repealed her decrees.

Canning was happy in the phrase he employed in Parliament, March 6, to justify the course of ministers toward America. “Extension of the law of nations” described well the Orders in Council themselves; but the instruction to Jackson was remarkable as a prodigious extension of the extended orders. The last legal plea was abandoned by these instructions, and the subject would have been the clearer for that abandonment were it not that owing to the rapidity of events the new extravagance was never known; with Canning himself the subject slipped from public view, and only the mystery remained of Canning’s objects and expectations.

Another man would have temporized, and would have offered some suggestion toward breaking the force of such a blow at a friendly people. Not only did Canning make no new suggestion, but he even withdrew that which he had made in February. He told Jackson to propose nothing whatever:—

“You are to inform the American Secretary of State that in the event of the government of the United States being desirous now to adopt this proposal, you are authorized to renew the negotiation and to conclude it on the terms of my instructions to Mr. Erskine; but that you are not instructed to press upon the acceptance of the American government an arrangement which they have so recently declined, especially as the arrangement itself is become less important, and the terms of it less applicable to the state of things now existing.”

The remainder of this despatch was devoted to proving that, the late order of April 26 had so modified that of November, 1807, as to remove the most serious American objections; and although the blockade was more restrictive than the old orders as concerned French and Dutch colonies, yet the recent surrender of Martinique had reduced the practical hardship of this restriction so considerably that it was fairly offset by the opening of the Baltic. America had the less inducement to a further arrangement which could little increase the extent of her commerce, while England was indifferent provided she obtained her indispensable objects:—

“I am therefore not to direct you to propose to the American government any formal agreement to be substituted for that which his Majesty has been under the necessity of disavowing. You are, however, at liberty to receive for reference home any proposal which the American government may tender to you; but it is only in the case of that proposal comprehending all the three conditions which Mr. Erskine was instructed to require.”

The fourth instruction prescribed the forms in which such an arrangement, if made, must be framed. The fifth dealt with another branch of the subject,—the Rule of 1756. Canning declined to accept a mere understanding in regard to this rule. Great Britain would insist on her right to prohibit neutral trade with enemies’ colonies, “of which she has permitted the exercise only by indulgence; ... but the indulgence which was granted for peculiar and temporary reasons being now withdrawn, the question is merely whether the rule from which such an indulgence was a deviation shall be established by the admission of America or enforced as heretofore by the naval power of Great Britain.” As a matter of courtesy the British government had no objection to allowing the United States to sanction by treaty the British right, so that legal condemnations should be made under the authority of the treaty instead of an Order in Council; “but either authority is sufficient. No offence is taken at the refusal of the United States to make this matter subject of compact. The result is that it must be the subject of an Order in Council.”

The result was that it became the subject of a much higher tribunal than his Majesty’s Council, and that the British people, and Canning himself, took great offence at the refusal of the United States to make it a subject of one-sided compact; but with this concluding touch Canning’s official irony toward America ended, and he laid down his pen. About the middle of June, Jackson with three well-defined casus belli in his portfolio, and another—that of impressments—awaiting his arrival, set sail for America on the errand which he strangely hoped might not be desperate. With his departure Canning’s control of American relations ceased. At the moment when he challenged for the last time an instant declaration of war from a people who had no warmer wish than to be permitted to remain his friends, the career of the Administration to which he belonged came to an end in scandalous disaster.

Hardly had the Duke of York stopped one source of libel, by resigning May 16 his office of commanderin-chief, when fresh troubles from many directions assailed ministers. As early as April 4, Canning had satisfied the Duke of Portland that he must dismiss Castlereagh for incompetence, and every Cabinet minister except Castlereagh himself was acquainted with this decision; but contrary to Canning’s wishes no action was taken, and the conduct of the war was left at a critical moment in the hands of a man whose removal for incompetence had been decreed by his own colleagues. The summer campaign was then fought. April 9 Austria had begun another war with Napoleon. At Essling, May 21, she nearly won a great victory; at Wagram, July 6, she lost a battle, and soon afterward entered on negotiations which ended, October 20, in the treaty of Vienna. While this great campaign went on, Sir Arthur Wellesley drove Soult out of Portugal much as Napoleon had driven Sir John Moore out of Spain; and then marching up the valley of the Tagus scared Joseph a second time from Madrid, and fought, July 28, the desperate battle of Talavera. In any case the result of the Austrian war would have obliged him to retreat; but the concentration of the French forces in his front quickly drove the British army back toward Lisbon, and ended all hope of immediate success in the Peninsula. A third great effort against Napoleon was directed from London toward the Scheldt and Meuse. The Cabinet, June 14, decided that Castlereagh should attempt this experiment; for raids of the kind had charms for a naval power, and although success could affect the war but little, it might assist smuggling and destroy a naval depot of Napoleon. Castlereagh sent to the Scheldt forty thousand soldiers who were grievously wanted on the Tagus. July 28, while Wellington fought the battle of Talavera, Lord Chatham’s expedition started from the Downs, and reaching the mouth of the Scheldt occupied itself until August 15 with the capture of Flushing. In gaining this success the army was worn out; nearly half its number were suffering from typhoid, and September 2 the Cabinet unanimously voted to recall the expedition.

Talavera and Flushing closed Castlereagh’s career in the War Office, as Jackson’s mission closed that of Canning in American diplomacy. Defeat abroad, ruin at home, disgrace and disaster everywhere were the results of two years of Tory administration. August 11 the Duke of Portland was struck by paralysis; and deprived of its chief, the Cabinet went to pieces. September 7 Castlereagh was gently forced to resign. Canning, refusing to serve under Perceval or under any one whom Perceval suggested, tendered his own resignation. In the course of the complicated negotiations that followed, Perceval showed to Castlereagh letters in which for a year past Canning had pressed Castlereagh’s removal from office. Then at last Castlereagh discovered, as he conceived, that Canning was not a gentleman or a man of honor, and having called him out, September 21, in a duel on Putney Heath shot him through the thigh.

Such an outcome was a natural result of such an Administration; but as concerned the United States Canning had already done all the harm possible, and more than three generations could wholly repair.

CHAPTER VI.

The news of Erskine’s disavowal reached America so slowly that merchants enjoyed three months of unrestricted trade, and shipped to England or elsewhere the accumulations of nearly two years’ produce. From April 21 till July 21 this process of depletion continued without an anxiety; and when July 21 news arrived that the arrangement had been repudiated, merchants still had time to hurry their last cargoes to sea before the government could again interpose.

The first effect of Canning’s disavowal seemed bewilderment. No one in the United States, whether enemy or friend of England, could for a time understand why Canning had taken so perplexing a course. Very few of England’s friends could believe that her conduct rested on the motives she avowed; they sought for some noble, or at least some respectable, object behind her acts. For several months the Federalist newspapers were at a loss for words, and groped in the dark for an English hand to help them; while the Republican press broke into anger, which expressed the common popular feeling. “The late conduct of the British ministry,” said the “National Intelligencer” of July 26, “has capped the climax of atrocity toward this country.” Every hope of reconciliation or even of peace with England seemed almost extinguished; yet the country was still far from a rupture. Not until popular feeling could express itself in a new election would the national will be felt; and the next election was still more than a year away, while the Congress to be then chosen would meet only in December, 1811. Until then war was improbable, perhaps impossible, except by the act of England.

When the news arrived, President Madison was at his Virginia plantation. During his absence Gallatin was in charge of matters at Washington, and on the instant wrote that he thought the President should return. In a letter of July 27, three days after the news reached Washington, Gallatin gave his own view of the situation:[83]—

“I will not waste time in conjectures respecting the true cause of the conduct of the British government, nor can we, until we are better informed, lay any permanent plan of conduct for ourselves. I will only observe that we are not so well prepared for resistance as we were one year ago. Then all or almost all our mercantile wealth was safe at home, our resources entire, and our finances sufficient to carry us through during the first year of the contest. Our property is now all afloat; England relieved by our relaxations might stand two years of privations with ease. We have wasted our resources without any national utility; and our treasury being exhausted, we must begin our plan of resistance with considerable and therefore unpopular loans.”

The immediate crisis called first for attention. Gallatin held that the Non-intercourse Act necessarily revived from the moment the supposed fact on which alone its suspension rested was shown not to have taken place. The remoter problem of Jackson’s mission seemed to the secretary simpler than the question of law:[84]—

“If we are too weak or too prudent to resist England in the direct and proper manner, I hope at least that we shall not make a single voluntary concession inconsistent with our rights and interest. If Mr. Jackson has any compromise to offer which would not be burdened with such, I shall be very agreeably disappointed. But judging by what is said to have been the substance of Mr. Erskine’s instructions, what can we expect but dishonorable and inadmissible proposals? He is probably sent out like Mr. Rose to amuse and to divide; and we shall, I trust, by coming at once to the point, bring his negotiation to an immediate close.”

The President heard the news with as much perplexity as anger, and even tried to persuade himself that Canning would be less severe than he threatened. Madison still clung to hope when he first replied to Gallatin’s summons:[85]—

“The conduct of the British government in protesting the arrangement of its minister surprises one in spite of all their examples of folly. If it be not their plan, now that they have filled their magazines with our supplies and ascertained our want of firmness in withholding them, to adopt openly a system of monopoly and piracy, it may be hoped that they will not persist in the scandalous course in which they have set out. Supposing Erskine to have misunderstood or overstrained his instructions, can the difference between our trading directly and indirectly with Holland account for the violent remedy applied to the case? Is it not more probable that they have yielded to the clamors of the London smugglers in sugar and coffee, whose numbers and impudence are displayed in the scandalous and successful demand from their government that it should strangle the lawful trade of a friendly nation lest it should interfere with their avowed purpose of carrying on a smuggling trade with their enemies? Such an outrage on all decency was never before heard of even on the shores of Africa.”

Madison exaggerated. The outrage on decency committed by the British government in May, 1809, was on the whole not so great as that of Sir William Scott’s decision in the case of the “Essex” in July, 1805; or that of the blockade of New York and the killing of Pierce in April, 1806; or that of Lord Howick’s Order in Council of January, 1807, when the signatures to Monroe’s treaty were hardly dry; or that of Spencer Perceval’s Orders in November, 1807, and the speeches made in their defence; or the mission of George Henry Rose in the winter of 1807–1808; or Erskine’s letter of February 23, or Canning’s letters of September 23, 1808,—for all these left the United States in a worse position than that created by the disavowal of Erskine. Indeed, except for the disgrace of submitting to acts of illegal force, the United States stood in a comparatively easy attitude after the orders of April 26, 1809, so long as Napoleon himself enforced within his empire a more rigid exclusion of neutral commerce than any that could be effected by a British blockade.

“Still, I cannot but hope,” continued Madison, “on the supposition that there be no predetermined hostility against our commerce and navigation, that things may take another turn under the influence of the obvious and striking considerations which advise it.”

The hope vanished when Erskine’s instructions became known, and was succeeded by consternation when the public read the reports made by Erskine and Canning of the language used by Madison, Gallatin, and Pinkney. For the first time in this contest, Englishmen and Americans could no longer understand each other’s meaning. Erskine had so confused every detail with his own ideas, and Canning’s course on one side the Atlantic seemed so little to accord with his tactics on the other, that neither party could longer believe in the other’s good faith. Americans were convinced that Canning had offered terms which he intended them to refuse. Englishmen were sure that Madison had precipitated a settlement which he knew could not be carried out. Madison credited Canning with fraud as freely as Canning charged Madison with connivance.

“I find myself under the mortifying necessity of setting out to-morrow morning for Washington,” wrote Madison to Jefferson, August 3.[86] “The intricate state of our affairs with England produced by the mixture of fraud and folly in her late conduct, and the important questions to be decided as to the legal effect of the failure of the arrangement of April on our commercial relations with her are thought by the heads of departments to require that I should join them.... You will see by the instructions to Erskine, as published by Canning, that the latter was as much determined that there should be no adjustment as the former was that there should be one.”

The President remained three days in Washington in order to sign, August 9, a Proclamation reviving the Non-intercourse Act against Great Britain. On the same day the Secretary of the Treasury enclosed this Proclamation to the Collectors of Customs in a circular, with instructions not to enforce the penalties of the law against vessels entering American ports on the faith of Erskine’s arrangement. This done, Madison returned to Montpelier, August 10, leaving Erskine to exchange apologetic but very unsatisfactory explanations with Robert Smith and Gallatin.

The Proclamation of August 9 was sharply criticised, and with reason; for Congress had given the President no express authority to revive the Non-intercourse Act, and he had clearly exceeded his powers, if not in the Proclamation which revived the Act, then certainly in the original Proclamation of April 19, which set it aside. Even this stretch of authority hardly equalled Gallatin’s assumption of the power to admit what vessels he pleased without regard to the Non-intercourse Act. Yet right or wrong the President had no choice but to use all the powers he needed. Evidently his original mistake in opening intercourse was a greater stretch of authority than any subsequent act could be, except that of leaving it open after the mistake was admitted. Sullenly and awkwardly the Government restored some degree of order to its system, and then President and Cabinet scattered once more, leaving the village of Washington to the solitude of August and September.

A month passed without further change, until September 5 Jackson landed at Annapolis, whence he reached Washington September 8. He came with his wife—a fashionable Prussian baroness with a toilette—and young children, for whose health a Washington September was ill suited; he came too with a carriage and liveries, coachmen and servants, and the outfit of a long residence, as though neither he nor Canning doubted his welcome.

Francis James Jackson had many good qualities, and was on the whole the only English minister of his time so severely treated by the American government as to warrant almost a feeling of sympathy. He was probably suffering from some organic disease which made his temper irritable, while his instructions were such as to leave him no room to show his best capacities in his profession. In ordinary times a man of his experience, intelligence, and marked character might have succeeded in winning at Washington a name for ability and straightforwardness; but he was ill fitted for the special task he had undertaken, and had no clear idea of the dangers to which he was exposed. Gallatin expressed the feeling of the Administration when he advised coming at once to the point with Jackson, and bringing his negotiation to an immediate close. Madison could not have wished to repeat his experience with Rose, or to allow a British minister to reside at Washington for the sole purpose of dividing American counsels and intriguing with Senator Pickering. Had Jackson been quick in his perceptions, he would have seen early that nothing but mortification could be in store for him; but he had the dogged courage and self-confidence of his time, and undertook to deal single-handed with a government and people he did not trouble himself to understand.

The President was not in Washington when the British minister drove into that “famous city,” as he called it, which “resembles more nearly Hampstead Heath than any other place I ever saw.”[87] Robert Smith apologized for the incivility of leaving him without the usual public recognition, and explained that the risk of fever and the fatigue of four days’ journey made the President extremely unwilling to return before October 1, the day fixed for Jackson’s reception. Indirectly Smith suggested that Jackson might visit the President at Montpelier, or even begin negotiation before being officially received; but the minister replied that he would cheerfully wait. Gallatin wrote to the President, September 11,—

“I do not think that there is any necessity to hurry yourself beyond your convenience in returning here. It will be as well the 10th as the 1st of October, for I am sure, although I have not seen Mr. Jackson and can judge only from what has passed between him and Mr. Smith, that he has nothing to say of importance, or pleasant.”[88]

Madison replied, proposing to set out for Washington about the 29th, but agreeing with Gallatin that in view of “Jackson’s apparent patience and reserve,” his disclosures “would not be either operative or agreeable.”[89]

Whether Jackson showed patience or activity, he could not avoid giving offence; and perhaps he did wisely to gain all the time he could, even if he gained nothing else. Unlike some of his predecessors, he understood how to make the best of his situation. He found amusement for a month of idleness, even though the month was September and the place was Washington. He took the house which Merry and Erskine had occupied,—a house that stood amid fields looking over Rock Creek to Georgetown:

“Erskine had let it go to such a state of ruin and dirt that it will be several weeks before we can attempt to move into it. A Scotchman with an American wife who would be a fine lady, are not the best people to succeed on such an occasion.

“It is but justice to say that I have met with nothing but the utmost civility, and with none of those hardships and difficulties of which the Merrys so bitterly complained. The travelling is not worse than much that I have met with before in my life, and the accommodations are better than many I have thought supportable. The expense is about the same as in England, and must be considered most exorbitant when the inferiority of their arrangements to ours and the greater cheapness of provisions are taken into account.”[90]

As the season advanced, Jackson began to enjoy his autumn picnic on the heath of Washington. He had an eye for the details which gave interest to travel. “I put up a covey of partridge,” he wrote October 7, “about three hundred yards from the House of Congress, yclept the Capitol.” He had the merit of being first to discover what few men of his time had the taste to feel,—that Washington was beautiful:—

“I have procured two very good saddle-horses, and Elizabeth and I have been riding in all directions round this place whenever the weather has been cool enough. The country has a beautifully picturesque appearance, and I have nowhere seen finer scenery than is composed by the Potomac and the woods and hills about it; yet it has a wild and desolate air from being so scantily and rudely cultivated, and from the want of population.... So you see we are not fallen into a wilderness,—so far from it that I am surprised no one should before have mentioned the great beauty of the neighborhood. The natives trouble themselves but little about it; their thoughts are chiefly of tobacco, flour, shingles, and the news of the day. The Merrys, I suppose, never got a mile out of Washington, except on their way to Philadelphia.”

Part of Jackson’s leisure was employed in reading Erskine’s correspondence, although he would have done better had he neglected this customary duty, and had he brought to his diplomacy no more prejudices than such as belonged to his nature and training. His disgust with Erskine only added to his antipathy for Erskine’s objects, methods, and friends.

“My visitors,” he wrote, “are a different set from Erskine’s, I perceive; many of them he says he never saw. Per contra, many of the Democrats who were his intimates never come to me, and I am well pleased and somewhat flattered by the distinction.... Erskine is really a greater fool than I could have thought it possible to be, and it is charity to give him that name.... Now that I have gone through all his correspondence, more than ever am I at a loss to comprehend how he could have been allowed to remain here for the last two years.... To be obliged to wade through such a mass of folly and stupidity, and to observe how our country has been made, through Erskine’s means, the instrument of these people’s cunning, is not the least part of my annoyance. Between them our cause is vilified indeed. The tone which Erskine had accustomed them to use with him, and to use without any notion whatever being taken of it, is another great difficulty I have had to overcome. Every third word was a declaration of war.”

The month passed only too soon for Jackson’s comfort, and October 1, punctual to his word, the President arrived. The next day Erskine had his farewell audience, and October 3 Jackson was officially received. Merry’s experience had not been without advantage to both sides; and Jackson, who seemed to feel more contempt for his own predecessors—Merry and Erskine—than for his American antagonists, accepted everything in good part.

“Madison, the President, is a plain and rather mean-looking little man, of great simplicity of manners, and an inveterate enemy to form and ceremony; so much so that I was officially informed that my introduction to him was to be considered as nothing more than the reception of one gentleman by another, and that no particular dress was to be worn on the occasion,—all which I was very willing to acquiesce in. Accordingly I went in an afternoon frock, and found the President in similar attire. Smith, the Secretary of State, who had walked from his office to join me, had on a pair of dusty boots, and his round hat in his hand. When he had introduced us he retired, and the President then asked me to take a chair. While we were talking, a negro servant brought in some glasses of punch and a seed-cake. The former, as I had been in conference the whole morning, served very agreeably to wet, or whet, my whistle, and still more strongly to contrast this audience with others I had had with most of the sovereigns of Europe.”

Perhaps this passing allusion to previous acquaintance with “most of the sovereigns of Europe” threw a light, somewhat too searching, into the recesses of Jackson’s character. The weakness was pardonable, and not specially unsuited to success in his career, but showed itself in private as a form of self-deception which promised ill for his coming struggle. Madison’s civility quite misled him.

“I do not know,” he wrote October 24, “that I had ever more civility and attention shown me than at a dinner at the President’s yesterday, where I was treated with a distinction not lately accorded to a British minister in this country. A foolish question of precedence, which ever since Merry’s time has been unsettled, and has occasioned some heart-burnings among the ladies, was also decided then by the President departing from his customary indifference to ceremony and etiquette, and taking Elizabeth in to dinner, while I conducted Mrs. Madison.”

Evidently this deference pleased the British minister, who saw nothing behind it but a social triumph for himself and his wife; yet he had already been forced to protest against the ceremonial forms with which Madison studiously surrounded him, and had he read Shakspeare rather than Erskine’s writings, he might have learned from Julius Cæsar the general diplomatic law that “when love begins to sicken and decay, it useth ever an enforced ceremony.” A man of tact would have seen that from the moment Madison became formal he was dangerous. The dinner of October 23 at the White House came at a moment when Jackson had been so carefully handled and so effectually disarmed as to stand at Madison’s mercy; and although he was allowed to please himself by taking Mrs. Madison to dinner, the “mean-looking little man” at the head of the table, was engaged only in thinking by what stroke the British minister’s official life should be most quickly and quietly ended.

Jackson’s interviews with Robert Smith began immediately after the President’s arrival in Washington. The first conversation was reported by the British minister to his Government in language so lifelike, but showing such astonishment on both sides at the attitude of each, as to give it place among the most natural sketches in American diplomatic history. After some fencing on the subject of Erskine’s responsibility, Jackson passed to the subject of his own instructions, and remarked that he was ordered to wait for propositions from the President.

“Here the American minister,” reported Jackson,[91] “exhibited signs of the utmost surprise and disappointment. He seemed to be so little prepared for this close of my conversation that he was some time before he could recollect himself sufficiently to give me any answer at all. Expecting to meet suggestions of a totally different nature, and finding that what he had ready to say to them did not suit the occasion, he seemed to require some time and reflection to new arrange his thoughts. Accordingly a considerable pause in our conversation took place, which at length he broke in upon by saying: ‘Then, sir, you have no proposal to make to us,—no explanation to give? How shall we be able to get rid of the Non-intercourse Act?’”

Robert Smith was a wearisome burden to Madison, and his incompetence made no agreeable object of study; but his apparent bewilderment at Jackson’s audacity was almost as instructive as the sincere astonishment of the Englishman at the effect of his own words. The game of cross-purposes could not be more naturally played. Robert Smith had been requested by Madison to ascertain precisely what Jackson’s instructions were; and both at the first and at a second interview he pressed this point, always trying to discover what Jackson had to offer, while the Englishman always declined to offer anything whatever. Two conversations satisfied the President that Jackson’s hands were fast tied, and that he could open no door of escape. Then Madison gently set the Secretary of State aside, and, as openly as the office of Chief Magistrate permitted, undertook to deal with the British minister.

October 9 the Secretary of State sent to the British Legation a formal letter, written, like all Robert Smith’s important papers, by the President.[92] After recapitulating the negative results reached in the two interviews, Jackson was asked whether he had been rightly understood; and the letter ended by saying, that, “to avoid the misconceptions incident to oral proceeding, I have also the honor to intimate that it is thought expedient that our further discussions on the present occasion be in the written form.”[93]

Jackson saw a challenge in this change of attitude, and undertook to meet it by vigorous resistance. He had no mind to be thrown on the defensive; as he wrote to Canning, he wished to teach the American government not to presume on his patience.

“On connecting all these circumstances,” he reported,[94]—“the manner in which Mr. Smith had conducted our conferences; the abruptness, especially, with which he had put an end to them; and the style in which he announces to me, without leaving any choice or alternative, but as the absolute decision of his Government, ‘that it is thought expedient that our future discussions on the present occasion’ (i. e., the only occasion of doing away existing differences) ‘should be in the written form,’—it occurred to me to be necessary to put the matter on such a footing as to preclude, in limine, the idea that every species of indirect obloquy was to be patiently submitted to by his Majesty’s minister in this country.”

In this temper Jackson wrote a long letter, dated October 11, for the purpose, as he reported to Canning,[95] of checking “that spirit which can never lead to conciliation, by which America thinks herself entitled to make her will and her view of things the criterion by which they are to be generally approved or condemned.” Beginning with the assertion that “there does not exist in the annals of diplomacy a precedent” for stopping verbal communication within so few days after the delivery of credentials, he rehearsed the story of Erskine’s arrangement, and justified his refusal of apology or explanation. In doing so, he allowed himself to insinuate what Canning expressly asserted in his instructions, that Robert Smith had connived at Erskine’s misconduct:—

“It was not known when I left England whether Mr. Erskine had, according to the liberty allowed him, communicated to you in extenso his original instructions. It now appears that he did not. But ... I find ... that he has submitted to your consideration the three conditions specified in those instructions as the ground-work of an arrangement.... Mr. Erskine reports, verbatim et seriatim, your observations upon each of the three conditions, and the reasons which induced you to think that others might be substituted in lieu of them. It may have been concluded between you that these latter were an equivalent for the original conditions; but the very act of substitution evidently shows that those original conditions were in fact very explicitly communicated to you, and by you, of course, laid before the President for his consideration.”

After justifying the disavowal of Erskine on the admitted ground that he had disobeyed instructions, Jackson came to the point of his own powers. “His Majesty has authorized me,” he said, “notwithstanding the ungracious manner in which his former offer of satisfaction for the affair of the ‘Chesapeake’ was received, to renew that which Mr. Erskine was instructed to make.” As for the Orders in Council, these had been so far modified by the blockade of April 26 as to make any formal agreement on that subject seem unnecessary, and he reserved his proposals until he should hear those of the President.

Two days after this letter was despatched, Robert Smith sent a civil message that there had been no intention to stop personal intercourse; “he should be most happy to see me whenever I would call upon him; we might converse upon indifferent subjects; but that his memory was so incorrect that it was on his account necessary that in making his reports to the President he should have some written document to assist him.”[96] With this excuse for the secretary’s sudden withdrawal from the field the British minister contented himself until October 19, when he received an official letter, signed as usual by Robert Smith, but written with ability such as that good-natured but illiterate Secretary of State never imagined himself to possess.

The American note of October 19, far too long to quote or even to abridge, was perhaps the best and keenest paper Madison ever wrote. His faults of style and vagueness of thought almost wholly disappeared in the heat of controversy; his defence was cool, his attack keen, as though his sixty years weighed lightly the day when he first got his young antagonist at his mercy. He dealt Jackson a fatal blow at the outset, by reminding him that in July, 1808, only the previous year, Canning had put an end to oral communication after two interviews with Pinkney on the subjects under negotiation. He then made three points, well stated and easily remembered: (1) That when a government refuses to fulfil a pledge, it owes a formal and frank disclosure of its reasons. (2) That, in the actual situation, Mr. Erskine’s successor was the proper channel for that disclosure. (3) That since Mr. Jackson disclaimed authority to make either explanations or proposals, the President could do no more than express his willingness to favor any honorable mode of settling the matters in dispute.

In enlarging on the subjects touched by Jackson’s letter, the President made more than one remark of the kind that most exasperated the British minister. Since no settlement of the dispute was possible or even desired by Jackson, such flashes of Madison’s temper were neither harmful nor inappropriate, yet they were certainly on the verge of insult. He told Jackson plainly that Great Britain, by retaining her so-called retaliation after admitting that it no longer retaliated, was guilty of deception:—

“You cannot but be sensible that a perseverance under such circumstances in a system which cannot longer be explained by its avowed object would force an explanation by some object not avowed. What object might be considered as best explaining it is an inquiry into which I do not permit myself to enter, further than to remark that in relation to the United States it must be an illegitimate object.”

On the other hand, Madison seemed not to resent, as warmly as he might have done, the intimation that he had induced Erskine to violate instructions. The President either affected not to see, or failed fully to grasp at first, the serious scope of this charge:

“The stress you have laid on what you have been pleased to state as the substitution of the terms finally agreed on for the terms first proposed, has excited no small degree of surprise. Certain it is that your predecessor did present for my consideration the three conditions which now appear on the printed document; that he was disposed to urge them more than the nature of two of them (both palpably inadmissible, and one more than merely inadmissible) could permit; and that on finding his first proposals unsuccessful, the more reasonable terms ... were adopted. And what, sir, is there in this to countenance the conclusion you have drawn in favor of the right of his Britannic Majesty to disavow the proceeding? Is anything more common in public negotiations than to begin with a higher demand, and that failing, to descend to a lower?”

Contenting himself with the remark that he had for the first time learned, from Jackson’s note, the restrictions on Erskine’s authority, the President passed to other points as though unaware that his good faith was in question.

The letter of October 19 forced Jackson one step backward, and drove him nearly to the wall. Obliged to choose between the avowal that he had no proposal to make, or the assertion that he had both explanations and proposals, he yielded, somewhat surlily, to the weakness of offering explanations, such as they were, and of inviting proposals eventually to be embodied in a convention. In a note dated October 23 he answered the American note of October 19.[97] If Madison had doubted his own advantage, his doubts must have vanished in reading Jackson’s second note, which shuffled and evaded the issues in a manner peculiar to disconcerted men; but the most convincing proof of Jackson’s weakness appeared in the want of judgment he showed in exposing himself to attack at the moment when he was seeking safety. He committed the blunder of repeating the charge that Madison was responsible for Erskine’s violation of instructions:—

“These instructions ... were at the time, in substance, made known to you.... So far from the terms which he was actually induced to accept having been contemplated in that instruction, he himself states that they were substituted by you in lieu of those originally proposed.”

Jackson’s folly in thus tempting his fate was the more flagrant because his private letters proved that he knew something of his true position. “Madison is now as obstinate as a mule,” he wrote October 26.[98] “Until he gets [the absolute surrender of the Orders in Council] he will not even accept any satisfaction for the affair of the ‘Chesapeake,’ which has been now for the third time offered to him in vain;” and he added: “There is already a great and growing fermentation in the United States, which shows itself in a manner highly prejudicial to the amity and good understanding which doubtless our ministers wish to see established between the two countries.”

A few days after writing this evidence of his own uneasiness, the British minister received from the Department of State a third note, dated November 1, which left no doubt that the President meant to push his antagonist to extremes. After accepting the explanations at last made in regard to the Orders in Council, and pointing out that they did not apply to the case of the “Chesapeake,” Madison requested Jackson to show his full powers, as an “indispensable preliminary to further negotiation.” The letter was short, and ended with a stern warning:—

“I abstain, sir, from making any particular animadversions on several irrelevant and improper allusions in your letter, not at all comporting with the professed disposition to adjust, in an amicable manner, the differences unhappily subsisting between the two countries; but it would be improper to conclude the few observations to which I purposely limit myself, without adverting to your repetition of a language implying a knowledge on the part of this Government that the instructions of your predecessor did not authorize the arrangement formed by him. After the explicit and peremptory asseveration that this Government had no such knowledge, and that with such a knowledge no such arrangement would have been entered into, the view which you have again presented of the subject makes it my duty to apprise you that such insinuations are inadmissible in the intercourse of a foreign minister with a Government that understands what it owes to itself.”

This letter placed Jackson in a position which he could not defend, and from which he thought, perhaps with reason, that he could not without disgrace retreat. The insinuations he had made were but a cautious expression of the views he was expressly ordered to take. November 4 he replied, with more ability than he had hitherto shown, to the letter of November 1; but he gave himself, for a mere point of temper, into Madison’s hands.

“I am concerned, sir, to be obliged, a second time, to appeal to those principles of public law, under the sanction and protection of which I was sent to this country.... You will find that in my correspondence with you I have carefully avoided drawing conclusions that did not necessarily follow from the premises advanced by me, and least of all should I think of uttering an insinuation where I was unable to substantiate a fact. To facts, such as I have become acquainted with them, I have scrupulously adhered; and in so doing I must continue, whenever the good faith of his Majesty’s government is called in question, to vindicate its honor and dignity in the manner that appears to me best calculated for that purpose.”

When Jackson was sent to Copenhagen with a message whose general tenor resembled that which he brought to the United States, he was fortunate enough to be accompanied by twenty ships of the line, forty frigates, and thirty thousand regular troops. Even with this support, if court gossip could be believed, King George expressed to him surprise that he had escaped being kicked downstairs. At Washington he had no other force on his side than such as his footman or his groom could render, and the destiny that King George predicted for him could not, by any diplomatic weapons, be longer escaped. November 8, Secretary Smith sent to the Legation one more note, which closed Jackson’s diplomatic career:—

“Sir,—... Finding that in your reply of the 4th instant you have used a language which cannot be understood but as reiterating and even aggravating the same gross insinuation, it only remains, in order to preclude opportunities which are thus abused, to inform you that no further communications will be received from you....”

CHAPTER VII.

The effect of American conciliation upon Canning was immediate and simple; but the effect of American defiance upon Napoleon will be understood only by those who forget the fatigue of details in their interest for Napoleon’s character. The Emperor’s steps in 1809 are not easily followed. He was overburdened with labor; his motives and policy shifted as circumstances changed; and among second-rate interests he lost more habitually than ever the thread of his own labyrinth.

Travelling day and night from Spain in January, 1809, with the same haste and with something of the same motive as when four years afterward he posted back to Paris from his Russian disaster, Napoleon appeared unexpectedly at his capital January 24. The moment was one of crisis, but a crisis of his own making. He had suffered a political check in Spain, which he had but partially disguised by a useless campaign. The same spirit of universal dominion which grasped at Spain and required the conquest of England, roused resistance elsewhere almost as desperate as that of the Spaniards and English. Even the American Congress repealed its embargo and poured its commerce through so-called neutral ports into the lap of England, while at the same moment Austria, driven to desperation, prepared to fight for a fourth time. Napoleon had strong reasons for choosing that moment to force Austria wholly into his system. Germany stood at his control. Russia alone could have made the result doubtful; but the Czar was wholly French. “M. Romanzoff,” wrote Armstrong to the State Department,[99] “with the fatalism of the Turk, shakes his head at Austria, and asks what has hitherto been got by opposition; calls to mind the fate of Prussia, and closes by a pious admonition not to resist the will of God.”

Toward Austria the Emperor directed all his attention, and rapidly drove her government into an attitude of resistance the most spirited and the most desperate taken by any people of Europe except Spain. Although Austria never wearied of fighting Napoleon, and rarely fought without credit, her effort to face, in 1809, a Power controlling the military resources of France, Italy, and Germany, with the moral support of Russia behind them, had an heroic quality higher than was shown at any time by any other government in Europe. April 9 the Austrian army crossed the Inn, and began the war. April 13 Napoleon left Paris for the Danube, and during the next three months his hands were full. Austria fought with an energy which put Germany and Russia to shame.

Such a moment was ill suited for inviting negotiation on American affairs; but Armstrong received instructions a few days after Napoleon left Paris, and with these instructions came a copy of the Non-intercourse Act of March 1, which, while apparently forbidding intercourse with England and France, notified Napoleon that the United States would no longer obey his wishes, or keep their industries from seeking a British market through indirect channels. Armstrong communicated this Act to the French government in the terms of his instructions:[100]—

“The undersigned is instructed to add that any interpretation of the Imperial Decrees of Nov. 21, 1806, and Dec. 17, 1807, which shall have the effect of leaving unimpaired the maritime rights of the Union, will be instantaneously followed by a revocation of the present Act [as regards France] and a re-establishment of the ordinary commercial intercourse between the two countries.”

May 17 Champagny, then at Munich, having received Armstrong’s letter of April 29, notified the Minister of Marine,[101]—

“The news of this measure having received an official character by the communication made to me by the United States minister on the part of his Government, I think it my duty to transmit to your Excellency a copy of the law which he has addressed to me.”

Armstrong informed Secretary Robert Smith[102] that nothing need be expected from this step, unless it were perhaps his own summary expulsion from France as a result of offence given either by the Non-intercourse Act or by the language of Armstrong’s despatches surreptitiously published. Bitterly as Armstrong detested Napoleon, he understood but little the mind and methods of that unusual character. Never in his career had the Emperor been busier than when Armstrong wrote this note to Champagny, but it caught his attention at once. He had fought one battle after another, and in five days had captured forty thousand men and a hundred pieces of cannon; he had entered Vienna May 10, and had taken his quarters at Schönbrunn, the favorite palace of the Austrian emperor. There he was in a position of no little difficulty, in spite of his military successes, when his courier brought him despatches from Paris containing news that the United States, March 1, had repealed the embargo, and that the British government, April 26, had withdrawn the Orders in Council of November, 1807, and had substituted a mere blockade of Holland, France, and Italy. The effect of these two events was greatly increased by their coming together.

At first Napoleon seemed to feel no occasion for altering his course. After reading Armstrong’s letter, he dictated May 18 a reply which was to serve as the legal argument to justify his refusal of concessions. His decrees were founded on eternal principles, and could not be revoked:—

“The seas belong to all nations. Every vessel sailing under the flag of any nation whatever, recognized and avowed by it, ought to be on the ocean as if it were in its own ports. The flag flying from the mast of a merchantman ought to be respected as though it were on the top of a village steeple.... To insult a merchant-vessel carrying the flag of any Power is to make an incursion into a village or a colony belonging to that Power. His Majesty declares that he considers the vessels of all nations as floating colonies belonging to the said nations. In result of this principle, the sovereignty and independence of one nation are a property of its neighbors.”[103]

The conclusion that the sovereignty and independence of every nation were the property of France, and that a floating colony denationalized by the visit of a foreign officer became the property of Napoleon, involved results too extreme for general acceptance. Arbitrary as the Emperor was, he could act only through agents, and could not broach such doctrines without meeting remonstrance. His dissertation on the principles of the jus gentium was sent May 18 to Champagny. Four days afterward, May 22, Napoleon fought the battle of Essling, in which he lost fifteen or twenty thousand men and suffered a serious repulse. Even this absorbing labor, and the critical situation that followed, did not long interrupt his attention to American business. May 26, Champagny made to the Emperor a report[104] on American affairs, taking ground altogether different from that chosen by Napoleon. After narrating the story of the various orders, decrees, blockades, embargoes, and non-intercourse measures, Champagny discussed them in their practical effect on the interests and industries of France:—

“The fact cannot be disguised; the interruption of neutral commerce which has done much harm to England has been also a cause of loss to France. The staple products of our territory have ceased to be sold. Those that were formerly exported are lost, or are stored away, leaving impoverished both the owner who produced them and the dealer who put them on the market. One of our chief sources of prosperity is dried up. Our interest therefore leads us toward America, whose commerce would still furnish an ample outlet for several of our products, and would bring us either materials of prime necessity for our manufactures, or produce the use of which has become almost a necessity, and which we would rather not owe to our enemies.”

For these reasons Champagny urged the Emperor not to persist in punishing America, but to charge M. d’Hauterive, the acting Minister of Foreign Relations at Paris, with the duty of discussing with General Armstrong the details of an arrangement. Champagny supported his advice by urging that England had made advances to America, had revoked her orders of November, 1807, and seemed about to turn the French Decrees against France. “It will always be in your Majesty’s power to evade this result. A great step to this end will be taken when Mr. Armstrong is made aware that your Majesty is disposed to interpret your commercial decrees favorably for the Americans, provided measures be taken that no tribute shall be paid to England, and that their efficacy shall be assured. Such will be the object of M. d’Hauterive’s mission.”

Napoleon, impressed by Champagny’s reasoning, fortified by the news that Erskine had settled the commercial disputes between England and America, sent to Champagny the draft of a new decree,[105] which declared that inasmuch as the United States by their firm resistance to the arbitrary measures of England had obtained the revocation of the British Orders of November, 1807, and were no longer obliged to pay imposts to the British government, therefore the Milan Decree of Dec. 17, 1807, should be withdrawn, and neutral commerce should be replaced where it stood under the Berlin Decree of Nov. 21, 1806.

This curious paper was sent June 10 to Paris for a report from the Treasury as to its probable effects. June 13 Champagny sent instructions to Hauterive[106] directing him to begin negotiation with Armstrong. Far from overlooking either the intention or the effect of the Non-intercourse Act, Champagny complained that it was unfair to France and “almost an act of violence;” but he did not resent it. “The Emperor is not checked by this consideration; he feels neither prejudice nor resentment against the Americans, but he remains firm in his projects of resisting British pretensions. The measures taken by England will chiefly decide his measures.” Champagny explained that the Emperor hesitated to issue the new decree already forwarded for the inspection of the customs authorities, not because any change had taken place in the reasons given for its policy, but because the arrangement of Erskine was said to be disavowed.

“What has prevented the Emperor till now from coming to a decision in this respect is the news contained in the English journals of an arrangement between England and America, and announced by a Proclamation of the President of the United States, April 19, 1806. If from this act should result the certainty that the English renounce their principle of blockade, then the Emperor would revoke the whole of his measures relative to neutral commerce. But the ‘Gazette de France’ of June 5, for I have no other authority, pretends that the British ministry refuse to sanction the arrangement concluded in America; and the result of all this is an extreme uncertainty, which prevents a decision as to the course proper to be taken.”

This was the situation of the American dispute June 13, 1809, at Vienna, at the moment Canning’s disavowal of Erskine became certain. Thus far Napoleon’s mind had passed through two changes,—the first, in consequence of the British Order in Council of April 26, which led him to decide on withdrawing the Milan Decree; the second, in consequence of Erskine’s arrangement, which led him to promise America everything she asked. The news of Canning’s refusal to carry out the arrangement stopped Napoleon short in his career of concession; he left the American affair untouched until after the battle of Wagram, July 6, which was followed by the submission of Austria, July 12. The battle of Wagram placed him in a position to defy resistance. Immediately afterward he sent orders to Paris to stop Hauterive’s negotiation. About the middle of July Hauterive told the American minister “that a change had taken place in the views of the Emperor; and in particular that a decree prepared by his orders as a substitute for those of November, 1806, and December, 1807, and which would have been a very material step toward accommodation, had been laid aside.”[107]

In the heat and fury of the battle of Wagram this order must have been given, for it was known at Paris only one week afterward, and Armstrong reported the message, July 24, as a notice that unless America resisted the British doctrines of search and blockade she need expect no relaxation on the part of Napoleon; while this notice was supported by a menace that until the Emperor knew the President’s decision he would take no step to make matters worse than they already were.[108]

If Armstrong put trust in this last promise or menace, he showed once more his want of sympathy with the Emperor’s character. Quick to yield before an evident disaster, Napoleon was equally quick to exhaust the fruits of an evident victory; and the advantage he had obtained over the United States was as decided, if not as extensive, as that which he had gained over Austria. In one way or another America must pay for rebellion, and she could be made to pay only by the usual process of seizing her commerce.

June 7, while the Emperor was still hesitating or leaning to concession, Decrès, his Minister of Marine, wrote to him that an American schooner with a cargo of colonial produce had arrived at San Sebastian May 20, and that more such vessels must be expected to arrive, since the Non-intercourse Act had opened the trade to Spanish ports. What should be done with them? The French Decrees denationalized every vessel which went to England, or wished to go there, or had been visited by an English cruiser, or had violated the laws of the United States, or had incurred suspicion of fraud; but the schooner in question was under no suspicion of fraud,—she had not been to England, nor had she ever thought of going there; she had not been stopped by any cruiser; she was in a Spanish port, nominally outside of French jurisdiction, and she was authorized in going there by the law of the United States. Here was an unforeseen case, and Decrès properly referred it to the Emperor.[109]

Decrès’ letter reached Vienna about June 13, the day when Champagny described the Emperor as vexed by an extreme uncertainty on American affairs. The subject was referred to the Minister of Finance. No decision seems to have been reached until August. Then Maret, the Secretary of State in personal attendance on the Emperor, created Duc de Bassano a few days later, enclosed to Champagny, August 4, the draft of a new decree,[110] which was never published, but furnished the clew to most of the intricate movements of Napoleon for the following year:—

“Napoleon, etc.,—considering that the American Congress by its Act of March 1, 1809, has forbidden the entrance of its ports to all French vessels under penalty of confiscation of ships and cargo,—on the report of our Minister of Finance have decreed and decree what follows:—

“Art. 1. The American schooner loaded with colonial produce and entered at San Sebastian the 20th May, 1809, will be seized and confiscated.

“Art. 2. The merchandise composing the cargo of the vessel will be conveyed to Bayonne, there to be sold, and the produce of the sale paid into the caisse de l’amortissement (sinking-fund).

“Art. 3. Every American ship which shall enter the ports of France, Spain, or Italy will be equally seized and confiscated, as long as the same measure shall continue to be executed in regard to French vessels in the harbors of the United States.”

Probably the ministers united in objecting to a general confiscation founded on the phrase of a penalty which the customs laws of every country necessarily contained. Whatever the reason, this draft rested in the files of the office over which Champagny presided, and the Emperor seemed to forget it; but its advantages from his standpoint were too great to be lost, and its principle was thenceforward his guide.

Not even Armstrong, suspicious as he was of Napoleon’s intentions, penetrated the projected policy; yet Armstrong was by no means an ordinary minister, and his information was usually good. At the moment when he received what he supposed to be the promise that Napoleon would not make matters worse until he heard what the President had to say, Armstrong warned his Government that this assurance was intended as a menace rather than as a pledge:[111]—