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. II.

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1890

Copyright, 1890
By Charles Scribner’s Sons.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

CHAPTER I.

Rarely had a great nation approached nearer than England to ruin without showing consciousness of danger. Napoleon’s boast to his Chamber of Commerce, that within ten years he would subject his rival, was not ill-founded. The conquest of Russia, which Napoleon meant to make certain, combined with a war between the United States and Great Britain, coming immediately upon the destruction of private credit and enterprise in 1810, could hardly fail to shake the British empire to its foundation; and perhaps the worst sign of danger was the absence of popular alarm. The intelligence of all England with feelings equally strong, whether mute or vociferous, was united in contempt for the stolid incompetence of the Tory faction beyond anything known in England since the Stuarts; but both Houses of Parliament, as well as the Crown, were conscious of needing no better representatives than Perceval and Eldon, and convulsions that shook the world never stirred the composure of these men. The capital and credit on which England’s power rested were swept away; the poorer classes were thrown out of employment; the price of wheat,[1] which averaged in 1807 seventy-eight shillings per quarter of eight bushels, in 1808 eighty-five shillings, and in 1809 one hundred and six shillings, in 1810 rose to one hundred and twelve shillings, or about three dollars and a half a bushel, and remained at or above this rate until the autumn of 1813; while abroad, the Spanish peninsula was subdued by Napoleon, whose armies occupied every part of Spain and Portugal except Cadiz and Lisbon. Sweden, the last neutral in Europe, elected a French general of Bonaparte’s family as king, and immediately afterward declared war on England; and the United States closed their ports to British commerce, and menaced a declaration of war. The exports of Great Britain fell off one third in the year 1811. The sources of England’s strength showed exhaustion.

Neither these arguments nor even the supreme argument of war shook the steadfast mind of Spencer Perceval. Responsibilities that might have driven him to insanity took the form of religious duties; and with the support of religious or patriotic formulas statesmen could sleep in peace amidst the wreck of nations. After the insanity of King George was admitted, at the beginning of November, 1810, Spencer Perceval became for a time the King of England, but a king without title. The Prince of Wales, the future regent, was obliged to wait for an Act of Parliament authorizing him to assume power. The Prince of Wales had all his life detested the Tory influence that surrounded the throne, and had associated with Whigs and liberals, like Sheridan and Fox. Perceval expected to retire; the prince could not yet take control, and this dead-lock put a stop to serious government. Nothing but business of routine could be undertaken.

If the United States could wait till spring, their friends were likely to be once more in power, or the Tory influence would be so far shaken that the danger of war might pass. For this possible revolution both Madison and Pinkney twelve months before would have waited with confidence and pleasure; but repeated disappointments had convinced them that their patience was useless. Pinkney had asked and received instructions to require a decision or to quit England. When November arrived, the day on which Napoleon’s Decrees stood revoked according to the Duc de Cadore, Pinkney acted in London on his own responsibility, as Madison acted at Washington, and sent to Lord Wellesley a note, dated November 3, asking for an immediate repeal of the British Orders in Council, on the ground that Napoleon’s revocation had taken effect. “That it has taken effect cannot be doubted,” he said;[2] but he offered no evidence to support his assertion. He also assumed that England was bound to withdraw Fox’s blockade of the French coast from Brest to the Elbe, as well as Spencer Perceval’s subsequent measures which were called into existence by Napoleon’s Continental system, and were to cease with it. Both these demands were made without instructions founded on the knowledge of Cadore’s letter.

At that moment Lord Wellesley was full of hope that at last he should remove Spencer Perceval from his path. Every one supposed, and had good ground for believing, that the Prince of Wales would at once form a new Government, with Wellesley and the Whigs for its support. At such a crisis Wellesley could not expect or indeed wish to effect a partial and sudden change of foreign policy. He waited a month before taking official notice of Pinkney’s letter, and when he replied,[3] December 4, said only that “after the most accurate inquiry” he had been unable to obtain any authentic intelligence of the French repeal, and begged the American minister to furnish whatever information he possessed on the subject.

The American minister possessed no information on the subject, but he received, December 11, news of the President’s proclamation founded on the French repeal, and was the more decided to insist on his ground. Finding that conversations produced no effect, Pinkney took his pen once more,—and then began another of the diplomatic duels which had occurred so often in the course of the last six years; but for the first time the American champion with weak arguments and indifferent temper used the kind of logic likely to produce conviction in the end.

Pinkney maintained that the French Decrees were revoked and that Fox’s blockade was illegal. Neither position was beyond attack. The American doctrine of blockade was by no means clear. The British government never attempted to defend its sweeping Orders of 1807 and 1809 on the ground of legality; these were admittedly illegal, and a proper casus belli if America chose to make war on their account. England claimed only that the United States were bound to make war on France for the Berlin Decree of Nov. 21, 1806, before making war on England for her retaliatory Orders of 1807. In order to evade this difficulty, France declared that her Decree of November, 1806, was retaliatory on Fox’s blockade of May, 1806. America began by maintaining that as far as concerned neutral commerce both belligerents used retaliation for illegitimate objects, and that the United States might rightfully declare war against either or both. The position was easily understood, and had the advantage of being historically true; but the United States stood on less certain ground when they were drawn into discussion of the legal theory involved in Fox’s blockade.

England held[4] that Fox’s blockade of May, 1806, covering the French coast from the Elbe to Brest, was a lawful blockade, supported by a particular naval force detached for that special purpose and sufficient for its object, until the blockade itself was merged in the avowedly extra-legal paper-blockades of 1809; and that if the paper-blockades were withdrawn, Great Britain had the right to re-establish Fox’s blockade with an efficient naval force to execute it.

President Madison held a different opinion. He insisted,[5] and ordered Pinkney to insist, that a particular port must be invested by a particular naval force; and that Great Britain ought not to contend that her naval force was adequate to blockade a coast a thousand miles long. On this ground the President, July 5, 1810,[6] instructed Pinkney to require the annulment of Fox’s blockade as “palpably at variance with the law of nations.” In order to prove the impartiality of this demand, the President promised to insist that the repeal required from France as its counterpart should “embrace every part of the French Decrees which violate the neutral rights guaranteed to us by the law of nations.”

No worse ground could have been found for Pinkney to stand upon. He was obliged to begin by asserting, what every public man in Europe knew to be untrue, that “every part of the French Decrees which violated the neutral rights” of America had been repealed by Cadore’s letter of August 5. His next contention, that coasts could not be blockaded, was at least open to dispute when the coast was that of the British Channel. Pinkney’s arguments became necessarily technical, and although technical reasoning might be easily understood in a Court of Admiralty, the attempt to treat politics as a branch of the profession of the law had the disadvantage of refining issues to a point which no large society could comprehend. When Wellesley, Dec. 4, 1810, asked for evidence that Napoleon’s Decrees were repealed, Pinkney replied, in a long note dated December 10,[7] that Cadore’s letter of August 5 stated two disjunctive conditions of repeal,—the first depending on Great Britain, the last on the United States; that although Great Britain had not satisfied the first condition, the United States would undoubtedly satisfy the last; therefore the French Decrees stood repealed. This proposition, not even easy to understand, was supported by a long argument showing that Cadore could not without absurdity have meant anything else. As for further proof, not only had Pinkney none to offer, but he gravely offered his want of evidence as evidence:—

“On such an occasion it is no paradox to say that the want of evidence is itself evidence. That certain decrees are not in force is proved by the absence of such facts as would appear if they were in force. Every motive which can be conjectured to have led to the repeal of the edicts invites to the full execution of that repeal, and no motive can be imagined for a different course. These considerations are alone conclusive.”

The argument might have escaped ridicule had not Jonathan Russell been engaged at the same moment[8] in remonstrating with the Duc de Cadore because the “New Orleans Packet” had been seized at Bordeaux under the Berlin and Milan Decrees; and had not the “Moniteur,” within a week, published Cadore’s official Report, declaring that the decrees would never be repealed as long as England maintained her blockades; and had not the Comte de Semonville, within another week, announced in the French Senate that the decrees were the palladium of the seas.

Wellesley answered Pinkney, December 29, in a note[9] comparatively short, and more courteous than any important State paper that had come from the British government since Fox’s death.

“If nothing more had been required from Great Britain than the repeal of our Orders in Council,” he said, “I should not have hesitated to declare the perfect readiness of this Government to fulfil that condition. On these terms the Government has always been sincerely disposed to repeal the Orders in Council. It appears, however, not only by the letter of the French minister, but by your explanation, that the repeal of the Orders in Council will not satisfy either the French or the American government. The British government is further required by the letter of the French minister to renounce those principles of blockade which the French government alleges to be new.... On the part of the American government, I understand you to require that Great Britain shall revoke her Order of Blockade of May, 1806.”

Wellesley declined to entertain this demand. He appealed to the justice of America not to force an issue on such ground, and he protested that the Government retained an anxious solicitude to revoke the Orders in Council as soon as the Berlin and Milan Decrees should be effectually repealed, without conditions injurious to the maritime rights of Great Britain.

To this declaration Pinkney replied, Jan. 14, 1811, in a letter[10] defending his own position and attacking the good faith of the British government. He began by defending the temper of his late remonstrances:—

“It would not have been very surprising nor very culpable, perhaps, if I had wholly forgotten to address myself to a spirit of conciliation which had met the most equitable claims with steady and unceasing repulsion; which had yielded nothing that could be denied, and had answered complaints of injury by multiplying their causes. With this forgetfulness, however, I am not chargeable; for against all the discouragements suggested by the past, I have acted still upon a presumption that the disposition to conciliate, so often professed, would finally be proved by some better evidence than a perseverance in oppressive novelties, as obviously incompatible with such a disposition in those who enforce them as in those whose patience they continue to exercise.”

America, continued Pinkney, was not a party, either openly or covertly, to the French requisition. “What I have to request of your Lordship is that you will take our views and principles from our own mouths.” The rejoinder was not so convincing as it would have been had Pinkney wholly discarded French views; but on the point of Fox’s blockade, the American and the French demand was the same. Pinkney was obliged to show that the two identical conditions rested on different grounds. At some length he laid down the law as the United States understood it.

“It is by no means clear,” he began, “that it may not be fairly contended, on principle and early usage, that a maritime blockade is incomplete with regard to States at peace unless the place which it would affect is invested by land as well as by sea. The United States, however, have called for the recognition of no such rule. They appear to have contented themselves with urging in substance that ports not actually blockaded by a present, adequate, stationary force employed by the Power which attacks them shall not be considered as shut to neutral trade in articles not contraband of war; ... that a vessel cleared or bound to a blockaded port shall not be considered as violating in any manner the blockade unless on her approach to such port she shall have been previously warned not to enter it; ... that whole coasts and countries shall not be declared (for they can never be more than declared) to be in a state of blockade; ... and lastly, that every blockade shall be impartial in its operation.”

On these definitions of law, and not to satisfy Napoleon’s requirement, the President insisted on the abandonment of Fox’s blockade.

The withdrawal of the Orders in Council, on the other hand, was required on the ground that England had pledged her faith to withdraw them whenever France revoked her decrees. France had revoked her decrees, and England could not honorably refuse to withdraw the orders.

“As to the Orders in Council which professed to be a reluctant departure from all ordinary rules, and to be justified only as a system of retaliation for a pre-existing measure of France, their foundation, such as it was, is gone the moment that measure is no longer in operation. But the Berlin Decree is repealed, and even the Milan Decree, the successor of your Orders in Council, is repealed also. Why is it, then, that your orders have outlived those edicts?”

In both instances the American position lost character by connection with Napoleon’s acts. Pinkney repudiated such a connection in the first case, and his argument would have been stronger could he have repudiated it in the second. Unable or unwilling to do this, he had no resource but to lose his temper, which he did with proper self-control. The correctness of his reasoning or of his facts became less important from the moment he showed himself in earnest; for then the controversy entered a new phase.

In making an issue of war, President Madison needed to exercise extreme caution not to shock the sentiment of New England, but he needed to observe no such delicacy in regard to the feelings of the British Tories. In respect to the British government, the nature of the issue mattered little, provided an issue were made; and Pinkney might reasonably think that the more paradoxical his arguments the more impression they would produce. Centuries of study at Oxford and Edinburgh, and generations devoted to the logic or rhetoric of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, had left the most educated classes of Great Britain still in the stage of culture where reasoning, in order to convince, must cease to be reasonable. As Pinkney became positive and arrogant, Wellesley became conciliatory and almost yielding. The American note of January 14, written in a tone that had not hitherto been taken in London, was coupled with a notice that brought the two governments in presence of the long-threatened rupture. Pinkney informed Lord Wellesley that as the British government, after a lapse of many months, had taken no steps to carry out the assurance of sending a new minister to Washington, the United States government could not retain a minister at London. Therewith Pinkney requested an audience of leave.

Although Wellesley had never avowed a political motive for his systematic delays, no one could doubt that he intentionally postponed not only concession on the Orders in Council, but also a settlement of the “Chesapeake” affair and the appointment of a new minister at Washington, because his colleagues, as he hinted[11] to Pinkney, were persuaded “that the British interest in America would be completely destroyed by sending thither at this time a minister plenipotentiary,” and of course by any other frank advance. The influence of F. J. Jackson with the Government was perhaps strong enough to check action that would have amounted to a censure on his own conduct; and although the American elections showed that Jackson had for the time so much reduced British influence in America as to make some change of policy necessary if it were to be revived, Jackson, in daily intercourse with the Foreign Office and with ministers, was exerting every effort to maintain his credit. Nothing less than Pinkney’s request for an audience of leave was likely to end these ministerial hesitations.

For the moment, as Pinkney knew, his request could not be granted, because the King was insane and could give audience to no one. Since Nov. 1, 1810, Parliament had done no other business than such as related to the regency; yet on Jan. 14, 1811, when Pinkney’s two notes were written, the Regency Bill had not been brought before the Commons. Introduced on the following day, Parliament showed extraordinary energy by making it law in little more than a fortnight; yet the Prince Regent, who took the oaths February 6, still required time to settle his government.

Everything depended on the Prince Regent’s action. Had he followed the expected course,—had he dismissed Spencer Perceval, and put himself in the hands of Wellesley, Grenville, Grey, and Holland,—the danger of an American war might possibly have vanished. The Orders in Council might have been withdrawn, the “Chesapeake” affair might have been settled, a friendly minister would have been sent to Washington, and the war party in the Twelfth Congress would have been thrown into a minority. After much manœuvring, the Prince of Wales at last avowed his decision. February 4 he wrote to Spencer Perceval, announcing the wish, wholly in deference to the King’s feelings, that the late ministers should remain in charge of the government. The Whigs were once more prostrated by this desertion, and the Marquess Wellesley abandoned his last hope of saving the government from Perceval’s control.

The effect of the Prince Regent’s course was instantly felt. His letter to Perceval was written February 4; he assumed the royal office February 6; and February 11 Wellesley was able to answer[12] Pinkney’s note on blockades.

“France requires,” said he, “that Great Britain shall not only repeal the Orders in Council, but renounce those principles of blockade which are alleged in the same letter to be new,—an allegation which must be understood to refer to the introductory part of the Berlin Decree. If Great Britain shall not submit to those terms, it is plainly intimated in the same letter that France requires America to enforce them. To these conditions his Royal Highness, on behalf of his Majesty, cannot accede. No principles of blockade have been promulgated or acted upon by Great Britain previously to the Berlin Decree which are not strictly conformable to the rights of civilized war and to the approved usages and laws of nations.... I am commanded to inform you that his Royal Highness cannot consent to blend the question which has arisen upon the Orders in Council with any discussion of the general principles of blockade.”

In a note of two lines, Pinkney replied[13] that he had no inducement to trouble his Lordship further on the subject. The same day he received a notice that the Prince Regent would hold his first diplomatic levee February 19; but instead of accepting the invitation, Pinkney wrote with the same brevity to ask at what time the Prince Regent would do him the honor to give his audience of leave.[14]

This abrupt course brought the Government partially to reason. Within forty-eight hours Wellesley wrote to Pinkney a private letter[15] of apology for the delay in appointing a minister to Washington, and of regret that this delay should have been misunderstood; he announced that Augustus J. Foster, late British minister in Sweden, would be immediately gazetted as minister to the United States; and his letter closed by a remark which came as near deprecation as Pinkney’s temper would allow: “You will, of course, exercise your own judgment, under these circumstances, respecting the propriety of requiring an audience of leave on the grounds which you have stated.” With this private letter, Lord Wellesley sent an official notice that the Prince Regent would receive Mr. Pinkney February 19, by his desire, for an audience of leave.

The responsibility thus thrown upon Pinkney was more serious than had ever before, or has ever since, fallen to the share of a minister of the United States in England. The policy of withdrawing the United States minister from London might be doubted, not so much because it was violent, as because it was likely to embarrass the President more than it embarrassed England. If the President was indeed bent on war, and wished to hasten its declaration, the recall of his minister in London might be proper; but if he still expected to negotiate, London was the spot where he needed to keep his strongest diplomatist, and, if possible, more than one. Yet the worst possible mistake was to recede once more,—to repeat the comedy of American errors, and to let the British government assume that its policy was still safe.

Pinkney hesitated, and consulted his instructions.[16] These were dated Nov. 15, 1810, and ordered Pinkney, in case no successor to F. J. Jackson should then have been appointed, to take leave of absence, entrusting the legation to a chargé d’affaires; but this positive order was practically revoked in the concluding sentence: “Considering the season at which this instruction may have its effect, and the possibility of a satisfactory change in the posture of our relations with Great Britain, the time of your return to the United States is left to your discretion and convenience.”

These instructions did not warrant Pinkney in demanding leave of absence on any other ground than that of failure to appoint a minister at Washington. They did not warrant him in returning to America at all if he saw the possibility of such an appointment. Pinkney was obliged to put a free construction on the President’s language. Abandoning the ground that his departure was a necessary result of the absence of a British minister at Washington, he asked Lord Wellesley, in an official note, dated February 17, what Mr. Foster was to do when he arrived there?[17] “I presume that for the restoration of harmony between the two countries, the Orders in Council will be relinquished without delay; that the blockade of 1806 will be annulled; that the case of the ‘Chesapeake’ will be arranged in the manner heretofore intended; and in general that all such just and reasonable acts will be done as are necessary to make us friends.” So important a letter was probably never written by any other American diplomatist without instructions from his Government,—for it was in effect an ultimatum, preliminary to the rupture of relations and ultimate war; yet even in this final list of American demands made by the American minister in withdrawing from London, impressment was not expressly mentioned.

Wellesley replied in a private letter[18] dated February 23, with the formal avowal that “it would be neither candid toward you, nor just toward this Government, to countenance any interpretation which might favor a supposition that it was intended by this Government to relinquish any of the principles which I have so often endeavored to explain to you.” Nothing in Wellesley’s letter showed a desire to irritate, and his refusals left less sting than was left by Canning’s concessions; but the issue was fairly joined, and America was at liberty to act upon it as she pleased.

In order to leave no doubt of his meaning, Pinkney instantly[19] claimed his audience of leave for February 28, declining, in the mean time, to attend the diplomatic levee which by postponement took place only February 26. His conduct was noticed and understood, as he meant it should be; and as his audience still remains the only occasion when an American minister at London has broken relations in a hostile manner, with resulting war, it has an interest peculiar to itself. Several accounts were preserved of what passed at the interview. Pinkney’s official report recorded the words used by him:[20]—

“I stated to the Prince Regent the grounds upon which it had become my duty to take my leave and to commit the business of the legation to a chargé d’affaires; and I concluded by expressing my regret that my humble efforts in the execution of the instructions of my Government to set to rights the embarrassed and disjointed relations of the two countries had wholly failed; and that I saw no reason to expect that the great work of their reconciliation was likely to be accomplished through any other agency.”

According to Pinkney, and according to the official report of Lord Wellesley,[21] the Prince Regent replied in terms of the utmost amity toward the United States. Another account of the interview gave the impression that the Prince Regent had not shown himself so gracious toward the departing minister as the official reports implied. Francis James Jackson, who dogged Pinkney’s footsteps with the personal malevolence he had almost a right to feel, and who haunted the Court and Foreign Office in the hope of obtaining—what he never received—some public mark of approval, wrote to Timothy Pickering a long letter on Pinkney’s departure:[22]—

“It has occasioned much surprise here that exactly at the moment of Pinkney’s demand being complied with he should nevertheless take what he calls an inamicable leave.... It was not expected that he would depart so far from his usual urbanity as to decline the invitation that was sent him in common with the rest of the foreign ministers to attend the Regent’s levee. It was not probable after this that the audience of leave which he claimed should answer his expectation. It was very short. Mr. Pinkney was told that the Regent was desirous of cultivating a good understanding with the United States; that he had given a proof of it in the appointment of a minister as soon as his acceptance of the Regency enabled him to appoint one; that the Orders in Council would have been repealed, but that his Royal Highness never could or would surrender the maritime rights of his country. Mr. Pinkney then made some profession of his personal sentiments, to which he was answered: ‘Sir, I cannot look into men’s minds; I can only judge of men’s motives by their conduct.’ And then the audience ended.”

So closed Pinkney’s residence in London. He had passed there nearly five years of such violent national hostility as no other American minister ever faced during an equal length of time, or defied at last with equal sternness; but his extraordinary abilities and character made him greatly respected and admired while he stayed, and silenced remonstrance when he left. For many years afterward, his successors were mortified by comparisons between his table-oratory and theirs. As a writer he was not less distinguished. Canning’s impenetrable self-confidence met in him powers that did not yield, even in self-confidence, to his own; and Lord Wellesley’s oriental dignity was not a little ruffled by Pinkney’s handling. As occasion required, he was patient under irritation that seemed intolerable, as aggressive as Canning himself, or as stately and urbane as Wellesley; and even when he lost his temper, he did so in cold blood, because he saw no other way to break through the obstacles put in his path. America never sent an abler representative to the Court of London.

Pinkney sailed from England a few weeks afterward, leaving in charge of the legation John Spear Smith, a son of Senator Samuel Smith, who had been for a time attached to the Legation at St. Petersburg; had thence travelled to Vienna and Paris, where he received Pinkney’s summons to London,—the most difficult and important diplomatic post in the world. Simultaneously, Lord Wellesley hurried Foster to the United States. The new British minister was personally acceptable. By birth a son of the actual Duchess of Devonshire by her first husband, he had the advantage of social and political backing, while he was already familiar with America, where he had served as Secretary of Legation. Just dismissed from Sweden by Bernadotte’s election and the declaration of war against England which followed it, Foster would hardly have sought or taken the mission to Washington had not Europe been closed to English diplomacy. Even F. J. Jackson, who spoke kindly of few people, gave a pleasant account of his successor.[23] “Foster is a very gentlemanlike young man, quite equal to do nothing at his post, which is now the best possible policy to follow;” but in the same breath, “that most clumsy and ill-conditioned minister,” as Pinkney described Jackson,[24] added that the police office was the proper place to train officials for service at Washington. “One of the best magistrates as minister, and a good sharp thief-taker for secretary, would put us in all respects much upon a level with their Yankeeships.” The phrase implied that Jackson felt his own career at Washington to have been mortifying, and that he had not been on a level with his opponents. Possibly the sense of mortification hurried the decline which ended in his death, three years afterward, in the midst of the war he did so much to cause.

Wellesley’s instructions to Foster were dated April 10,[25] and marked another slight step toward concession. Once more he discussed the Orders in Council, but on the ground taken by Pinkney could come to no other conclusion than that the President was mistaken in thinking the French Decrees repealed, and extravagant in requiring the blockade of 1806 to be repealed in consequence; yet as long as any hope remained of prevailing with the President to correct his error, American ships, captured while acting in pursuance of it, should not be condemned. Even under the challenge expressly proclaimed by the non-importation, the British government anxiously desired to avoid a positive rupture. As for the “Chesapeake” affair, Foster was ordered to settle it to suit the American government, guarding only against the admission of insulting expressions. He was to remonstrate and protest against the seizure of the Floridas,[26] but was not to commit his Government further. Finally, a secret instruction[27] notified Foster that in case America should persist in her non-importation, England would retaliate,—probably by increasing her import duties, and excluding American commerce from the East Indies.

These instructions conformed with the general attitude of English society. Though sobered by the disasters that attended Tory government, England had not yet passed beyond the stage when annoyances created only the wish to ignore them. No one would admit serious danger from America. In Parliament, Pinkney’s abrupt and hostile departure was barely mentioned, and ministers denied it importance. The “London Times,” of March 1, complained that no one could be induced to feel an interest in the American question. “There is certainly great apathy in the public mind generally upon the questions now at issue between us and our quondam colonies, which it is difficult to arouse, and perhaps useless to attempt.” Here and there the old wish for a war with the United States was still felt;[28] but the public asked only to hear no more on American subjects. Even the “Times” refused, April 13, to continue discussion on matters “upon which the feelings of the great bulk of the nation are peculiarly blunt.” Wellesley’s course and Foster’s instructions reflected only the lassitude and torpor of the day; but within eighteen months Wellesley, in open Parliament, criticised what he charged as the policy, not of himself, but of his colleagues, in language which implied that the public apathy was assumed rather than real. “The disposition of the American government was quite evident,” he said, Nov. 30, 1812;[29] “and therefore common policy should have urged ministers to prepare fully for the event; and they should have made adequate exertion either to pacify, to intimidate, or to punish America.” Knowing this, they sent out Foster, powerless either for defence or attack, to waste his time at Washington, where for ten years his predecessors had found the grave of their ambitions.

CHAPTER II.

The diplomatic insolvency inherited from Merry, Rose, Erskine, and Jackson became more complete with every year that passed; and even while Foster was on the ocean, a new incident occurred, which if it did not prove a catastrophe to be inevitable, showed at least how small was his chance of averting it.

On the renewal of trade between America and France, the British navy renewed its blockade of New York. If nothing more had happened, the recurrence of this vexation would alone have gone far to destroy the hopes of diplomacy; but this was not all.

The “Melampus” reappeared, having for a companion the “Guerriere,” commanded by Captain Dacres, and supposed to be one of the best British frigates of her class. Early in May, when Foster sailed from England, these cruisers, lying off Sandy Hook, began to capture American vessels bound for France, and to impress American sailors at will. No sooner did these complaints reach Washington than Secretary Hamilton, May 6,[30] ordered Commodore John Rodgers, whose flag-ship, the 44-gun frigate “President,” was lying at Annapolis, to sail at once to protect American commerce from unlawful interference by British and French cruisers. Rodgers sailed from Annapolis May 10, and May 14 passed the capes. The scene of the “Chesapeake’s” unredressed outrage lay some fifteen or twenty miles to the southward, and the officers and crew of the “President” had reason to think themselves expected to lose no fair opportunity of taking into their own hands the redress which the British government denied. For the past year Rodgers had carried orders “to vindicate the injured honor of our navy and revive the drooping spirits of the nation; ... to maintain and support at any risk and cost the honor” of his flag; and these orders were founded chiefly on “the inhuman and dastardly attack on our frigate ‘Chesapeake,’—an outrage which prostrated the flag of our country, and has imposed on the American people cause of ceaseless mourning.”[31]

Rodgers was bound for New York, but on the morning of May 16 was still about thirty miles from Cape Charles and eighteen miles from the coast, when toward noon he saw a ship to the eastward standing toward him under a press of canvas. As the vessel came near, he could make her out from the shape of her upper sails to be a man-of-war; he knew of no man-of-war except the “Guerriere” on the coast; the new-comer appeared from the quarter where that frigate would be looked for, and Rodgers reasoned that in all probability she was the “Guerriere.” He decided to approach her, with the object of ascertaining whether a man named Diggio, said to have been impressed a few days before by Captain Dacres from an American brig, was on board. The spirit of this inquiry was new.

Until quarter before two o’clock in the afternoon the ships stood toward each other. The stranger showed no colors, but made signals, until finding them unanswered, she changed her course and stood to the southward. Rodgers then made sail in chase, his colors and pennant flying. At half-past three, the stranger’s hull began to be visible from the “President’s” deck, but as the wind failed the American frigate gained less rapidly. In latitude 37° the sun, May 16, sets at seven o’clock, and dusk comes quickly on. At quarter-past seven the unknown ship again changed her course, and lay to, presenting her broadside to the “President,” and showing colors, which in the gathering twilight were not clearly seen. The ship had the look of a frigate.

At quarter before eight, Rodgers ordered his acting commandant to bring the “President” to windward of the supposed frigate within speaking distance,—a manœuvre which naturally caused the stranger uneasiness, so that she wore three times to prevent the “President” from getting under her stern. At half-past eight, according to the American account,—at quarter-past eight, according to the British story,—the “President” rounded to, within pistol-shot. On both ships every gun in the broadside was run out and trained on the opposite vessel, and out of every port a dozen eyes were strained to catch sight, through the dusk, of what passed in the stranger.

By the dim light Rodgers saw the supposed “Guerriere,” her main-top-sail to the mast, waiting with apparent confidence the next act of the audacious American frigate which had chased a British man-of-war all day, and had at last run up close to windward,—a manœuvre which British frigates were disposed to resent. To this point the reports showed no great disagreement; but in regard to what followed, one story was told by Rodgers and all his ship’s company, while a wholly different story was told by the British captain and his officers.

Rodgers reported that while rounding to, he hailed the unknown vessel through his trumpet, calling out: “What ship is that?” The question, “What ship is that?” was immediately echoed back. Rodgers had time to tell his acting captain that the “President” was forging too fast ahead, before he hailed again: “What ship is that, I say?” Instantly a flash was seen from the dark where the stranger’s hull lay, and a double report told that the ball had struck the “President,” lodging in the mainmast. Taken by surprise, Rodgers turned to his commandant of marines and asked, “What the devil was that?” but before he gave an order his third lieutenant, Alexander James Dallas, who was watching at the first port forward of the gangway and saw the flash, leaped to one of the guns in his division and discharged it. The “Chesapeake’s” disaster had done away with the old-fashioned logger-heads and matches; the “President’s” guns were fitted with locks, and were discharged in an instant. Immediately afterward three guns were fired by the enemy, and the report of muskets was heard. Then Rodgers gave the order to fire, and the “President” opened with a whole broadside, followed by another. In about five minutes the enemy seemed to be silenced, and Rodgers gave the order to cease firing; but some three minutes afterward the stranger opened again, and the “President” resumed fire until she desisted. From the “President’s” deck enough could be seen of the enemy’s behavior to prove that whoever she might be, she was not the “Guerriere;” and Rodgers then made the remark that either she had received some unfortunate shot at the outset, or she was a vessel of force very inferior to what he had taken her for,—although she was still supposed to be nothing less than a 36-gun frigate. Disabled she certainly was, for she lay ungovernable, with her bow directly under the “President’s” broadside.

Rodgers hailed once more, and understood the stranger to answer that she was a British ship-of-war in great distress. At nine o’clock at night the “President” began to repair damages, and beat about within reach, on different tacks, with lights displayed, until daybreak, when she ran down to the British vessel, and sent a boat on board. Then at last Rodgers learned, certainly to his great disappointment, that he had been fighting a single-decked vessel of less than half his force. His mistake was not so surprising as it seemed. The British cruiser might easily at a distance, or in the dark, be taken for a frigate. Her great length; her poop, top-gallants, forecastle; her deep bulwarks; the manner of stowing her hammocks; and room on each side to mount three more guns than she actually carried,—were decisive to any one who could not see that she carried but one tier of guns.[32]

Captain Bingham of the “Little Belt,” a British corvette, rated at twenty guns, gave a very different account of the affair. He had been ordered from Bermuda to carry despatches to the “Guerriere;” had run north toward New York without finding her; and on his return southward, at eleven o’clock on the morning of May 16, had seen a strange sail, to which he gave chase. At two o’clock in the afternoon, concluding that she was an American frigate, he abandoned the chase, and resumed his course. The rest of his story is to be told in his own words:[33]—

“Hoisted the colors, and made all sail south, ... the stranger edging away, but not making any more sail. At 3.30 he made sail in chase.... At 6.30, finding he gained so considerably on us as not to be able to elude him during the night, being within gunshot, and clearly discerning the stars in his broad pennant, I imagined the most prudent method was to bring to, and hoist the colors, that no mistake might arise, and that he might see what we were. The ship was therefore brought to, her colors hoisted, her guns double-shotted, and every preparation made in case of a surprise. By his manner of steering down, he evidently wished to lay his ship in a position for raking, which I frustrated by wearing three times. At about 8.15 he came within hail. I hailed and asked what ship it was. He again repeated my words and fired a broadside, which I instantly returned. The action then became general, and continued so for three quarters of an hour, when he ceased firing, and appeared to be on fire about the main hatchway. He then filled, ... hailed, and asked what ship this was. He fired no more guns, but stood from us, giving no reason for his most extraordinary conduct.”

Bingham’s report was afterward supported by the evidence of his two lieutenants, his boatswain, purser, and surgeon, at the official inquiry made May 29, at Halifax.[34] Rodgers’s report was sustained by the searching inquiry made by the American government to ascertain the truth of Bingham’s assertions.[35] The American investigation was naturally much more thorough in consequence of Bingham’s charges, so that not only every officer, but also every seaman of the “President’s” company gave evidence under oath. All agreed in swearing to the facts as they have been related in the American story.

About a month after the action, two sailors claiming to be deserters from the “President” arrived at Halifax and made affidavits,[36] which gave a third account quite different from the other two. One of these men, an Englishman, swore that he had been stationed in the second division, on the gun-deck of the “President;” that a gun in that division went off, as he thought, by accident, four or five men leaning on it; that he had turned to acquaint Lieutenant Belden, who commanded that division, of the fact, but before he could do this, though the lieutenant was only three guns from him, the whole broadside of the “President” was discharged. This story was the least probable of the three. The evidence of a deserter, under every motive to ingratiate himself with his future officers, would be suspicious, even if he were proved to have been in the “President’s” crew, which was not the case; but it became valueless when the rolls showed no Lieutenant Belden on board the “President,” but that the second division on the gun-deck was commanded by Lieut. A. J. Dallas,—and Lieutenant Dallas swore that he himself fired the first gun from the “President,” without orders, in answer to the “Little Belt’s” discharge. The evidence of every other officer and man at the guns supported his assertion.

When the contradictory reports of Rodgers and Bingham were published, a controversy arose between the newspapers which sympathized with the different captains. Rodgers was vehemently attacked by the English and Federalist press; Bingham was as hotly scouted by the American newspapers friendly to Madison. The dispute was never settled. Perhaps this was the only instance where the honor of the services was so deeply involved on both sides as to make the controversy important; for if Rodgers, all his officers, and his whole crew behaved as Bingham alleged, and perjured themselves afterward to conceal it, they were not the men they were supposed to be; and if Bingham swore falsely, he went far to establish the worst American charges against the character of the British navy.

For this reason some little effort to form an opinion on the subject deserves to be made, even at the risk of diffuseness. The elaborate investigation by the United States government settled the weight of testimony in favor of Rodgers. Other evidence raised doubts of the accuracy of Bingham’s report.

This report was dated May 21, five days after the battle, in “lat. 36° 53´ N.; long. 71° 49´ W. Cape Charles bearing W. 48 miles,”—which, according to the senior lieutenant’s evidence, May 29, was about the spot of the action, from fifty to fifty-four miles east of Cape Charles. Yet a glance at the map showed that these bearings marked a point more than two hundred miles east of Cape Charles. This carelessness could not be set to the account of a misprint.

The date proved only inaccuracy; other parts of Bingham’s report showed a willingness to confuse the facts. He claimed to have hoisted his colors at two o’clock in the afternoon, after making out the American commodore’s pennant and resuming a southerly course. Rodgers averred that the “Little Belt” obstinately refused to show colors till darkness concealed them; and Bingham’s report itself admitted that at 6.30 he decided to hoist his colors, “that no mistake might arise.” During the five hours’ chase his colors were not flying. His assertion, too, that at 6.30 the American frigate was within gunshot, and that the “Little Belt” was brought to because she could not escape, agreed ill with his next admission, that the “President” consumed nearly two hours in getting within hailing distance.

The most evident error was at the close of the British story. Bingham declared that the general action lasted three quarters of an hour, and that then the enemy ceased firing; appeared to be on fire about the main hatchway, and “stood from us,” firing no more guns. The two lieutenants, boatswain, and purser of the “Little Belt” swore that the action lasted “about an hour;” the surgeon said “about forty-five minutes.” Every American officer declared under oath that the entire action, including the cessation of firing for three minutes, did not exceed a quarter of an hour, or eighteen minutes at most. On this point the American story was certainly correct. Indeed, two years later, after the “Constitution” had silenced the “Guerriere” in thirty-five minutes, and the “United States” had, in a rough sea and at comparatively long range, left the “Macedonian” a wreck in less than two hours of action, no officer in the British service would have sacrificed his reputation for veracity by suggesting that a British corvette of eighteen guns could have lain nearly an hour within pistol-shot, in calm weather, under the hot fire of an American “line-of-battle ship in disguise.” The idea of forcing her to “stand from us” would have seemed then mere gasconade. Some fifteen months afterward, the British sloop-of-war “Alert,” of twenty guns, imitated the “Little Belt” by attacking Commodore Porter’s 32-gun frigate “Essex,” and in eight minutes struck her colors in a sinking condition. If the “President” had been no heavier than the “Essex,” she should still have silenced the “Little Belt” in a quarter of an hour.

The “Little Belt” escaped destruction, but she suffered severely. Bingham reported: “I was obliged to desist from firing, as, the ship falling off, no gun would bear, and had no after-sail to help her to; all the rigging and sails cut to pieces; not a brace nor a bowline left.... I have to lament the loss of thirty-two men killed and wounded, among whom is the master. His Majesty’s ship is much damaged in masts, rigging, and hull; ... many shot through between wind and water, and many shots still remain inside, and upper works all shot away; starboard pump also.” He did not know his good fortune. Two years afterward he would have been well content to escape from the “President” on any terms, even though the “Little Belt” had been twice the size she was. The “President’s” loss consisted of one boy wounded, and some slight damage to the rigging.

Bingham’s report was accepted by the British government and navy with blind confidence, and caused no small part of the miscalculation which ended in disasters to British pride. “No one act of the little navy of the United States,” said the British historian five years afterward, “had been at all calculated to gain the respect of the British. First was seen the ‘Chesapeake’ allowing herself to be beaten with impunity by a British ship only nominally superior to her. Then the huge frigate ‘President’ attacks and fights for nearly three quarters of an hour the British sloop ‘Little Belt.’”[37] So self-confident was the British navy that Bingham was believed to have fought the “President” with credit and success; while, on the American side, Rodgers and his ship’s company believed that the British captain deliberately delayed the meeting until dark, with the view of taking advantage of the night to punish what he thought the insolence of the chase.

Whatever opinion might be formed as to the conduct of the two captains, the vehemence of feeling on each side was only to be compared with the “Chesapeake” affair; but in this instance the grievance belonged to the British navy, and Dacres and the “Guerriere” felt the full passion and duty of revenge. The news met Foster on his arrival at Norfolk, a few weeks afterward, and took away his only hope of a cordial reception. His instructions intended him to conciliate good-will by settling the “Chesapeake” outrage, while they obliged him to take a tone of refusal or remonstrance on every other subject; but he found, on arriving, that the Americans cared nothing for reparation of the “Chesapeake” outrage, since Commodore Rodgers had set off against it an outrage of his own, and had killed four men for every one killed by Captain Humphries. Instead of giving redress, Foster found himself obliged to claim it.

July 2 Foster was formally received by the President; and the same day, as though he had no other hope but to take the offensive, he began his official correspondence by a letter on the seizure of West Florida, closing with a formal notice that if the United States persevered in their course, his orders required him to present the solemn protest of his Government “against an attempt so contrary to every principle of public justice, faith, and national honor.”

The language was strong; but unfortunately for Foster’s influence, the world at the moment showed so little regard for justice, faith, or honor, that the United States had no reason to be singular in Quixotism; and although in logic the tu quoque was an argument hardly deserving notice, in politics it was only less decisive than cannon. The policy of Foster’s remonstrance was doubtful in another respect. In proportion as men exposed themselves to reprimands, they resented the reprimand itself. Madison and Monroe had each his sensitive point. Madison resented the suggestion that Napoleon’s decrees were still in force, regarding the matter as involving his veracity. Monroe equally resented the assertion that West Florida belonged to Spain, for his character as a man of sense, if not of truth, was involved in the assertion that he had himself bought West Florida in his Louisiana purchase. Yet the mildness of his reply to Foster’s severe protest proved his earnest wish to conciliate England. In a note[38] of July 8 he justified the seizure of West Florida by the arguments already used, and offered what he called a “frank and candid explanation” to satisfy the British government. In private he talked with more freedom, and—if Foster could be believed—showed himself in a character more lively if not more moral than any the American people would have recognized as his. July 5 Foster wrote to Wellesley:[39]—

“It was with real pain, my Lord, that I was forced to listen to arguments of the most profligate nature, such as that other nations were not so scrupulous; that the United States showed sufficient forbearance in not assisting the insurgents of South America and looking to their own interests in the present situation of that country.”

Foster was obliged to ignore the meaning of this pointed retort; while his inquiries how far the American government meant to carry its seizures of Spanish territory drew from Monroe no answer but a laugh. The Secretary of State seemed a transformed man. Not only did he show no dread of interference from England in Florida, but he took an equally indifferent air on every other matter except one. He said not a word about impressments; he betrayed no wish to trouble himself about the “Chesapeake” affair; he made no haste in apologizing for the attack on the “Little Belt;” but the Orders in Council—these, and nothing else—formed the issue on which a change of policy was to depend.

Precisely on the Orders in Council Foster could offer no hope of concession or compromise. So far from withdrawing the orders, he was instructed to require that the United States should withdraw the Non-intercourse Act, under threat of retaliation; and he carried out his instructions to the letter. After protesting, July 2, against the seizure of West Florida, he wrote, July 3, a long protest against the non-importation.[40] His demand savored of Canning’s and Jackson’s diplomacy; but his arguments in its support were better calculated for effect, and his cry for justice claimed no little sympathy among men who shared in the opinion of Europe that France was the true object of attack, and that Napoleon’s overthrow, not the overthrow of England, was the necessary condition of restoring public order. Foster’s protest against including Fox’s blockade among the admittedly illegal Orders in Council, brought the argument to a delicate issue of law and fact.

“In point of date,” he said, “the blockade of May, 1806, preceded the Berlin Decree; but it was a just and legal blockade, according to the established law of nations, because it was intended to be maintained, and was actually maintained, by an adequate force appointed to guard the whole coast described in the notification, and consequently to enforce the blockade.”

In effect this argument conceded Madison’s principle; for the further difference between blockading a coast and blockading by name the several ports on a coast, was hardly worth a war; and the question whether an estuary, like the British Channel, the Baltic Sea, or Chesapeake Bay, could be best blockaded by a cruising or by a stationary squadron, or by both, called rather for naval than for legal opinion. Foster repudiated the principle of paper-blockades; and after showing that Fox’s blockade was defended only as far as it was meant to be legal, he made the further concession of admitting that since it had been merged in the Orders in Council, it existed only as a part of the orders; so that if the orders were repealed, England must either make Fox’s blockade effective, or abandon it. By this expedient, the issue was narrowed to the Orders in Council retaliatory on Bonaparte’s decrees, and intended to last only as long as those decrees lasted. Foster appealed to Napoleon’s public and official language to prove that those decrees were still in force, and therefore that the United States government could not, without making itself a party to Napoleon’s acts and principles, demand a withdrawal of the British Orders. If the orders were not to be withdrawn because they were illegal, they ought not to be withdrawn on the false excuse that Napoleon had withdrawn his decrees. Against such a demand England might reasonably protest:—

“Great Britain has a right to complain that ... not only has America suffered her trade to be moulded into the means of annoyance to Great Britain under the provisions of the French Decrees, but construing those decrees as extinct, upon a deceitful declaration of the French Cabinet, she has enforced her Non-importation Act against England. Under these circumstances I am instructed by my Government to urge to that of the United States the injustice of thus enforcing that Act against his Majesty’s dominions; and I cannot but hope that a spirit of justice will induce the United States government to reconsider the line of conduct they have pursued, and at least to re-establish their former state of strict neutrality.”

President Madison had put himself, little by little, in a position where he had reason to fear the popular effect of such appeals; but awkward as Madison’s position was, that of Monroe was many degrees worse. He had accepted office in April as the representative of Republicans who believed that Napoleon’s decrees were not repealed, and the objects of his ambition seemed to depend on reversing Madison’s course. In July he found himself in painful straits. Obliged to maintain that Napoleon’s decrees were repealed, he was reduced to sacrifice his own official agent in the effort. Foster reported, as a matter of surprise to himself, remarks of Monroe still more surprising to history.

“I have urged,” reported Foster, July 7,[41] “with every argument I could think of, the injustice of the Non-importation Act which was passed in the last session of Congress, while there were doubts entertained even here as to the repeal of the Berlin and Milan Decrees; but to my surprise I find it now maintained that there existed no doubt on the subject at the time of passing the Act, and Mr. Russell is censured by his Government for publicly averring that the ship ‘New Orleans Packet’ was seized under their operation,—not that it is denied, however, that she was seized under them by our construction. Mr. Monroe, indeed, though he qualified his blame of Mr. Russell by praising his zeal, yet allowed to me that much of their present embarrassment was owing to his statement.”

“It would be fatiguing to your Lordship,” continued Foster, “were I to describe the various shadows of argument to which the American minister had recourse in order to prove his statement of the decrees having been repealed in as far as America had a right to expect.”

These shadows of argument, however elaborately described, could be reduced to the compass of a few lines; for they all resulted in a doctrine which became thenceforward a dogma. Napoleon’s decrees, so viewed, had two characters,—an international, and a municipal. The international character alone could give the right of international retaliation; and the Emperor, since November 1, had ceased to enforce his edicts in this character. The municipal character, whether enforced or not, in no way concerned England.

Such was, indeed, Napoleon’s object in substituting customs regulations for the rules of his decrees in his own ports. After that change, he applied the decrees themselves to every other part of Europe, but made an apparent exception for American commerce with France, which was forced to conform to his objects by municipal licenses and prohibitory duties. Monroe took the ground that since November 2 the decrees stood repealed, and the “New Orleans Packet” had been seized under a “municipal operation” with which England had nothing to do. The argument, though perhaps casuistic, seemed to offer a sufficient excuse for England, in case she should wish to abandon her own system as she saw danger approaching; but it brought Monroe, who used it profusely, into daily mortification, and caused the President, who invented and believed it, a world of annoyance,—for Napoleon, as Monroe had personal reason to remember, never failed to sacrifice his allies, and was certain to fail in supporting a theory so infirm as this.

For the moment, Monroe made no written reply to Foster’s letter of July 3; he was tormented by the crisis of his career, and Foster ceased to be important from the moment he could do nothing toward a repeal of the orders. With the usual misfortune of British diplomatists, Foster became aggressive as he lost ground, and pushed the secretary vigorously into Napoleon’s arms. July 14 Foster wrote again, in a threatening tone, that measures of retaliation for the Act of March 2 were already before his Government, and if America persisted in her injurious course of conduct, the most unfriendly situation would result. While this threat was all that England offered for Monroe’s friendship, news arrived on the same day that Napoleon, May 4, had opened his ports to American commerce. Not till then did Monroe give way, and turn his back upon England and his old political friends. The course taken by Foster left no apparent choice; and for that reason chiefly Monroe, probably with many misgivings, abandoned the theory of foreign affairs which had for five years led him into so many mortifications at home and abroad.

July 23 Monroe sent his answer[42] to the British minister’s argument. In substance this note, though long, contained nothing new; but in effect it was an ultimatum which left England to choose between concession and war. As an ultimatum, it was weakened by the speciousness of its long argument to prove that the French Decrees were repealed. The weakness of the ground required double boldness of assertion, and Monroe accepted the whole task. He showed further willingness to accept an issue on any point England might select. Foster’s remonstrance in regard to the “Little Belt” called from Monroe a tart reference to the affair of the “Chesapeake,” and a refusal to order an inquiry, as a matter of right, into the conduct of Commodore Rodgers. He showed equally little disposition to press for a settlement of the “Chesapeake” affair. Foster had been barely two weeks at Washington when he summed up the result of his efforts in a few words,[43] which told the situation, as Monroe then understood it, a year before war was declared:—

“On the whole, their view in this business [of the ‘Little Belt’] is to settle this, with every other difference, in the most amicable manner, provided his Majesty’s Orders in Council are revoked; otherwise, to make use of it, together with all other topics of irritation, for the purpose of fomenting a spirit of hatred toward England, and thereby strengthening their party. Your Lordship cannot expect to hear of any change till Congress meet.”

CHAPTER III.

Before the familiar figure of Robert Smith quite fades from the story of his time, the mystery which he succeeded in throwing around his true sympathies needs explanation. When dismissed from the Cabinet in March, he was supposed to be a friend of France and of the President’s French policy. In June he appeared before the public as an opponent of Madison and of French influence. Perhaps in reality he neither supported nor opposed either policy; but he deserves such credit as friendly hands gave him at the moment of his disgrace, and on no one had he made a happier impression than on Serurier, the new French minister. After six weeks’ experience, Serurier, who looked upon Gallatin as little better than an enemy, regarded Robert Smith as a friend. March 5, while Gallatin was writing his resignation, Serurier wrote a despatch to Cadore giving his estimates of the two Cabinet officers:[44]—

“Mr. Gallatin, perhaps the most capable man in the Republic, under an exterior rigidly Republican hides his ambitious designs, his feelings of superiority, which torment him without his being able to satisfy them. People maintain that all his system as a financier is English,—a thing simple enough; and that, on another side, he thinks himself obliged to expiate the sin of being a stranger and born on our frontiers, by separating himself from us in his political principles. I am told also that he has seen with annoyance the occupation by France of Geneva, his country,—whither he expected to withdraw himself with his riches, if his ambition should be crossed here by events. I have as yet no cause for complaint in regard to him, but this is the way he is talked about by the Frenchmen here, and by the party most nearly in sympathy with us (le parti qui se rapproche le plus de nous).”

The fable of Gallatin’s richesses revealed the source of Serurier’s information. The party most nearly in sympathy with France was the “Aurora” faction, which spread stories of Gallatin’s speculations and treated him with vindictive enmity, but regarded Robert Smith as a friend. Serurier’s description of Gallatin’s character contrasted darkly with his portrait of Robert Smith:—

“Mr. Smith shows certainly a character equally decided, but more open. His system seems more Continental; at least he wishes me to think so. With perhaps less breadth of mind, he has more elevation. I know that he nourishes a secret admiration of the Emperor, which he very wisely hides. I dined with him three days ago; it was my first dinner. On leaving the table he sent for a bust and an engraving of his Majesty, and on this subject said to me things full of politeness. In the conversation which followed, he became more expansive: ‘The nation’ (it is he who is speaking) ‘is bold and enterprising at sea; and if war should break out with England, supposing this rupture to be accompanied by a full reconciliation with France, the commerce between Europe and America might become more active than ever. The Americans possess a sort of vessels called schooners, the swiftest sailers in the world, and for that reason beyond insult and capture; while their sailors are full of confidence in the advantage given them by this sort of vessel in time of war.’ He affirmed to me that the great majority of the nation, if satisfied on the side of France, will be much inclined to war with her rival; but that the mild, prudent, and perhaps too timid administration of Mr. Jefferson heretofore, and now that of Mr. Madison, had thus far repressed the national enthusiasm; but he was convinced that under the administration, for example, of the Vice-President General Clinton, or of any other statesman of his character, war would have already broken out.”

This was not the only occasion when Robert Smith showed himself to the French minister as restive under restraint.

“I asked him,” reported Serurier at another time,[45] “what the Government expected to do if the English resented its pretension to the independence of its flag? ‘War,’ he replied with perfect frankness, ‘is the inevitable result of our position toward the English if they refuse to recognize our rights.’ Mr. Smith then admitted to me that his Government certainly had the best founded hope that the establishment of the regency in England would bring about a change of ministry and probably of system, and that the Orders in Council would be repealed; that in this case, neutral rights being re-established, the motive for all this discussion would cease. But he repeated to me that in the contrary case war would, in his eyes, be inevitable, and that the Americans, in deciding on this course, had perfectly foreseen where it would lead them, without being, on that account, deterred from a decision dictated by their honor or their interest.”

These remarks were made February 17, the day when the President decided to accept Napoleon’s conditions; and they helped to convince Serurier that Robert Smith was more “continental,” or Napoleonic, than Gallatin. For this reason, when he heard that Gallatin had prevailed, and Smith was to take the Russian Mission, he wrote to his Government with regret:[46]—

“The Secretary of State has taken his resolution like a man of courage. Instead of sulking and going to intrigue in his province, he has preferred to remain attached to the government of his country, and to go for some time to enjoy the air of our Europe, whither his tastes lead him, and to reserve himself for more favorable circumstances. His frank and open character makes him generally regretted. I think he must have had a share at the time in the fit of energy which his Government has shown. His language was measured; but very certainly his system drew him much nearer to France than to England.”

Perhaps Serurier was misled by Robert Smith’s habit of taking tone from the person nearest him; but as the French minister learned more of Monroe, his regrets for Smith became acute. “I regard as an evil,” he wrote, April 5,[47] “the removal of a man whose elevated views,—noble in foreign policy at least,—and whose decided character, might have given to affairs a direction which must be at least counteracted by his absence, and especially by the way in which his place is filled.”

Monroe took charge of the State Department April 1, and within a few days Serurier became unpleasantly conscious of the change. He still met with civility, but he felt new hesitation. Joel Barlow had been appointed minister to France, and should have started instantly for his post. Yet Barlow lingered at Washington; and when Serurier asked the reason of the delay, Monroe merely said he was waiting for the arrival of the frigate “Essex” with despatches from France and England to the middle of April. The expected despatches did not arrive until July; and in the interval Serurier passed a season of discomfort. The new Secretary of State, unlike his predecessor, showed no admiration for Napoleon. Toward the end of June, the French consuls in the United States made known that they were still authorized and required by the Emperor to issue permits or certificates to American vessels destined for France. Monroe sent at once for Serurier, and admonished him in language that seemed to the French minister altogether out of place:[48]—

“Mr. Monroe’s countenance was absolutely distorted (tout-à-fait décomposeé). I could not conceive how an object, apparently so unimportant, could affect him so keenly. He continued thus: ‘You are witness, sir, to the candor of our motives, to the loyalty of our principles, to our immovable fidelity to our engagements. In spite of party clamor and the extreme difficulty of the circumstances, we persevere in our system; but your Government abandons us to the attacks of its enemies and ours, by not fulfilling on its side the conditions set forth in the President’s proclamation. We are daily accused of a culpable partiality for France. These cries were at first feeble, and we flattered ourselves every day to be able to silence them by announcing the Emperor’s arrangements in conformity with ours; but they become louder by our silence. The Administration finds itself in the most extreme embarrassment (dans le plus extrême embarras); it knows neither what to expect from you, nor what to say to its constituents. Ah, sir!’ cried Mr. Monroe, ‘if your sovereign had deigned to imitate the promptness (empressement) which our President showed in publishing his proclamation; if he had re-opened, with the necessary precautions, concerted with us, his ports and his vessels,—all the commerce of America was won for France. A thousand ships would have sailed at all risks to your ports, where they would have sought the products of your manufactures which are so much liked in this country. The English would have certainly opposed such a useful exchange between the two peoples; our honor and interest would have united to resist them; and the result, for which you are doubtless more desirous than you admit, could not have failed to happen at last.’”

Serurier tried, in vain to soothe the secretary; Monroe was not to be appeased. Oratory so impassioned was not meant for mere show; and as causes of grievance multiplied, the secretary gathered one after another, evidently to be used for a rupture with France. Each stage toward his end he marked by the regular shade of increasing displeasure that he had himself, as a victim, so often watched. Enjoying the pleasure of doing to others what Cevallos and Harrowby, Talleyrand and Canning had done to him, Monroe, familiar with the accents of the most famous school in European diplomacy, ran no risk of throwing away a single tone.

When the secretary told Serurier that Joel Barlow’s departure depended on the news to be brought by the “Essex,” he did not add that he was himself waiting for the arrival of Foster, the new British minister; but as it happened, Foster reached Washington July 1, at the same instant with the despatches brought by the “Essex.” The crisis of Serurier’s diplomatic fortune came with the arrival of Foster, and during the next two weeks the French minister passed through many uncomfortable scenes. He knew too little of American affairs to foresee that not himself, but Monroe, must in the end be the victim. As soon as the “Essex” was announced, bringing William Pinkney from London and Jonathan Russell’s despatches from Paris,—including his report of Napoleon’s tirade to the Paris merchants, but no sign that his decrees were repealed,—Serurier called at the Department to learn what Monroe had to say. “I found him icy; he told me that, contrary to all the hopes of the Government, the ‘Essex’ had brought nothing decisive, and asked if I was more fortunate.”[49] Serurier had despatches, but as the story has shown[50] they were emphatic in forbidding him to pledge himself in regard to the Emperor’s course. Obliged to evade Monroe’s inquiry, he could only suggest hopes of more decisive news by the next arrival, and then turned the subject to Napoleon’s zeal in revolutionizing Spanish America:—

“I was heard with politeness, but coldly. Then I talked of the abrupt and improper tone of Mr. Russell’s correspondence. I said that it did not offend, because Mr. Russell was not of enough consequence to give offence; but that it was considered altogether indecorous. I made him aware, on this occasion, of the necessity that the Republic should have a minister at Paris. Mr. Monroe answered that the Government had already made that remark; he repeated to me that he had intended, long before, to send away Mr. Barlow, but that the daily expectation of despatches from France had made him always delay. Here he stopped himself, and returned for the tenth time upon the difficult position of the Government; upon the universal outcry of commerce, which would become a kind of revolt in the North if the Government could offer nothing to counteract it. He recalled to me the effect produced by the announcement of new licenses issued at Boston and Baltimore, and the equally annoying effect of a pamphlet by the ex-Secretary of State, Mr. Smith, which revealed to the public the declaration made by me on my arrival, that the old confiscations made by way of reprisals, could not be matter of discussion,—‘information,’ said he, ‘which had at the time profoundly afflicted the Administration, and which it had counted on publishing only at the moment when it could simultaneously announce a better outlook, and the absolute restoration of commercial relations.’ He ended, at last, this conference by telling me that he had not yet finished reading all his papers; that the Government was that moment deliberating on its course, and that in a few days we would have a new conference.”

Serurier felt his danger, and expected to be sacrificed. Society turned against him. Even Duane became abusive of France.

“Already, within a few days, I notice a change in the manners of every one about me. The general attention of which I was the object during the first five months has been suddenly followed by a general reserve; people are civil, but under a thousand pretexts they avoid being seen in conversation with me. The journals hitherto most favorable to France begin to say that since we will not keep our engagements, a rupture must take place.”

Thinking that he had nothing to lose, the French minister took a high tone, and July 3, through a private channel, conveyed to the President a warning that the course threatened might lead too far.

“The person in question having answered that I might depend on the Government’s fidelity to its engagements, I replied that I would believe it all if the new American minister should be despatched to Paris, and that I would believe nothing if this departure were again postponed.”

Everything depended on Foster, who had been received by the President July 2, the day before Serurier’s message was sent. Apparently, the first impression made by Foster’s letters and conversation was decisive, for Monroe told the French minister at the public dinner of July 4, that Barlow was to start at once on his mission.

“This news,” reported Serurier, “caused me great pleasure. This success, though doubtless inconsiderable, made all my ambition for the moment; it delays for several months the crisis that the English party was trying to force, in the hope of making it decisive against us; it neutralizes the effect of the arrival of the British minister, whose want of influence down to this point it reveals; it withdraws the initiative from the President and restores to his Majesty the decision of our great affairs.”

No sooner had this decision been made, than Monroe seemed to repent it. The conduct of France had been of late more outrageous than that of England; and Monroe, who found his worst expectations fulfilled, could not easily resign himself to accepting a yoke against which he had for five years protested. The departure of Barlow, ordered July 4, was countermanded July 5; and this proof of Monroe’s discontent led to a striking interview, July 9, in which the Secretary of State became more impassioned than ever.[51] Serurier began by asking what he was to think of the Government’s conduct. Monroe replied by recalling what had happened since the appointment of Barlow as minister to France, a fortnight after Serurier’s arrival. Then the Proclamation of November 2 had been supposed sufficient to satisfy the Emperor; the Non-intercourse Act followed,—yet the President was still waiting for the assurance that the French Decrees were repealed, without which knowledge Barlow’s instructions could not be written.

“So we reached the day when the ‘Essex’ arrived,” continued Monroe. “Not an officer of the government, not a citizen in the Republic, but was convinced that this frigate brought the most satisfactory and the most decisive news. Yet to our great astonishment—even to our confusion—she has brought nothing. In spite of a deception so afflicting, the President had still decided to make a last attempt, and this was to send off Mr. Barlow. I had the honor to announce it to you; but on the news of our frigate’s arrival without satisfactory information from France, a general cry of discontent rose all over the Republic, and public opinion pronounced itself so strongly against Mr. Barlow’s departure that the Government can to-day no longer give the order without raising from all parts of the Union the cry of treason. I am myself a daily witness of the general effervescence that this silence of your Government excites. I cannot walk from my house to this office without being accosted by twenty citizens, who say to me: ‘What, sir! shall you send off a minister to France, when the Imperial government shows itself unwilling to carry out its’ engagements; when it treats our citizens with so much injustice, and you yourself with so much contempt? No! the honor of the Republic will not permit you to send your ambassador under such circumstances, and you will be responsible for it to the country.’”

Monroe’s objection seemed reasonable. The sending a new minister to France was in no way necessary for making an issue with England. Indeed, if only a simple issue with England had been wanted, the permanent presence of British frigates off Sandy Hook, capturing American vessels and impressing American seamen, was sufficient. No further protest against it needed to be made, seeing that it had been the subject of innumerable protests. If President Madison wanted an issue that should oblige Great Britain to declare war, or to take measures equivalent to war, he could obtain it in a moment by ordering Rodgers and Decatur to drive the British frigates away and rescue their victims. For such a purpose he needed no minister in France, and had no occasion to make himself a party to fraud. Monroe’s language implied that he would have preferred some such issue.

“‘Believe me,’ said Mr. Monroe in finishing, and as we were about to separate, ‘the American government will not be inconsequent; but its patience is exhausted, and as regards foreign Powers it is determined to make itself respected. People in Europe suppose us to be merchants, occupied exclusively with pepper and ginger. They are much deceived, and I hope we shall prove it. The immense majority of citizens do not belong to this class, and are, as much as your Europeans, controlled by principles of honor and dignity. I never knew what trade was. The President is as much of a stranger to it as I; and we accord to commerce only the protection that we owe it, as every government owes it to an interesting class of its citizens.’”

Commerce would have listened with more amusement than conviction to Monroe’s ideas on the “principles of honor and dignity” which led a government of Virginia and Pennsylvania farmers to accord protection in the form of embargoes and non-intercourses to commerce which it distrusted and despised; but Monroe meant only that France, as well as England, must reckon on a new national spirit in Virginia,—a spirit which they had themselves roused, and for whose bad qualities they had only themselves to blame.

Yet Monroe found himself in an attitude not flattering to his pride. All his life a representative of the Virginia school,—more conservative than Jefferson, and only to be compared with John Randolph, and John Taylor of Caroline,—he had come to the State Department to enforce his own principles and overrule the President; but he found himself helpless in the President’s hands. That the contest was in reality between Monroe’s will and Madison’s became clear to Serurier; and that Monroe’s pliable nature must succumb to Madison’s pertinacity, backed as it was by authority, could not be doubtful. Six months seemed to Virginians a short time for Monroe’s submission, but in truth Monroe had submitted long before; his rebellion itself had been due to William Pinkney and John Randolph rather than to impulses of his own; he regretted it almost as soon as it was made, and he suffered little in allowing Madison to control the course of events. Yet he would certainly have preferred another result, and his interview with Serurier, July 9, recorded the policy he had meant to impose, while preparing for its abandonment.

The secretary waited only for a pretext to accept Madison’s dogma that the French Decrees were withdrawn, although his conversations with Serurier proved his conviction to the contrary. A few days later, a vessel arrived from England bringing unofficial news from France, to May 24, that the Emperor had released the American vessels kept in sequestration since November 1, and had admitted their cargoes for sale. Without the form of further struggle, Monroe followed the footsteps of his predecessor.

“The Secretary of State sent for me three days ago to his office,” wrote Serurier, July 20.[52] “After having congratulated me on this decision [of the Emperor], he told me that he had no doubt of its producing on the public the same excellent impression it had made on the Government; but he added that as it was not official, the President would like to have me write a letter as confirmative as possible, in the absence of instructions, both of these events and of his Majesty’s good intentions; and that if I could write him this letter, Mr. Barlow should immediately depart.”

The only instructions possessed by Serurier on the subject of the decrees warned him against doing what Monroe asked; but the temptation to win a success was strong, and he wrote a cautious letter,[53] dated July 19, saying that he had no official knowledge on the subject, but that “it is with reason, sir, that you reject the idea of a doubt on the fidelity of France in fulfilling her engagements; for to justify such a doubt one must have some contradictory facts to cite,—one must show that judgments have been rendered in France on the principle of maintaining the Decrees of Berlin and Milan, or that a series of American ships coming from England to America, or from America to England, have been captured by our privateers in virtue of the blockade of the British Isles. Nothing of the sort has become known to any of us, and, on the contrary,” all advices showed that the decrees in France and on the ocean had ceased to affect American commerce.

Probably this letter disappointed the President, for it was never published, nor was any allusion made to it in the correspondence that followed. Without even such cover, Monroe ordered Barlow to depart, and made the decision public. Serurier, puzzled though delighted by his success, groped in the dark to discover how the Government had reached its decision. Foster’s attitude failed to enlighten him; and he could see no explanation, except that the result was a personal victory of Madison over Monroe and the Cabinet.

“The joy is general among the authorities,” he wrote July 20,[54] “except among some friends of Mr. Foster; but more than any one else, Mr. Madison seems enchanted to see himself confirmed (raffermi) in a system which is wholly his own, but which he began to see no means of maintaining. I do him the justice to say that if he had a movement of hesitation on the point of Mr. Barlow’s departure, it was more the effect of public clamor than of his own sentiments,—a movement of spite (dépit) and discouragement, rather than of inclination toward England, which he frankly detests, as does his friend Mr. Jefferson,—and that he has not been for a moment unfaithful to his engagements with us. I have never seen him more triumphant. The Secretaries of State, of the Treasury, and of War are doubtful, perhaps, and conduct themselves more according to events; but happily the President, superior to them in enlightenment as in position, governs entirely by himself, and there is no reason to fear his being crossed by them.”

Serurier knew Madison and Jefferson only as a Frenchman might, and his ideas of their feelings toward England were such as a Frenchman could understand. In truth, Madison did not want a distinct issue of peace or war with England. Had he wished for such an issue, he would have made it. Disbelieving in war, as war approached, he clung to the last chances of peaceful coercion. The fiction that Napoleon’s decrees were repealed enabled him to enforce his peaceful coercive measures to avoid war. Not because he wanted war, but because he wanted peace, Madison insisted that the decrees were withdrawn. As he carried each point, he stood more and more alone; he was misunderstood by his enemies and overborne by his friends; he failed in his policy of peace, and knew himself unfit to administer a policy of war. Yet he held to his principle, that commercial restrictions were the true safeguards of an American system.

A man of keen intelligence, Madison knew, quite as well as Monroe, Serurier, or Foster, that the French Decrees were not repealed. His alleged reason for despatching Barlow was unsatisfactory to himself as to Monroe, and doubly worthless because unofficial. Even while he insisted on his measures, he made no secret of his discontent. When official despatches arrived a few days later, Serurier was puzzled at finding Madison well aware that the Emperor had not withdrawn and did not mean to withdraw his decrees. July 23 Serurier communicated[55] to Monroe the substance of the despatches from France. The next day he called at the Department and at the White House to watch the effect of his letter, which announced the admission of American merchandise into French ports.

“Mr. Monroe showed himself less satisfied than I had hoped, either because the President had so directed, in order to reserve the right of raising new pretensions, or because, already advised by Mr. Russell, he had been at the same time informed that the prizes made since November by our privateers were not restored; and these restrictions had been represented in an unfavorable light by the chargé d’affaires. He confined himself to telling me that certainly there were things agreeable to the American government in the Emperor’s arrangements, but that there were others wholly contrary to expectation, and that before his departure he would send me a list of the complaints left unsatisfied.. .. As the President is to start to-morrow for his estate in Virginia, I called this morning to bid him good-by. I had on this occasion with Mr. Madison an interview which put the last stroke to my suspicions. When I told him that I was glad to see him a last time under auspices so happy as the news I had officially given him the evening before, he answered me that he had learned with pleasure, though without surprise, the release of the sequestered ships and the Emperor’s decision to admit American products; but that one thing pained him profoundly. This was that the American ships captured since last November, under pretext of the Berlin and Milan Decrees, had not been released with those which voluntarily entered French ports; and he pretended that this failure to execute the chief of our engagements destroyed the effect of all the rest.”[56]

The opinion scarcely admitted dispute. Reversing Madison’s theory, Napoleon had relieved American vessels from the “municipal operation” of his decrees in France, while he enforced that international operation on the high seas which alone Madison declared himself bound by the law of nations to resist. The blockade thus enforced by Napoleon against England was more extravagant than any blockade England had ever declared. Of his acts in Denmark and on the Baltic Madison took no notice at all, though these, more than the detention of American prizes in France, “destroyed the effect of all the rest.” If, then, the decrees were still enforced on the ocean,—as Madison insisted they were,—they could not have been repealed; and Madison, by submitting to their enforcement on the ocean, not only recognized their legality, but also required England to make the same submission, under penalty of a declaration of war from the United States. This dilemma threatened to overthrow Madison’s Administration, or even to break up the Union. Serurier saw its dangers, and did his utmost to influence Napoleon toward concessions:

“The revocation of the Decrees of Milan and Berlin has become a personal affair with Mr. Madison. He announced it by proclamation, and has constantly maintained it since. The English party never stops worrying him on this point, and saying that he has been made a tool of France,—that the decrees have not been repealed. He fears the effect of this suspension, and foresees that it will cause great discussions in the next Congress, and that it alone may compromise the Administration, triumphant on all other points.”

Under such circumstances, Monroe needed more than common powers in order to play his part. Talleyrand himself would have found his impassive countenance tried by assuring Foster in the morning that the decrees were repealed, and rating Serurier in the afternoon because they were in force. Such conversations, extended over a length of time, might in the end raise doubts of a statesman’s veracity; yet this was what Monroe undertook. On the day when Serurier communicated the news that disturbed the President, Monroe sent to the British minister the note maintaining broadly that France had revoked her decrees. Three days later, after the President had told Serurier that “the failure to execute the chief of our engagements destroyed the effect of all the rest,” Monroe gave to Barlow his instructions founded on the revocation of the decrees. Doubtless this double-dealing exasperated all the actors concerned in it. Madison and Monroe at heart were more angry with France than with England, if indeed degrees in anger could be felt where the outrages of both parties were incessant and intolerable. Yet Barlow took his instructions and set sail for France; a proclamation appeared in the “National Intelligencer” calling Congress together for November 1; and the President and his Secretary of State left Washington for their summer vacation in Virginia, having accepted, once for all, the conditions imposed by Napoleon.

For some years afterward Monroe said no more about old Republican principles; but twelve months later he wrote to Colonel Taylor a letter[57] which began with a candid confession:—

“I have been afraid to write to you for some time past, because I knew that you expected better things from me than I have been able to perform. You thought that I might contribute to promote a compromise with Great Britain, and thereby prevent a war between that country and the United States; that we might also get rid of our restrictive system. I own to you that I had some hope, though less than some of my friends entertained, that I might aid in promoting that desirable result. This hope has been disappointed.”

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY,
J. W. POWELL, DIRECTOR.

MAP OF
THE
STATE OF INDIANA

Exhibiting the Lands ceded by the
Indian Tribes
TO THE
UNITED STATES
BY
C. C. ROYCE

CESSIONS OF INDIAN TERRITORY IN INDIANA,

1795–1810.

1. Tract ceded by Treaty of Greenville, August 3rd, 1795.

2. Tract about Fort Wayne, ceded by the same Treaty.

3. Two miles square on the Miami portage, ceded by the same Treaty.

4. Six miles square at Old Wea Town on the Wabash, ceded by the same Treaty.

5. Clark’s Grant on the Ohio, reserved by the same Treaty.

6. Vincennes tract, reserved by the same Treaty.

7. Tract ceded by Treaties of August 18th and 27th, 1804.

8. Tract ceded by Treaty of August 21st, 1805.

9, 10, 11. Tracts ceded by Treaty of September 30th, 1809.

12. Tract ceded by Treaty of December 9th, 1809.

CHAPTER IV.

Although no one doubted that the year 1812 was to witness a new convulsion of society, if signs of panic occurred they were less marked in crowded countries where vast interests were at stake, than in remote regions which might have been thought as safe from Napoleon’s wars as from those of Genghis Khan. As in the year 1754 a petty fight between two French and English scouting parties on the banks of the Youghiogheny River, far in the American wilderness, began a war that changed the balance of the world, so in 1811 an encounter in the Indian country, on the banks of the Wabash, began a fresh convulsion which ended only with the fall of Napoleon. The battle of Tippecanoe was a premature outbreak of the great wars of 1812.

Governor William Henry Harrison, of the Indiana Territory, often said he could tell by the conduct of his Indians, as by a thermometer, the chances of war and peace for the United States as estimated in the Cabinet at London. The remark was curious, but not surprising. Uneasiness would naturally be greatest where least control and most irritation existed. Such a region was the Northwestern Territory. Even the spot where violence would break out might be predicted as somewhere on the waterline of the Maumee and the Wabash, between Detroit at one extremity and Vincennes at the other. If a guess had been ventured that the most probable point would be found on that line, about half way between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, the map would have shown that Tippecanoe Creek, where it flowed into the Wabash, corresponded with the rough suggestion.

The Indiana Territory was created in 1800; and the former delegate of the whole Northwestern Territory, William Henry Harrison, was then appointed governor of the new division. Until the year 1809, Illinois formed part of the Indiana Territory; but its single settlement at Kaskaskia was remote. The Indiana settlement consisted mainly of two tracts,—one on the Ohio, opposite Louisville in Kentucky, at the falls, consisting of about one hundred and fifty thousand acres, called Clark’s Grant; the other, at Vincennes on the Wabash, where the French had held a post, without a definite grant of lands, under an old Indian treaty, and where the Americans took whatever rights the French enjoyed. One hundred miles of wilderness separated these two tracts. In 1800, their population numbered about twenty-five hundred persons; in 1810, nearly twenty-five thousand.

Northward and westward, from the bounds of these districts the Indian country stretched to the Lakes and the Mississippi, unbroken except by military posts at Fort Wayne and Fort Dearborn, or Chicago, and a considerable settlement of white people in the neighborhood of the fortress at Detroit. Some five thousand Indian warriors held this vast region, and were abundantly able to expel every white man from Indiana if their organization had been as strong as their numbers. The whites were equally eager to expel the Indians, and showed the wish openly.

Governor Harrison was the highest authority on matters connected with the northwestern Indians. During eight years of Harrison’s government Jefferson guided the Indian policy; and as long as Jefferson insisted on the philanthropic principles which were his pride, Harrison, whose genius lay in ready adaptation, took his tone from the President, and wrote in a different spirit from that which he would have taken had he represented an aggressive chief. His account of Indian affairs offered an illustration of the law accepted by all historians in theory, but adopted by none in practice; which former ages called “fate,” and metaphysicians called “necessity,” but which modern science has refined into the “survival of the fittest.” No acid ever worked more mechanically on a vegetable fibre than the white man acted on the Indian. As the line of American settlements approached, the nearest Indian tribes withered away.

Harrison reported conscientiously the incurable evils which attended the contact of the two hostile forms of society. The first, but not the most serious, was that the white man, though not allowed to settle beyond the Indian border, could not be prevented from trespassing far and wide on Indian territory in search of game. The practice of hunting on Indian lands, in violation of law and existing treaties, had grown into a monstrous abuse. The Kentucky settlers crossed the Ohio River every autumn to kill deer, bear, and buffalo for their skins, which they had no more right to take than they had to cross the Alleghanies, and shoot or trap the cows and sheep in the farm-yards of Bucks County. Many parts of the Northwestern Territory which as late as 1795 abounded in game, ten years afterward contained not game enough to support the small Indian parties passing through them, and had become worthless for Indian purposes except as a barrier to further encroachment.[58]

The tribes that owned these lands were forced either to remove elsewhere, or to sell their old hunting-grounds to the government for supplies or for an annuity. The tribes that sold, remaining near the settlements to enjoy their annuity, were more to be pitied than those that removed, which were destined to destruction by war. Harrison reported that contact with white settlements never failed to ruin them. “I can tell at once,” he wrote in 1801,[59] “upon looking at an Indian whom I may chance to meet, whether he belongs to a neighboring or to a more distant tribe. The latter is generally well-clothed, healthy, and vigorous; the former half-naked, filthy, and enfeebled by intoxication, and many of them without arms excepting a knife, which they carry for the most villanous purposes.” Harrison estimated the number of Indian warriors then in the whole valley of the Wabash as not exceeding six hundred; the sale of whiskey was unlawful, yet they were supposed to consume six thousand gallons of whiskey a year, and their drunkenness so often ended in murder that among three of the tribes scarcely a chief survived.

“I have had much difficulty,” wrote Harrison in the same letter from Vincennes, “with the small tribes in this immediate neighborhood; namely the Piankeshaws, the Weas, and the Eel River Miamis. These three tribes form a body of the most depraved wretches on earth. They are daily in this town in considerable numbers, and are frequently intoxicated to the number of thirty or forty at once, when they commit the greatest disorders, drawing their knives and stabbing every one they meet with; breaking open the houses of the citizens, killing their cattle and hogs, and breaking down their fences. But in all their frolics they generally suffer the most themselves. They kill each other without mercy. Some years ago as many as four were found dead in a morning; and although those murders were actually committed in the streets of the town, yet no attempt to punish them has ever been made.”

The Piankeshaws were reduced to twenty-five or thirty warriors; the Weas and Eel River Indians were mere remnants. The more powerful tribes at a distance saw with growing alarm the steady destruction of the border warriors; and the intelligent Indians everywhere forbade the introduction of whiskey, and tried to create a central authority to control the degraded tribes.

A third evil was much noticed by Harrison. By treaty, if an Indian killed a white man the tribe was bound to surrender the murderer for trial by American law; while if a white man killed an Indian, the murderer was also to be tried by a white jury. The Indians surrendered their murderers, and white juries at Vincennes hung them without scruple; but no jury in the territory ever convicted a white man of murdering an Indian. Harrison complained to the President of the wanton and atrocious murders committed by white men on Indians, and the impossibility of punishing them in a society where witnesses would not appear, criminals broke jail, and juries refused to convict. Throughout the territory the people avowed the opinion that a white man ought not in justice to suffer for killing an Indian;[60] and many of them, like the uncle of Abraham Lincoln,[61] thought it a virtuous act to shoot an Indian at sight. Harrison could combat this code of popular law only by proclamations offering rewards for the arrest of murderers, who were never punished when arrested. In 1801 the Delawares alone complained of six unatoned murders committed on their tribe since the Treaty of Greenville, and every year increased the score.

“All these injuries,” reported Harrison in 1801, “the Indians have hitherto borne with astonishing patience; but though they discover no disposition to make war on the United States at present, I am confident that most of the tribes would eagerly seize any favorable opportunity for that purpose; and should the United States be at war with any of the European nations who are known to the Indians, there would probably be a combination of more than nine tenths of the Northern tribes against us, unless some means are used to conciliate them.”

So warmly were the French remembered by the Indians, that if Napoleon had carried out his Louisiana scheme of 1802 he could have counted on the active support of nearly every Indian tribe on the Mississippi and the Lakes; from Pensacola to Detroit his orders would have been obeyed. Toward England the Indians felt no such sentimental attachment; but interest took the place of sentiment. Their natural line of trade was with the Lakes, and their relations with the British trading-post at Malden, opposite Detroit, became more and more close with every new quarrel between Washington and London.

President Jefferson earnestly urged the Indians to become industrious cultivators of the soil; but even for that reform one condition was indispensable. The Indians must be protected from contact with the whites; and during the change in their mode of life, they must not be drugged, murdered, or defrauded. Trespasses on Indian land and purchases of tribal territory must for a time cease, until the Indian tribes should all be induced to adopt a new system. Even then the reform would be difficult, for Indian warriors thought death less irksome than daily labor; and men who did not fear death were not easily driven to toil.

There President Jefferson’s philanthropy stopped. His greed for land equalled that of any settler on the border, and his humanity to the Indian suffered the suspicion of having among its motives the purpose of gaining the Indian lands for the whites. Jefferson’s policy in practice offered a reward for Indian extinction, since he not only claimed the territory of every extinct tribe on the doctrine of paramount sovereignty, but deliberately ordered[62] his Indian agents to tempt the tribal chiefs into debt in order to oblige them to sell the tribal lands, which did not belong to them, but to their tribes:—

“To promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading-houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them in debt; because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.”

No one would have felt more astonishment than Jefferson had some friend told him that this policy, which he believed to be virtuous, was a conspiracy to induce trustees to betray their trusts; and that in morals it was as improper as though it were not virtuously intended. Shocked as he would have been at such a method of obtaining the neighboring estate of any Virginia family, he not only suggested but vigorously carried out the system toward the Indians.

In 1804 and 1805, Governor Harrison made treaties with the Miamis, Eel Rivers, Weas, Piankeshaws, and Delawares,—chiefly the tribes he called “a body of the most depraved wretches upon earth,”—by which he obtained the strip of country, fifty miles wide, between the Ohio and the White rivers, thus carrying the boundary back toward the Wabash. The treaty excited deep feeling among the better Indians throughout the territory, who held long debates on their means of preventing its execution.

Among the settlers in Indiana, an internal dispute mingled with the dangers of Indian relations. For this misfortune Harrison himself was partially to blame. A Virginian by birth, naturally inclined toward Southern influences, he shared the feelings of the Kentucky and Virginia slave-owners who wanted the right of bringing their slaves with them into the Territory, contrary to the Ordinance of 1787. The men who stood nearest the governor were earnest and active in the effort to repeal or evade the prohibition of slavery, and they received from Harrison all the support he could give them. With his approval, successive appeals were made to Congress. Perhaps the weightiest act of John Randolph’s career as leader of the Republican majority in the House was to report, March 2, 1803, that the extension of slavery into Indiana was “highly dangerous and inexpedient,” and that the people of Indiana “would at no distant day find ample remuneration for a temporary privation of labor and immigration” in the beneficence of a free society. Cæsar Rodney, of Delaware, in March, 1804, made a report to a contrary effect, recommending a suspension for ten years of the anti-slavery clause in the Ordinance; but the House did not act upon it.

The advocates of a slave system, with Harrison’s co-operation, then decided that the Territory should pass into the second grade, which under the Ordinance of 1787 could be done when the population should number five thousand male whites of full age. The change was effected in the winter of 1804–1805, by means open to grave objection.[63] Thenceforward Harrison shared his power with a Legislative Council and a House of Representatives; while the legislature chose a territorial delegate to Congress. The first territorial legislature, in 1805, which was wholly under Harrison’s influence, passed an Act, subsequently revised and approved Sept. 17, 1807, permitting owners of slaves to bring them into the Territory and keep them there for a number of days, during which time the slave might be emancipated on condition of binding himself to service for a term of years to which the law set no limit.[64]

The overpowering influence and energy of the governor and his Southern friends gave them during these years undisputed control. Yet the anti-slavery sentiment was so strong as to make the governor uncomfortable, and almost to endanger his personal safety; until at last, in 1808, the issue was fairly brought before the people in the elections. Both in that and in the following year the opponents of slavery outvoted and defeated the governor’s party. Feelings became exceedingly bitter, and the Territory was distracted by feuds which had no small influence on matters of administration, and on the Indian troubles most of all. Between the difficulties of introducing negroes and expelling Indians, Harrison found that his popularity had been lessened, if not lost.[65] He could not fail to see that a military exploit was perhaps his only hope of recovering it; and for such an exploit he had excuses enough.

The treaties of 1804–1805, which threatened the Indians with immediate loss of their hunting-grounds in the Wabash valley, caused a fermentation peculiarly alarming because altogether new. Early in 1806 Harrison learned that a Shawanee Indian, claiming to be a prophet, had gathered a number of warriors about him at Greenville, in Ohio, and was preaching doctrines that threatened trouble. Harrison attributed the mischief to the Prophet; but he learned in time that the Prophet’s brother Tecumseh—or more properly Tecumthe—gave the movement its chief strength.

Indians and whites soon recognized Tecumthe as a phenomenon. His father was a Shawanee warrior, in no way distinguished; his mother, a Creek or Cherokee Indian, captured and adopted by the Shawanee,—and of these parents three children at one birth were born about the year 1780, a few miles from Springfield, Ohio. The third brother lived and died obscure; Tecumthe and the Prophet became famous, although they were not chiefs of their tribe, and had no authority of office or birth. Such of the chiefs as were in the pay or under the power of the United States government were jealous of their influence, and had every reason for wishing to suppress the leaders of a movement avowedly designed to overthrow the system of tribal independence. From the first, Tecumthe aimed at limiting the authority of the tribes and their chiefs in order to build up an Indian confederacy, embracing not the chiefs but the warriors of all the tribes, who should act as an Indian Congress and assume joint ownership of Indian lands.

This scheme was hostile to the plans though not to the professions of President Jefferson. Its object was to prevent the piecemeal sale of Indian lands by petty tribal chiefs, under pressure of government agents. No one could honestly deny that the object was lawful and even regular; for in the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which was the only decisive authority or precedent, the United States had admitted and acted on the principle for which Tecumthe contended,—of accepting its cessions of land, not from single tribes, but from the whole body of northwestern Indians, without entering on the subject of local ownership.[66] Governor Harrison and President Jefferson were of course aware of the precedent, and decided to disregard it[67] in order to act on the rule better suited to their purposes; but their decision was in no way binding on Tecumthe or the tribes who were parties to the treaty of Greenville.

During the year 1807 Tecumthe’s influence was increased by the “Chesapeake” excitement, which caused the Governor-general of Canada to intrigue among the Indians for aid in case of war. Probably their increase of influence led the Prophet and his brother, in May or June, 1808, to establish themselves on Tippecanoe Creek, the central point of Indian strategy and politics. Vincennes lay one hundred and fifty miles below, barely four-and-twenty hours down the stream of the Wabash; Fort Dearborn, or Chicago, was a hundred miles to the northwest; Fort Wayne the same distance to the northeast; and excepting a short portage, the Tippecanoe Indians could paddle their canoes to Malden and Detroit in one direction, or to any part of the waters of the Ohio and Mississippi in the other. At the mouth of Tippecanoe Creek the reformers laid out a village that realized Jefferson’s wish, for the Indians there drank no whiskey, and avowed themselves to be tillers of the soil. Their professions seemed honest. In August, 1808, the Prophet came to Vincennes and passed two weeks with Governor Harrison, who was surprised to find that no temptation could overcome the temperance of the Prophet’s followers. The speech then made in the public talk with the governor remains the only record of the Prophet’s words, and of the character he wished to pretend, if not to adopt.

“I told all the redskins,” he said to Harrison, “that the way they were in was not good, and that they ought to abandon it; that we ought to consider ourselves as one man, but we ought to live agreeable to our several customs,—the red people after their mode, and the white people after theirs; particularly that they should not drink whiskey; that it was not made for them, but the white people, who alone know how to use it; and that it is the cause of all the mischiefs which the Indians suffer.... Determine to listen to nothing that is had; do not take up the tomahawk, should it be offered by the British or by the Long-knives; do not meddle with anything that does not belong to you, but mind your own business, and cultivate the ground, that your women and your children may have enough to live on. I now inform you that it is our intention to live in peace with our father and his children forever.”

Whatever want of confidence Harrison felt in these professions of peace, he recorded his great surprise at finding the temperance to be real; and every one who visited the settlement at Tippecanoe bore witness to the tillage, which seemed to guarantee a peaceful intent; for if war had been in Tecumthe’s mind, he would not have placed town, crops, and stock within easy reach of destruction.

Nothing could be more embarrassing to Jefferson than to see the Indians follow his advice; for however well-disposed he might be, he could not want the Indians to become civilized, educated, or competent to protect themselves,—yet he was powerless to protect them. The Prophet asked that the sale of liquor should be stopped; but the President could no more prevent white settlers from selling liquor to the Indians than he could prevent the Wabash from flowing. The tribes asked that white men who murdered Indians should be punished; but the President could no more execute such malefactors than he could execute the smugglers who defied his embargo. The Indians had rights recognized by law, by treaty, and by custom, on which their existence depended; but these rights required force to maintain them, and on the Wabash President Jefferson had less police power than the Prophet himself controlled.

Wide separation could alone protect the Indians from the whites, and Tecumthe’s scheme depended for its only chance of success on holding the white settlements at a distance. The Prophet said nothing to Harrison on that point, but his silence covered no secret. So notorious was the Indian hostility to land-cessions, that when Governor Hull of Michigan Territory, in November, 1807, negotiated another such cession at Detroit,[68] the Indian agent at Fort Wayne not only doubted its policy, but insinuated that it might have been dictated by the British in order to irritate the Indians; and he reported that the Northern Indians talked of punishing with death the chiefs who signed it.[69]

Aware of the danger, Harrison decided to challenge it. The people of his Territory wanted the lands of the Wabash, even at the risk of war. The settlement at Tippecanoe was supposed to contain no more than eighty or a hundred warriors, with four or five times that number within a radius of fifty miles. No immediate outbreak was to be feared; and Harrison, “conceiving that a favorable opportunity then offered”[70] for carrying the boundary from the White River to the Wabash, asked authority to make a new purchase. Secretary Eustis, July 15, 1809, wrote him a cautious letter,[71] giving the required permission, but insisting that, “to prevent any future dissatisfaction, the chiefs of all the nations who had or pretended right to these lands” were to be present as consenting parties to the treaty. On this authority Harrison once more summoned together “the most depraved wretches upon earth,”—Miamis, Eel Rivers, Delawares, Pottawatomies, and Kickapoos,—and obtained from them, Sept. 30, 1809, several enormous cessions of territory which cut into the heart of the Indian country for nearly a hundred miles up both banks of the Wabash valley. These transfers included about three million acres.

Harrison knew that this transaction would carry despair to the heart of every Indian in his Territory. The Wabash valley alone still contained game. Deprived of their last resource, these Indians must fall back to perish in the country of the Chippewas and Sioux, their enemies.[72] Already impoverished by the decrees of Napoleon, the Orders in Council, and the embargo, which combined to render their peltry valueless, so that they could scarcely buy the powder and shot to kill their game,[73] the Indians had thenceforward no choice but to depend on British assistance. Harrison’s treaty immediately strengthened the influence of Tecumthe and the Prophet. The Wyandots, or Hurons, regarded by all the Indian tribes in the Territory as first in dignity and influence, joined Tecumthe’s league, and united in a declaration that the late cessions were void, and would not be recognized by the tribes. The winter of 1809–1810 passed quietly; but toward May, 1810, alarming reports reached Vincennes of gatherings at the Prophet’s town, and of violence to be expected. When the salt, which was part of the usual annuity, reached Tippecanoe, Tecumthe refused to accept it, and drove the boatmen away. He charged the American government with deceiving the Indians; and he insisted, as the foundation of future peace, that the cessions of 1809 should be annulled, and no future cession should be good unless made by all the tribes.

Harrison knew that his treaties of 1809 opened an aggressive policy, which must naturally end in an Indian war. Some of the best citizens in the Territory thought that the blame for the consequences ought not to rest on the Indians.[74] Since the election of Madison to the Presidency in November, 1808, war with England had been so imminent, and its effect on the Indians so marked, that Harrison could not help seeing the opportunity of a military career, and he had given much study to military matters.[75] His plans, if they accorded with his acts, included an Indian war, in which he should take the initiative. His treaties of 1809 left him no choice, for after making such a war inevitable, his only safety lay in crushing the Indians before the British could openly aid them. Unfortunately, neither Madison nor Eustis understood his purpose, or would have liked it. They approved his land-purchases, which no Administration and no citizen would have dared reject; but they were very unwilling to be drawn into an Indian war, however natural might be such a consequence of the purchases.

So it happened that as early as the summer of 1810 war was imminent in the Wabash and Maumee valleys, and perhaps only British influence delayed it. British interests imperatively required that Tecumthe’s confederacy should be made strong, and should not be wrecked prematurely in an unequal war. From Malden, opposite Detroit, the British traders loaded the American Indians with gifts and weapons; urged Tecumthe to widen his confederacy, to unite all the tribes, but not to begin war till he received the signal from Canada. All this was duly reported at Washington.[76] On the other hand, Harrison sent for Tecumthe; and August 12, 1810, the Indian chief came for a conference to Vincennes. Indians and whites, in considerable numbers, armed and alert, fearing treachery on both sides, witnessed the interview.

Tecumthe took, as his right, the position he felt himself to occupy as the most powerful American then living,—who, a warrior himself, with five thousand warriors behind him, held in one hand an alliance with Great Britain, in the other an alliance with the Indians of the southwest. Representatives of the Wyandots, Kickapoos, Pottawatomies, Ottawas, and Winnebagoes announced the adhesion of their tribes to the Shawanee Confederacy and the election of Tecumthe as their chief. In this character he avowed to Harrison, in the broadest and boldest language, the scope of his policy:[77]—

“Brother, since the peace was made in 1795 you have killed some of the Shawanee, Winnebagoes, Delawares, and Miamis, and you have taken our land from us; and I do not see how we can remain at peace with you if you continue to do so.... You try to force the red people to do some injury; it is you that are pushing them on to do mischief. You endeavor to make distinctions; you wish to prevent the Indians from doing as we wish them,—from uniting and considering their land as the common property of the whole. You take tribes aside and advise them not to come into this measure.... The reason, I tell you, is this: You want, by your distinctions of Indian tribes, in allotting to each a particular tract of land, to make them to war with each other. You never see an Indian come and endeavor to make the white people do so. You are continually driving the red people; and at last you will drive them into the great lake, where they cannot either stand or work.

Since my residence at Tippecanoe we have endeavored to level all distinctions, to destroy village chiefs by whom all mischief is done: it is they who sell our lands to the Americans. Our object is to let all our affairs be transacted by warriors. This land that was sold, and the goods that were given for it, was only done by a few. The treaty was afterward brought here, and the Weas were induced to give their consent because of their small numbers.... In future we are prepared to punish those chiefs who may come forward to propose to sell their land. If you continue to purchase of them, it will produce war among the different tribes, and at last I do not know what will be the consequence to the white people.”

Earnestly denying the intention of making war, Tecumthe still declared that any attempt on Harrison’s part to enter into possession of the land lately ceded would be resisted by force. In the vehemence of discussion he used language in regard to the United States which caused great excitement, and broke up the meeting for that day; but he lost no time in correcting the mistake. After the conference closed, he had a private interview with Harrison, and repeated his official ultimatum. He should only with great reluctance make war on the United States, against whom he had no other complaint than their land-purchases; he was extremely anxious to be their friend, and if the governor would prevail upon the President to give up the lands lately purchased, and agree never to make another treaty without the consent of all the tribes, Tecumthe pledged himself to be a faithful ally to the United States, and to assist them in all their wars with the English; otherwise he would be obliged to enter into an English alliance.

Harrison told him that no such condition had the least chance of finding favor with the Government. “Well,” rejoined Tecumthe, as though he had expected the answer, “as the great chief is to decide the matter, I hope the Great Spirit will put sense enough into his head to induce him to direct you to give up this land. It is true, he is so far off he will not be injured by the war; he may sit still in his town and drink his wine, while you and I will have to fight it out.”

Therewith Tecumthe and Harrison parted, each to carry on his preparations for the conflict. The Secretary of War wrote to Harrison in November instructing him to defer the military occupation of the new purchase on the Wabash, but giving no orders as to the policy intended to be taken by the Government. Wanting peace, he threw on Harrison the responsibility for war.[78]

“It has indeed occurred to me,” wrote the secretary, “that the surest means of securing good behavior from this conspicuous personage [Tecumthe] and his brother, would be to make them prisoners; but at this time more particularly, it is desirable that peace with all the Indian tribes should be preserved; and I am instructed by the President to express to your Excellency his expectation and confidence that in all your arrangements this may be considered (as I am confident it ever has been) a primary object with you.”

CHAPTER V.

Notwithstanding the hostile spirit on both sides, the winter of 1810–1811 passed without serious disturbance on the Wabash, and the summer of 1811 arrived before Harrison thought proper to take the next step. Then, June 24, he sent to Tecumthe and the Prophet a letter, or speech, intended to force an issue.

“Brothers,” he wrote,[79] “this is the third year that all the white people in this country have been alarmed at your proceedings. You threaten us with war; you invite all the tribes to the north and west of us to join against us. Brothers, your warriors who have lately been here deny this, but I have received the information from every direction. The tribes on the Mississippi have sent me word that you intended to murder me, and then to commence a war upon our people. I have also received the speech that you sent to the Pottawatomies and others to join you for that purpose; but if I had no other evidence of your hostility to us, your seizing the salt which I lately sent up the Wabash is sufficient.”

Except the seizure of five barrels of salt intended for other Indians, in June, 1811, no overt act yet showed the intention to begin a war, and certainly no such immediate intention existed; but two white men were at that moment murdered in the Illinois Territory, a drunken Indian was murdered at Vincennes, and these acts of violence, together with the general sense of insecurity, caused the government officials to write from all quarters to the War Department that Tecumthe must be suppressed. Tecumthe himself seemed disposed to avoid cause for attack. July 4 he sent word that he would come to Vincennes; and to Harrison’s alarm he appeared there, July 27, with two or three hundred warriors for an interview with the governor. The act proved courage, if not rashness. Harrison’s instructions hinted advice to seize the two Indian leaders, if it could be done without producing a war, and Harrison had ample time to prepare his measures.

Tecumthe came and remained two days at Vincennes, explaining, with childlike candor, his plans and wishes. As soon as the council was over, he said, he should visit the Southern tribes to unite them with those of the North in a peaceful confederacy; and he hoped no attempt would be made to settle the disputed territory till his return in the spring. A great number of Indians were to come in the autumn to live at Tippecanoe; they must use the disputed region for hunting-ground. He wished everything to remain in its present situation till his return; he would then go and see the President and settle everything with him. The affairs of all the tribes in that quarter were in his own hands, and he would despatch messengers in every direction to prevent the Indians from doing further mischief.

Tecumthe seemed to think that his wish would prevent Harrison from further aggression for the time. A few days afterward he passed down the Wabash, with some twenty warriors, on his diplomatic errand to the Creeks; but before he was fairly out of sight, July 31, a number of citizens met at Vincennes, and adopted resolutions demanding that the settlement at Tippecanoe should be broken up. Immediate action, before Tecumthe should return, was urged by Harrison’s party, and by many frightened settlers. Harrison’s personal wish could not be doubted.

The Secretary of War had already ordered the Fourth Regiment of U. S. Infantry, under Colonel Boyd, with a company of riflemen,—making in the whole a force of five hundred regular troops,—to descend the Ohio from Pittsburg as rapidly as possible, and place themselves under Harrison’s orders; but Eustis added instructions not easily followed or understood. July 17 he wrote to Harrison,[80]—

“In case circumstances shall occur which may render it necessary or expedient to attack the Prophet and his followers, the force should be such as to insure the most complete success. This force will consist of the militia and regular troops.... If the Prophet should commence or seriously threaten hostilities, he ought to be attacked.”

Under these instructions, Harrison was warranted in doing what he pleased. Not even Tecumthe denied the seriousness of his hostile threats, and Harrison had every reason to begin the war at once, if war must be; but although Eustis spoke his own mind clearly, he failed to reckon upon the President, and this neglect was the cause of another letter to Harrison, written three days later:[81]—

“Since my letter of the 17th instant, I have been particularly instructed by the President to communicate to your Excellency his earnest desire that peace may, if possible, be preserved with the Indians, and that to this end every proper means may be adopted.... Circumstances conspire at this particular juncture to render it peculiarly desirable that hostilities of any kind or to any degree, not indispensably required, should be avoided. The force under Colonel Boyd has been ordered to descend the Ohio, ... and although the force is at the disposal of your Excellency, I am instructed to inform you that the President indulges the hope and expectation that your exertions and measures with the Indians will be such as may render their march to the Indian Territory unnecessary, and that they may remain liable to another disposition.”

Without paying attention to the President’s wishes emphatically expressed in these orders of July 20, Harrison passed the next month in raising forces for an expedition to satisfy the wishes of the Western people. No doubt was felt on the Ohio that Harrison meant to attack the Indians at Tippecanoe; and so serious a campaign was expected that Kentucky became eager to share it. Among other Kentuckians, Joseph H. Daveiss, Aaron Burr’s persecutor, wrote,[82] August 24, to Harrison, offering himself as a volunteer: “Under all the privacy of a letter,” said he, “I make free to tell you that I have imagined there were two men in the West who had military talents; and you, sir, were the first of the two. It is thus an opportunity of service much valued by me.” Daveiss doubted only whether the army was to attack at once, or to provoke attack.

Harrison accepted Daveiss’s services, and gave him command of the dragoons, a mounted force of about one hundred and thirty men from Indiana and Kentucky. The Fourth U. S. Infantry, three hundred strong according to Colonel Boyd who commanded it,[83] arrived in the Territory at the beginning of September. As rapidly as possible Harrison collected his forces, and sent them up the river to a point in the new purchase about sixty-five miles above Vincennes. The exact force was afterward much disputed.[84] Harrison reported his effectives as a few more than nine hundred men. Some sixty Kentucky volunteers were of the number.

The last instructions from the Department, dated August 29,[85] made no change in the tenor of the President’s orders. When Harrison joined his army, October 6, at the camp above Vincennes, he wrote to Eustis,[86]—

“I sincerely wish that my instructions were such as to authorize me to march up immediately to the Prophet’s town. The troops which I command are a fine body of men, and the proportion of regulars, irregulars, infantry, and dragoons such as I could wish it. I have no reason to doubt the issue of a contest with the savages, and I am much deceived if the greater part of both officers and men are not desirous of coming in contact with them.”

In doubt what to do next, Harrison waited while his army built a small wooden fort, to which he gave his own name, and which was intended to establish formal possession of the new purchase. While the army was engaged in this work, one of the sentinels was fired at and wounded in the night of October 10 by some person or persons unseen and unknown. Harrison regarded this as a beginning of hostilities by the Prophet, and decided to act as though war was declared. October 12 he received from Secretary Eustis a letter dated September 18, never published though often referred to,[87] which is not found in the records of the government. Harrison replied the next day:[88]—

“Your letter of the 18th ult. I had the honor to receive yesterday. My views have hitherto been limited to the erection of the fort which we are now building, and to a march, by way of feint, in the direction of the Prophet’s town, as high, perhaps, as the Vermilion River. But the powers given me in your last letter, and circumstances which have occurred here at the very moment on which it was received, call for measures of a more energetic kind.”

With this despatch Harrison enclosed a return of the soldiers present under his command. “You will observe,” he said, “that our effectives are but little over nine hundred.” The rank-and-file consisted of seven hundred and forty-two men fit for duty. Harrison thought this force too small, and sent back to Vincennes for four companies of mounted riflemen. Two of the four companies joined him,[89] but their strength was not reported. These returns showed that the army, with the two additional companies, numbered at least one thousand effectives. One of the officers of the Fourth U. S. Infantry, writing November 21, said that the force was a little upward of eleven hundred men.[90]

While the Americans were determined not to return without a battle, the Indians had been strictly ordered by Tecumthe to keep the peace, and showed the intention to avoid Harrison’s attack. As early as September 25, the Prophet sent a number of Indians to Vincennes to protest his peaceful intentions, and to promise that Harrison’s demands should be complied with.[91] Harrison returned no answer and sent no demands. October 28 he broke up his camp at Fort Harrison, and the army began its march up the river. The governor remained one day longer at the fort, and from there, October 29, sent some friendly Indians to the Prophet with a message requiring that the Winnebagoes, Pottawatomies, and Kickapoos, at Tippecanoe, should return to their tribes; that all stolen horses should be given up, and that murderers should be surrendered. He intended at a later time to add a demand for hostages,[92] in case the Prophet should accede to these preliminary terms.

Harrison did not inform the friendly Indians where they would find him, or where they were to bring their answer.[93] Crossing to the west bank of the Wabash to avoid the woods, the troops marched over a level prairie to the mouth of the Vermilion River, where they erected a blockhouse to protect their boats. The Vermilion River was the extreme boundary of the recent land-cession; and to cross it, under such circumstances, was war. Harrison looked for resistance; but not an Indian was seen, and November 3 the army resumed its march, keeping in the open country, until on the evening of November 5 it arrived, still unmolested, within eleven miles of the Prophet’s town. From the Vermilion River to Tippecanoe was fifty miles.

The next morning, November 6, the army advanced toward the town, and as the column approached, Indians were frequently seen in front and on the flanks. Interpreters tried to parley with them, but they returned no answer except insulting or threatening gestures. Two miles from the town the army unexpectedly entered a difficult country, thick with wood and cut by deep ravines, where Harrison was greatly alarmed, seeing himself at the mercy of an attack; but no attack was made. When clear of the woods, within a mile and a half of the town, he halted his troops and declared his intention to encamp. Daveiss and all the other officers urged him to attack the town at once; but he replied that his instructions would not justify his attacking the Indians unless they refused his demands, and he still hoped to hear something in the course of the evening from the friendly Indians sent from Fort Harrison. Daveiss remonstrated, and every officer in the army supported him. Harrison then pleaded the danger of further advance. “The experience of the last two days,” he said,[94] “ought to convince every officer that no reliance ought to be placed upon the guides as to the topography of the country; that, relying on their information, the troops had been led into a situation so unfavorable that but for the celerity with which they changed their position a few Indians might have destroyed them; he was therefore determined not to advance to the town until he had previously reconnoitred.”

The candor of this admission did not prove the military advantages of the halt; and neither of Harrison’s reasons was strengthened by a third, which he gave a month afterward in a letter to the Governor of Kentucky. “The success of an attack upon the town by day,” he said,[95] “was very problematical. I expected that they would have met me the next day to hear my terms; but I did not believe that they would accede to them, and it was my determination to attack and burn the town the following night.” Daveiss and the other officers, looking at the matter only as soldiers, became more urgent, until Harrison at last yielded, and resolving no longer to hesitate in treating the Indians as enemies,[96] ordered an advance, with the determination to attack. “I yielded to what appeared the general wish,” he said in his official report,[97] “and directed the troops to advance.” They advanced about four hundred yards, when three Indians sent by the Prophet came to meet them, bringing a pacific message, and urging that hostilities should if possible be avoided. Harrison’s conscience, already heavy-ladened, again gave way at this entreaty.[98] “I answered that I had no intention of attacking them until I discovered that they would not comply with the demands that I had made; that I would go on and encamp at the Wabash, and in the morning would have an interview with the Prophet and his chiefs, and explain to them the determination of the President; that in the mean time no hostilities should be committed.”

Had Harrison’s vacillation been due to consciousness of strength, his officers would have had no just reason for remonstrance; but he estimated his force at about eight hundred effective men, and the Indians at more than six hundred.[99] He knew that no victory over the Northern Indians had ever been won where the numbers were anything like equal.[100] Before him was an unknown wilderness; behind him was a line of retreat, one hundred and fifty miles long, and he had supplies for very few days. He could not trust the Indians; and certainly they could not trust him, for he meant in any case to surprise their town the next night. Delay was dangerous only to the whites,—advantageous only to the Indians. Daveiss felt so strongly the governor’s hesitation that he made no secret of his discontent, and said openly not only that the army ought to attack,[101] but also that it would be attacked before morning, or would march home with nothing accomplished.[102] Indeed, if Harrison had not come there to destroy the town, he had no sufficient military reason for being there at all.

Having decided to wait, Harrison had next to choose a camping-ground. The army marched on, looking for some spot on the river where wood as well as water could be obtained, until they came within one hundred and fifty yards of the town, when the Indians, becoming alarmed, called on them to stop. Harrison halted his men and asked the Indians to show him a place suitable for his purpose, which they did;[103] and the troops filed off in front of the town, at right angles to the Wabash, till they reached a creek less than a mile to the northwest. Next to the town was a marshy prairie; beyond the marsh the ground rose about ten feet to a level covered with oaks; and then about a hundred yards farther it suddenly dropped to the creek behind, where the banks were thick with willow and brushwood. No spot in the neighborhood was better suited for a camp than this saddle-back between the marsh and the brook, but Harrison saw that it offered serious disadvantages. “I found the ground destined for the encampment,” he reported, “not altogether such as I could wish it. It was, indeed, admirably calculated for regular troops that were opposed to regulars, but it afforded great facility to the approach of the savages.”

There Harrison camped. The troops were stationed in a sort of triangle, following the shape of the high land,[104]—the base toward the northeast, the blunt apex toward the southwest; but at no part of the line was any attempt made to intrench, or palisade, or in any way to cover the troops. Harrison afterward explained that he had barely axes enough to procure firewood. The want of axes had been discovered at Fort Harrison, and hardly excused the neglect to intrench at Tippecanoe, for it had not prevented building the fort. The army pitched its tents and lighted its fires for the night, with no other protection than a single line of sentries, although the creek in the rear gave cover to an attack within a few yards of the camp.

The night was dark, with light rain at intervals; the troops slept on their arms, and their rest was disturbed by no sound. Many accounts have been given of what passed in the Prophet’s town,[105] but none of them deserve attention. During the night neither Harrison nor his sentinels heard or saw anything that roused their suspicions. Harrison, in a brief report of the next day,[106] said that the first alarm was given at half-past four o’clock in the morning. His full report of November 18 corrected the time to a few minutes before four. Still another account, on the day after the battle, named five o’clock as the moment.[107] Harrison himself was about to leave his tent, before calling the men to parade, when a sentinel at the farthest angle of the camp above the creek fired a shot. In an instant the Indian yell was raised, and before the soldiers at that end of the camp could leave their tents, the Indians had pierced the line, and were shooting the men by the light of the camp-fires. Within a few moments, firing began along the whole line, until the camp, except for a space next the creek, was encircled by it. Fortunately for Harrison, the attacking party at the broken angle had not strength to follow up its advantage, and the American line was soon reformed in the rear. Harrison rode to the point, and at the northeast angle met Daveiss and his dismounted dragoons. Daveiss reported that the Indians, under cover of the trees, were annoying the troops severely, and asked leave to dislodge them. The order was given; and Daveiss, followed by only a few men, rushed forward among the trees, where he soon fell, mortally wounded. The troops, after forming, held their position without further disaster till daybreak, when they advanced and drove the Indians into the swamp. With this success the battle ended, having lasted two hours.

For the moment the army was saved, but only at great cost. Daveiss, who held an anomalous position almost as prominent as that of Harrison himself, died in the afternoon. Captain Baen, acting major of the Fourth Regiment, two lieutenants, and an ensign of the same regiment, were killed or wounded; two lieutenant-colonels, four captains, and several lieutenants of the Indiana militia were on the same list, and the general’s aid-de-camp was killed. One hundred and fifty-four privates were returned among the casualties, fifty-two of whom were killed or mortally wounded. The total loss was one hundred and eighty-eight, of whom sixty-one were killed or mortally wounded.[108] The bodies of thirty-eight Indians were found on the field.

If the army had cause for anxiety before the battle, it had double reason for alarm when it realized its position on November 7. If Harrison’s own account was correct, he had with him only eight hundred men. Sixty-one had been killed or mortally wounded, and he had near a hundred and fifty wounded to carry with him in his retreat. His effective force was diminished more than one fourth, according to his biographer;[109] his camp contained very little flour and no meat, for the few beeves brought with the army were either driven away by the Indians or stampeded by the noise of the battle; and his only base of supplies was at Vincennes, one hundred and seventy miles away. The Indians could return in greater numbers, but his own force must steadily grow weaker. Harrison was naturally a cautious man; he felt strongly the dangers that surrounded him, and his army felt them not less.[110]

The number of Indian warriors engaged in the night attack was estimated by Harrison at six hundred.[111] The law of exaggeration, almost invariable in battle, warrants belief that not more than four hundred Indians were concerned in the attack. The Prophet’s Indians were few. Tecumthe afterward spoke of the attack as an “unfortunate transaction that took place between the white people and a few of our young men at our village,”[112]—as though it was an affair in which the young warriors had engaged against the will of the older chiefs. Tecumthe commonly told the truth, even with indiscretion; and nothing in the American account contradicted his version of the affair at Tippecanoe. Harrison’s ablest military manœuvre had been the availing himself of Tecumthe’s over-confidence in quitting the country at so critical a moment.

Although Harrison did not venture to send out a scout for twenty-four hours, but remained in camp waiting attack, no further sign of hostilities was given. “Night,” said one of the army,[113] “found every man mounting guard, without food, fire, or light, and in a drizzling rain. The Indian dogs, during the dark hours, produced frequent alarms by prowling in search of carrion about the sentinels.” On the morning of November 8, the dragoons and mounted riflemen approached the town and found it deserted. Apparently the Indians had fled in haste, leaving everything, even a few new English guns and powder. The army took what supplies were needed, and set fire to the village. Meanwhile every preparation had been made for rapid retreat. The wagons could scarcely carry all the wounded, and Harrison abandoned the camp furniture and private baggage. “We managed, however, to bring off the public property,” he reported. At noon of November 9 the train started, and by night-fall had passed the dangerous woods and broken country where a few enemies could have stopped it. No Indians appeared; the march was undisturbed; and after leaving a company of the U. S. Fourth Regiment at Fort Harrison, the rest of the force arrived, November 18, at Vincennes.

The battle of Tippecanoe at once became a point of pride throughout the Western country, and Harrison received the official applause and thanks of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois; but Harrison’s account of his victory was not received without criticism, and the battle was fought again in the press and in private. The Fourth Regiment more than hinted that had it not been for their steadiness the whole party would have been massacred. At Vincennes, Harrison was severely attacked. In Kentucky criticism was open, for the family and friends of Joseph Daveiss were old Federalists, who had no interest in the military triumphs of a Republican official. Humphrey Marshall, Daveiss’s brother-in-law, published a sharp review of Harrison’s report, and hinted plainly that Daveiss had fallen a victim to the General’s blunders. With characteristic vigor of language, Marshall called Harrison “a little, selfish, intriguing busybody,” and charged him with having made the war without just cause, for personal objects.[114] These attacks caused the Western Republicans to sustain with the more ardor their faith in Harrison’s military genius, and their enthusiasm for the victory of Tippecanoe; but President Madison and Secretary Eustis guarded themselves with some care from expressing an opinion on the subject.

Whatever his critics might say, Harrison gained his object, and established himself in the West as the necessary leader of any future campaign. That result, as far as it was good, seemed to be the only advantage gained at Tippecanoe. Harrison believed that the battle had broken the Prophet’s influence, and saved the frontier from further alarm; he thought that in the event of a British war, the Indians would remain neutral having “witnessed the inefficacy of British assistance;”[115] he expected the tribes to seek peace as a consequence of what he considered the severest defeat they had ever received since their acquaintance with the white people;[116] and the expectation was general that they would deliver the Prophet and Tecumthe into the hands of the American government. For a time these impressions seemed reasonable. The Prophet lost influence, and the peace was not further disturbed; but presently the Western people learned that the Prophet had returned to Tippecanoe, and that all things had resumed their old aspect, except that no one could foresee when the Indians would choose to retaliate for Harrison’s invasion.

Toward January, Tecumthe returned from the South, and sent word that he was ready to go to Washington. March 1, 1812, a deputation of some eighty Indians visited Vincennes, and told Harrison that the whole winter had been passed in sending messages to the different villages to consult on their future course, and that all agreed to ask for peace. They blamed the Prophet for the affair at Tippecanoe, and asked leave to visit Washington to obtain peace from the President. Harrison gladly assented, for a delegation of Indians sent to Washington was a guaranty of peace during the time of their absence. He expected them to appear at Fort Wayne in April, ready for the journey.

The Indian hesitation was probably due to doubt whether war would take place between the United States and England. The whole influence of the British agents was exerted to unite the Indians and to arm them, but to prevent a premature outbreak. The British Indian agent at Amherstburg sent Tecumthe a message blaming the attack on Harrison. Tecumthe replied:[117]—

“You tell us to retreat or turn to one side should the Big Knives come against us. Had I been at home in the late unfortunate affair I should have done so; but those I left at home were (I cannot call them men) a poor set of people, and their scuffle with the Big Knives I compared to a struggle between little children who only scratch each other’s faces. The Kickapoos, Winnebagoes have since been at Post Vincennes and settled the matter amicably.”

The situation was well understood. “If we have a British war, we shall have an Indian war,” wrote the commandant from Fort Wayne.[118] “From the best information I can get, I have every reason to believe we shall have an Indian war this spring, whether we have a British war or not.” Harrison must himself have felt that the campaign to Tippecanoe could only add to his dangers unless it was followed up. After April 1, 1812, illusions vanished; for Indian hostilities began all along the border. April 6 two settlers were murdered within three miles of Fort Dearborn, at Chicago; several murders were committed near Fort Madison, above St. Louis, on the Mississippi; but the warning which spread wild alarm throughout Indiana was the murder of a whole family early in April within five miles of Vincennes, and April 14 that of a settler within a few miles of the Ohio River. Another murder a few weeks afterward, on the White River, completed the work of terror.

Then a general panic seized the people. The militia dared not turn out; for while they collected at one spot, the Indians might attack their isolated cabins. Even Vincennes was thought to be in danger, and the stream of fugitives passed through it as rapidly as possible on their way southward, until depopulation threatened the Territory.[119] “Most of the citizens in this country,” reported Harrison, May 6,[120] “have abandoned their farms, and taken refuge in such temporary forts as they have been able to construct. Nothing can exhibit more distress than those wretched people crowded together in places almost destitute of every necessary accommodation.” Misled by the previous peaceful reports, the Government had sent the Fourth Regiment to Detroit; not even a company of militia could be procured nearer than the falls of the Ohio; and Harrison called for help in vain.

Fortunately, Tecumthe was not yet ready for war. Six weeks after the hostilities began he appeared at a grand council, May 16, at Massassinway on the Wabash, between Tippecanoe and Fort Wayne. His speech to the tribes assembled there was more temperate than ever.[121]

“Governor Harrison made war on my people in my absence,” he said. “It was the will of God that he should do so. We hope it will please God that the white people may let us live in peace; we will not disturb them, neither have we done it, except when they came to our village with the intention of destroying us. We are happy to state to our brothers present that the unfortunate transaction that took place between the white people and a few of our young men at our village has been settled between us and Governor Harrison; and I will further state, had I been at home there would have been no bloodshed at that time.”

He added that the recent murders had been committed by Pottawatomies not under his control, and he offered no excuse for them.

“Should the bad acts of our brothers the Pottawatomies draw on us the ill-will of our white brothers, and they should come again and make an unprovoked attack on us at our village, we will die like men; but we will never strike the first blow.... We defy a living creature to say we ever advised any one, directly or indirectly, to make war on our white brothers. It has constantly been our misfortune to have our views misrepresented to our white brethren. This has been done by pretended chiefs of the Pottawatomies and others that have been in the habit of selling land to the white people that did not belong to them.”

This was the situation on the Wabash in May and June, 1812. Not only was Tecumthe unwilling to strike the first blow, but he would not even retaliate Harrison’s invasion and seizure of the disputed territory. He waited for Congress to act, but every one knew that whenever Congress should declare war against England, war must also be waged with the Indians; and no one could doubt that after provoking the Indian war, Americans ought to be prepared to wage it with effect, and without complaint of its horrors.

CHAPTER VI.

The war fever of 1811 swept far and wide over the country, but even at its height seemed somewhat intermittent and imaginary. A passion that needed to be nursed for five years before it acquired strength to break into act, could not seem genuine to men who did not share it. A nation which had submitted to robbery and violence in 1805, in 1807, in 1809, could not readily lash itself into rage in 1811 when it had no new grievance to allege; nor could the public feel earnest in maintaining national honor, for every one admitted that the nation had sacrificed its honor, and must fight to regain it. Yet what honor was to be hoped from a war which required continued submission to one robber as the price of resistance to another? President Madison submitted to Napoleon in order to resist England; the New England Federalists preferred submitting to England in order to resist Napoleon; but not one American expected the United States to uphold their national rights against the world.

Politicians of the old school looked coldly on the war spirit. Nations like individuals, when driven to choose between desperate courses, might at times be compelled to take the chances of destruction, often destroying themselves, or suffering irreparable harm. Yet the opponents of war could argue that Americans were not placed between desperate alternatives. They had persevered hitherto, in spite of their leaders, in the policy of peace; had suffered much injury and acute mortification, but had won Louisiana and West Florida, had given democracy all it asked, and had remained in reasonable harmony with the liberal movement of the world. They were reaping the fruit of their patient and obstinate husbandry; for Russia and Sweden were about to fight their battles without reward. Napoleon offered them favors more or less real, and even England could not long resist the pressure of her interests. Jefferson’s policy had wrought all the evil it could cause,—perhaps it had cost the highest price the nation could pay; but after the nation had suffered the evil and paid the price, it had a right to the profit. With more force than in 1798, the old Republicans pleaded that if they should throw aside their principles and plunge into hostilities with England, they would not only sacrifice the results of six years’ humiliation, but would throw the United States athwart the liberal movement of Europe, destroy the hopes of pure government at home, and with more eagerness than they had shown for the past ten years in stripping government of its power, must devote themselves to the task of rebuilding a sovereignty as terrible in peace as in war.

The moment for fighting, conservatives argued, had come in 1807, had passed in 1809; and henceforward good policy called only for perseverance in the course that had been so persistently preferred. Not merely old Republicans, but an actual majority of the people probably held these opinions; yet the youthful energy of the nation, which had at last come to its strength under the shelter of Jefferson’s peaceful rule, cried out against the cowardice of further submission, and insisted on fighting if only to restore its own self-respect.

The course of Massachusetts had much to do with changing the current of opinion. Hitherto this State had barred the way to a British war. Although the Republican party in Massachusetts several times elected their candidate for governor by majorities more or less decisive, they failed to gain full control of the State legislature before 1811. In 1810 they elected Elbridge Gerry and a majority of the representatives, but they still lacked one vote to give them control of the Senate. In April, 1811, Gerry succeeded once more, defeating Christopher Gore, the Federalist candidate, by a majority of three thousand votes; while the House, which consisted of some six hundred and fifty members, chose a Republican speaker by a majority of thirty-one. For the first time the Republicans controlled also a majority, though only of one vote, in the State Senate. This success, gained in spite of the unpopular Non-importation Act, gave extraordinary confidence to the Government, and left the Federalists powerless. Timothy Pickering lost his seat in the United States Senate, and Speaker Varnum received it. The Republicans hastened to introduce, and to carry through the Massachusetts legislature, measures that threatened to upturn the foundation of Federalist society. Other measures still more radical were expected. Jefferson’s hopes of reforming Massachusetts were almost fulfilled; but the success which gave reality to them removed the last obstacle to war with England.

As the autumn advanced, the Republican newspapers broke into a general cry for war. The British minister’s refusal to withdraw the Orders in Council, the return of Pinkney from London, the affair of the “Little Belt,” the notorious relations between the northwestern Indians and the British traders,—all served to increase the ill-temper of a public trying to lash itself into an act it feared. Even the battle at Tippecanoe, although evidently contrary to British interest, was charged to British influence. As though England had not already given cause for a score of wars, the press invented new grievances; and became as eager to denounce imaginary crimes as to correct flagrant and chronic wrongs.

The matter of impressments then began to receive the attention which had never yet been given it. Hitherto neither Government nor people had thought necessary to make a casus belli of impressments. Orders in Council and other measures of Great Britain which affected American property had been treated as matters of vital consequence; but as late as the close of 1811, neither the President, the Secretary of State, nor Congress had yet insisted that the person of an American citizen was as sacred as his property. Impressments occurred daily. No one knew how many native-born Americans had been taken by force from the protection of the American flag; but whether the number was small or great, neither Republican nor Federalist had ventured to say that the country must at all hazards protect them, or that whatever rules of blockade or contraband the belligerents might adopt against property, they must at least keep their hands off the persons of peaceable Americans whether afloat or ashore. President Madison had repeated, until the world laughed in his face, that Napoleon no longer enforced his decrees, and that therefore if England did not withdraw her blockade, war would result; but he had never suggested that America would fight for her sailors. When he and his supporters in earnest took up the grievances of the seamen, they seemed to do so as an afterthought, to make out a cause of war against England, after finding the public unwilling to accept the cause at first suggested. However unjust the suspicion might be, so much truth existed in this Federalist view of Madison’s course as warranted the belief that if England in July, 1811, had yielded to the demand for commercial freedom, the Government would have become deaf to the outcry of the imprisoned seamen. Only by slow degrees, and in the doubtful form of a political manœuvre, did this, the worst of all American grievances, take its proper place at the head of the causes for war.

Winter drew near, finding the public restless, irritable, more than half afraid of its own boldness, but outspoken at last. British frigates once more blockaded New York, seizing ships and impressing men without mercy, while the British prize-courts, after a moment’s hesitation, declared that the French Decrees were not repealed, and that American vessels sailing to France were good prize. Under these irritations the temper of the American press became rapidly worse, until war was declared to be imminent, and the conquest of Canada became the favorite topic of newspaper discussion.

Yet the true intentions of the President and his Cabinet were as uncertain as those of the Twelfth Congress, which had not yet met. A very large part of the public could not believe war to be possible, and the Government itself shared so far in the doubt as to wait for Congress to give the impulse so often refused. When the President and his Cabinet met in Washington to prepare for the session of Congress called for November 4, a month earlier than usual, neither the Cabinet nor the congressmen felt a certainty of the future; and so little did the outside world believe in war, that Madison, Monroe, and Gallatin were supposed to be aiming at a diplomatic rather than at a military victory. In truth they had no well-defined plan. The process by which a scattered democracy decided its own will, in a matter so serious as a great and perhaps fatal war, was new to the world; bystanders were surprised and amused at the simplicity with which the people disputed plans of war and peace, giving many months of warning and exact information to the enemy, while they showed no sign of leadership, discipline, or union, or even a consciousness that such qualities were needed. Men like Josiah Quincy, Rufus King, John Randolph, and even Madison and Gallatin, seeing that the people themselves, like the machine of government they had invented, were incompetent to the work of war, waited with varied emotions, but equally believing or fearing that at last a fatal crisis was at hand.

Monroe was far from easy; but he had accepted, as was his wont, the nearest dominating will, and he drifted without an effort, although his old friends had already parted company with him. Though obliged to support the President in holding that Napoleon’s decrees were withdrawn so that they had ceased to violate the neutral commerce of the United States, he showed that he did so, not so much because he thought it the truth, as because England gave him no choice. To Serurier, the French minister, Monroe made little concealment of his real wishes; and when Serurier first called at the Department after Monroe’s return from Virginia, he heard nothing that greatly pleased him.

“I found the Secretary of State,” wrote Serurier, October 23,[122] “nearly in the same state of mind in which I left him at his departure for Virginia. He told me at the outset that although the information received by the President during the last two months had added to his hopes, it had not yet completed his conviction on the decrees; that he could not believe them entirely repealed so long as there remained in our ports a single vessel captured by our privateers since November.... He pretended that very recent advices from Naples announced an order sent lately from Paris to sell the American prizes, and this news had been very disagreeable to the Executive, and had thrown it into new uncertainties.... He returned again to our customs-tariff, and the indispensability of its reduction.”

Serurier exerted himself to infuse what he called proper spirit into the secretary’s temper, complaining that England was actually engaged in making war on American commerce with France while enjoying all the advantages of American trade,—

“A very dangerous situation for an alliance, I added, where all the advantage is for your enemies, and all the loss is for your friends. Mr. Monroe agreed to all this; but he pretended that this false position could be viewed only as a transition to a more decided state of things; that the present situation was equally burdensome and intolerable to the citizens, and little suited to the dignity of the Government; that it was necessary to wait for despatches from Mr. Barlow. Then he fell back once more on his theme,—that whenever they should be perfectly satisfied on the side of France, and also of the Emperor’s friendship, they would certainly adopt very energetic measures toward England.... ‘We shall not go backward,’ said Mr. Monroe to me; ‘we shall be inflexible about the repeal of the Orders in Council. But in order to go further, to bring us to great resolutions, the Emperor must aid us; private and public interest must make the same demand. The President does indeed hold the rudder of the Ship of State; he guides, but it is public opinion which makes the vessel move. On France depends the winning of public opinion; and we wish for it, as you can well conceive that in our position we should.’”

Serurier knew no more than this, which was no more than all the world could see. The British minister was not so well informed. After an exchange of notes with Monroe, which left matters where they were, Foster learned from Monroe, October 30, that the Government was waiting for Barlow’s despatches, and if these should prove unsatisfactory, some restriction of French commerce would be imposed by way of retaliation on the restrictions imposed by Napoleon.[123] Foster hoped for a turn in affairs favorable to himself, and tried to bring it about, not only by suggesting to Lord Wellesley the wisdom of concessions from England, but also by offering a frank and fair reparation for the “Chesapeake” outrage. He wrote, November 1, to the Secretary of State renewing the formal disavowal of Berkeley’s unauthorized act, and offering to restore the men to the vessel from which they had been taken, with compensation to themselves and families. Somewhat coldly Monroe accepted the offer. The two surviving seamen were in due time brought from their prison at Halifax and restored to the deck of the “Chesapeake” in Boston harbor; the redress was made as complete as such tardy justice could ever be, but the time had passed when it could atone for the wrong.

Both Foster and Serurier felt that the people were further advanced than the Government in hostility to England, and that this was especially true in the matter of impressments; but no one, even at the White House, knew certainly what to expect from the new Congress assembling at Washington Nov. 4, 1811. That this body differed greatly from any previous Congress was clear, if only because it contained some seventy new members; but another difference, less easily measured, was more serious. The active leaders were young men. Henry Clay of Kentucky, William Lowndes, John Caldwell Calhoun, David R. Williams, Langdon Cheves of South Carolina, Felix Grundy of Tennessee, Peter Buell Porter of New York, Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, had none of them reached his fortieth year; while Madison and his Cabinet belonged to a different generation. None of the new leaders could remember the colonial epoch, or had taken a share in public life except under the Constitution of 1789, or had been old enough to feel and understand the lessons taught by opposition to the Federalist rule. They knew the Federalists only as a faction, more or less given to treasonable talk, controlling some thirty or forty votes in the House, and proclaiming with tedious iteration opinions no one cared to hear. The young war Republicans, as they were called, felt only contempt for such a party; while, as their acts showed, they were filled with no respect for the technicalities of their Executive head, and regarded Gallatin with distrust. Of statesmanship, in the old sense, they took little thought. Bent on war with England, they were willing to face debt and probable bankruptcy on the chance of creating a nation, of conquering Canada, and carrying the American flag to Mobile and Key West.

After ten years devoted to weakening national energies, such freshness of youth and recklessness of fear had wonderful popular charm. The reaction from Jefferson’s system threatened to be more violent than its adoption. Experience seemed to show that a period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.

Had the majority of the House been in a gentler mood, its choice for Speaker should have fallen on Macon, once more a sound party man prepared to support war; but Macon was set aside. Bibb of Georgia, a candidate of the minority, received only thirty-eight voices, while seventy-five were given for Henry Clay. Clay was barely thirty-four years of age, and was a new member of the House; but he was the boldest and most active leader of the war Republicans. He immediately organized the committees for war. That on Foreign Relations, the most immediately important, was put into the hands of Porter, Calhoun, and Grundy. Military affairs were placed in charge of David R. Williams. Langdon Cheves became chairman of the Naval Committee. Ezekiel Bacon and Cheves stood at the head of the Ways and Means.

November 5 the President’s Message was read, and its account of the situation seemed to offer hardly the chance of peace. England, it said, had refused the “reasonable step” of repealing its Orders in return for the extinction of the French Decrees; while the new British minister had made “an indispensable condition of the repeal of the British Orders, that commerce should be restored to a footing that would admit the productions and manufactures of Great Britain, when owned by neutrals, into markets shut against them by her enemies,—the United States being given to understand that in the mean time a continuation of their Non-importation Act would lead to measures of retaliation.” Instead of repealing the orders, the British government, “at a moment when least to have been expected,” put them into more rigorous execution; “indemnity and redress for other wrongs have continued to be withheld; and our coasts and the mouths of our harbors have again witnessed scenes not less derogatory to the dearest of our national rights than vexatious to the regular course of our trade.” In some respects Madison’s statement of grievances sounded almost needlessly quarrelsome; yet even in this list of causes which were to warrant a declaration of war, the President did not expressly mention impressments, in comparison with which his other grievances sank, in the afterthought, to insignificance.

Of France, also, the President spoke in language far from friendly. Although the decrees were revoked, “no proof is yet given,” he said, “of an intention to repair the other wrongs done to the United States, and particularly to restore the great amount of American property seized and condemned under edicts ... founded in such unjust principles that the reparation ought to have been prompt and ample.” In addition to this, the United States had much reason to be dissatisfied with “the rigorous and unexpected restrictions” imposed on their trade with France, which if continued would lead to retaliation. Not a word did the Message contain of friendly or even civil regard for the French government.

Then followed the sentences which could be read only in the sense of an invitation to war:—

“I must now add that the period has arrived which claims from the legislative guardians of the national rights a system of more ample provisions for maintaining them. Notwithstanding the scrupulous justice, the protracted moderation, and the multiplied efforts on the part of the United States to substitute for the accumulating dangers to the peace of the two countries all the mutual advantages of re-established friendship and confidence, we have seen that the British Cabinet perseveres not only in withholding a remedy for other wrongs so long and so loudly calling for it, but in the execution, brought home to the threshold of our territory, of measures which, under existing circumstances, have the character as well as the effect of war on our lawful commerce. With this evidence of hostile inflexibility in trampling on rights which no independent nation can relinquish, Congress will feel the duty of putting the United States into an armor and an attitude demanded by the crisis, and corresponding with the national spirit and expectations.”

The report of Secretary Gallatin, sent to the House November 22, bore also a warlike character. For the past year Gallatin told a cheerful story. In spite of the non-importation, the receipts from customs and other revenue exceeded $13,500,000, while the current expenses had not reached $8,000,000. If war should be declared, the secretary asked only for an increase of fifty per cent in the duties, in order to make sure of a fixed revenue of nine million dollars; and should this increase of duty be insufficient for the purpose, the deficiency could be supplied without difficulty by a further increase of duties, by a restoration of the impost on salt, and by “a proper selection of moderate internal taxes.” With a revenue of nine million dollars secured, the Treasury could rely on loans to defray extraordinary expenses, and a few years of peace would supply the means of discharging the debt incurred.

If this was different finance from that which Gallatin had taught in other days, and by which he had risen to popularity and power, it was at least as simple as all that Gallatin did; but the simplicity of his methods, which was their chief professional merit, caused also their chief reproach. History showed the financial charlatan to be popular, not so much because he was dishonest as because he gratified an instinct for gambling as deep as the instinct of selfishness; and a common notion of a financier was that of a man whose merit lay in the discovery of new sources of wealth, or in inventing means of borrowing without repayment. Gallatin professed to do neither. He did not recommend the issue of paper money; he saw no secret hoards buried in the unsold public lands; he would listen to no tricks or devices for raising money. If money was needed he would borrow it, and would pay whatever it was worth; but he would not suggest that any device could relieve the public from taxing itself to pay whatever the public chose to spend.

“The ability and will of the United States faithfully to perform their engagements are universally known; and the terms of loans will in no shape whatever be affected by want of confidence in either. They must, however, depend not only upon the state of public credit, and on the ability to lend, but also on the existing demand for capital required for other objects. Whatever this may be, the money wanted by the public must be purchased at its market price.... The most simple and direct is also the cheapest and safest mode.”

Gallatin instanced, as an extreme case, the borrowing of forty millions at eight instead of the legal rate of six per cent, which he declared an inconsiderable difference if compared with the effects of other modes of raising money. No one whose judgment deserved respect doubted the correctness of his opinion; but Republican congressmen had for twelve years denounced the Federalist loan of 1798, when five millions had been borrowed at eight per cent, and they hardly dared face their constituents when their own Secretary of the Treasury talked of borrowing forty millions at the same exorbitant rate. Gently as Gallatin hinted at “a proper selection of moderate internal taxes,” they remembered that these internal taxes had broken the Federalist party to pieces. They were angry with Gallatin for not providing other means for the war than loans and taxes, and they regarded him as not unwilling to check and chill the military ardor of the nation.

The President’s Message, as far as it regarded foreign affairs, was referred in the House, November 11, to a select committee, the chairman of which was Peter B. Porter, with Calhoun and Grundy to support his well-known opinions. Although the nature of their report could hardly be doubted, no one seemed confident that it would be taken seriously. Macon wrote privately, November 21, to his old friend Joseph Nicholson, that he was still ignorant of the leaders’ intentions:[124]—

“At this place we are nearly all too wise or too mysterious to form hasty conclusions; it is, however, probable that there are not more than five or six opinions among us, varying from open war to repealing the present restrictive system. I have had but little communication with the knowing ones, and have in some degree guessed at the number of different opinions. I am almost certain that no plan is yet adopted by the leaders in the House.”

Within a week Macon found that a plan was made, but it seemed to come wholly from the White House. The Secretary of War appeared before the Committee of Foreign Relations and explained what the President wanted;[125] at the same time Secretary Monroe communicated to the French minister the nature of the Executive plan.[126]

“Mr. Monroe added;” wrote Serurier, November 28, “... that the situation of affairs should leave me no doubt as to his Excellency’s [the President’s] disposition; that the Government had lost every illusion as to the repeal of the Orders in Council, and was decided in adopting measures of rigor; that we might be assured it would not retreat; that ten thousand regulars were to be raised and placed at the disposition of the Executive, with a great number of volunteers; that the posts would be put in a state of defence, the navy increased, and merchants authorized to arm for the protection of their commerce; that this measure, now that our decrees were withdrawn, could strike at England alone; that the Administration in taking this resolution had perfectly seen where it led; that evidently this situation would not last three months, and would inevitably lead to a decision for which the country was prepared; that the Committee of Foreign Relations in the House of Representatives would report within a few days, and he had no doubt that these measures would pass by a great majority.”

A few days later Serurier had conversations with Monroe and Madison on the subject of the Spanish American colonies, whose independence they agreed to assist not only by moral but also by material aid. The French minister closed his despatch by adding that Congress was at the moment listening to the report of the Committee of Foreign Relations. “Mr. Monroe repeated to me that he considered war as pretty nearly decided.”

If the British minister knew less exactly what was happening behind the scenes, he still knew enough to alarm him. He reported that the Government was actively organizing its party in Congress; that different sets of members met every evening in caucus, and were instilled with the ideas of the Administration;[127] but that while the members of the Government were to all appearance still undecided themselves, it would be rash for other persons to express a decided opinion. A few days after writing in this doubtful sense, Foster was electrified by an outburst of temper from Monroe, who told him that the Government would send no new minister to England, and that it “had reason to believe Great Britain really wished for war with the United States.”[128] Monroe added that he felt some difficulty in talking openly about the views of the Government, as some of his disclosures might be regarded as menaces. The President, though less warm than the Secretary, talked not less decidedly:

“He owned to me that the situation of America was very embarrassing; that anything was better than remaining in such a state; and though he very strongly asserted the impossibility of America receding from the grounds she had taken, ... said that he would ask no sacrifice of principle in Great Britain, and would have no objection to some conventional arrangement between the two countries if it should be judged necessary in the event of the Orders in Council being withdrawn. This was, however, an indispensable preliminary, for he must consider the French Decrees as revoked so far as Great Britain had a right to expect America should require their revocation.”

Although Foster became more nervous from day to day, and showed strong symptoms of a wish that the Orders in Council might be modified or withdrawn, neither he nor the President informed the British government that any other cause of war existed, or that the United States meant to insist on further concessions. In secret, diplomacy flattered itself that war would still be avoided; but it reckoned without taking into account the temper of Congress.

CHAPTER VII.

The leaders of the war party next performed in Congress a scene in some respects new in the drama of history.

November 29, Peter B. Porter of New York, from the Committee of Foreign Relations, presented to the House his report, in part.

“Your committee will not incumber your journals,” it began, “and waste your patience with a detailed history of all the various matters growing out of our foreign relations. The cold recital of wrongs, of injuries, and aggressions known and felt by every member of this Union could have no other effect than to deaden the national sensibility, and render the public mind callous to injuries with which it is already too familiar.”

Admission of weakness in the national sensibility gave the key-note of the report, and of the speeches that supported it. Even the allusion to the repeal of the French Decrees showed fear lest the truth might make the public mind callous to shame:—

“France at length ... announced the repeal ... of the Decrees of Berlin and Milan; and it affords a subject of sincere congratulation to be informed, through the official organs of the Government, that those decrees are, so far at least as our rights are concerned, really and practically at an end.”

Porter had not studied the correspondence of the Department of State so thoroughly as to learn that Russia and Sweden were in the act of making war to protect American rights from the operation of those decrees which, as he was informed, were “really and practically at an end.” His report ignored these difficulties, but added that England affected to deny the practical extinction of the French Decrees. In truth, England not affectedly but positively denied the extinction of those decrees; the United States offered no sufficient evidence to satisfy even themselves; and a declaration of war founded on England’s “affected” denial was in a high degree likely to deaden the national sensibility. With more reason and effect, the committee dwelt on the severity with which England enforced her blockades as far as the American coast; and last of all, added, almost in a tone of apology, an allusion to the practice of impressments:—

“Your committee are not, however, of that sect whose worship is at the shrine of a calculating avarice; and while we are laying before you the just complaints of our merchants against the plunder of their ships and cargoes, we cannot refrain from presenting to the justice and humanity of our country the unhappy case of our impressed seamen. Although the groans of these victims of barbarity for the loss of (what should be dearer to Americans than life) their liberty; although the cries of their wives and children, in the privation of protectors and parents, have of late been drowned in the louder clamors at the loss of property,—yet is the practice of forcing our mariners into the British navy, in violation of the rights of our flag, carried on with unabated rigor and severity. If it be our duty to encourage the fair and legitimate commerce of this country by protecting the property of the merchant, then indeed, by as much as life and liberty are more estimable than ships and goods, so much more impressive is the duty to shield the persons of our seamen, whose hard and honest services are employed equally with those of the merchants in advancing under the mantle of its laws the interests of their country.”

Truisms like these, matters of course in the oldest despotisms of Europe, and the foundation of even Roman society, sounded altogether new in the mouth of a democratic Legislature, which uttered them as though their force were not universally admitted. The weakness of the report in its premises was not strengthened by vigor in the self-excuses that followed, more apologetic than convincing:—

“If we have not rushed to the field of battle, like the nations who are led by the mad ambition of a single chief or the avarice of a corrupted court, it has not proceeded from a fear of war, but from our love of justice and humanity.”

As the sway of Jefferson’s philosophy ceased, these formulas, never altogether pleasing, became peculiarly repulsive. Indeed, the only sentence in the committee’s report that commanded respect was its concluding appeal to the people to abandon the policy which had proceeded, as it claimed, from their love of justice and humanity:—

“The period has arrived when in the opinion of your committee it is the sacred duty of Congress to call forth the patriotism and resources of the country. By the aid of these, and with the blessing of God, we confidently trust we shall be enabled to procure that redress which has been sought for by justice, by remonstrance, and forbearance in vain.”

The report closed with six Resolutions, recommending an increase of ten thousand men to the regular army; a levy of fifty thousand volunteers; the outfit of all the vessels of war not in actual service; and the arming of merchant vessels.

In opening the debate on the report, Porter spoke in language more candid than the report itself. “It was the determination of the committee,” he said, “to recommend open and decided war,—a war as vigorous and effective as the resources of the country and the relative situation of ourselves and our enemy would enable us to prosecute.” He went so far as to point out the intended military operations,—the destruction of British fisheries, and of British commerce with America and the West Indies, and the conquest of Canada. “By carrying on such a war at the public expense on land, and by individual enterprise at sea, we should be able in a short time to remunerate ourselves ten-fold for all the spoliations she had committed on our commerce.”

Such ideas were not unbecoming to Porter, who began life as a Federalist, and had no philosophical theories or recorded principles to explain or defend; but what Porter might advise without a qualm, was much less simple for Republicans from the South; and while his speech had its value for the public as a straightforward declaration, it had little or none for individuals who were conscious that it advised what they had always condemned. The true spokesman of the committee was not Porter, but Felix Grundy of Tennessee.

Grundy, like Henry Clay a Virginian by birth and born the same year, 1777, like Clay began his career in Kentucky, where he rose to be chief-justice of the State before he was thirty years old. In 1807 he removed from Kentucky to Tennessee, and was next elected to the Twelfth Congress expressly to advocate war. As a new member, whose duty, like that of all new members, required him to exchange some controversial hostilities with John Randolph, he could not afford to miss his mark; and when Randolph called upon him by a sneering request to tell what were the constitutional resources of the committee and its talents, Grundy spoke. He apologized for his remarks as embarrassed, and indeed his speech showed less fluency than the subject and occasion seemed to warrant; but though it made no pretence of wit or rhetoric, it went to the heart of the subject, and dealt seriously with the difficulties which Grundy and his party felt.

“What cost me more reflection than anything else,” he admitted, “was the new test to which we are to put this government. We are about to ascertain by actual experiment how far our republican institutions are calculated to stand the shock of war; and whether, after foreign danger has disappeared, we can again assume our peaceful attitude without endangering the liberties of the people.”

At the outset, Grundy stumbled upon the difficulty which checked every movement of his party. Obliged to reconcile his present action with the attitude taken by his friends in opposition to the Federalist armaments of 1798, he could only charge that the armaments of 1798 were made not for war, but to provide Executive patronage and affect domestic politics,—a charge which, whether true or not, did not meet the objection.

“If your minds are resolved on war,” continued the speaker, “you are consistent, you are right, you are still Republican; but if you are not resolved, pause and reflect, for should this Resolution pass and you then become faint-hearted, remember that you have abandoned your old principles and trod in the paths of your predecessors.”

Thus, according to Grundy, from the moment a party intended in earnest to make war against a foreign enemy, armies, loans, patronage, taxes, and every following corruption, with all the perils of European practice, became Republican. Only when armies were to be raised for domestic purposes were they unrepublican. The Administration of 1798 would gladly have accepted this test, had the Republicans then been willing to permit armaments on any terms.

Grundy weakened the argument further by attempting to show that in the present case, unlike that of 1798, sufficient cause for war existed: “It is the right of exporting the productions of our own soil and industry to foreign markets.” The statement, considering Grundy’s reputation, was not skilfully made. The blockades maintained by England in 1811 were less hostile to American products and industry than were the decrees of Napoleon, or the French Decrees of 1798, which confiscated every American ship laden in whole or in part with goods of English origin, and closed France to every American ship that entered an English port. Grundy still maintained that the decrees of 1798 had not justified the Federalist armaments; he could hardly maintain that the British blockades of 1811 alone gave cause for armaments of the same kind,—yet this he did. “What are we now called on to decide?” he asked. “It is whether we will resist by force the attempt ... to subject our maritime rights to the arbitrary and capricious rule of her will.”

Grundy spoke of impressments as an outrage which called loudly for the interposition of the government, but he did not allege them as in themselves a sufficient cause for war. He laid more weight on the influence of England in turning the minds of the northwestern Indians toward hostilities. “War is not to commence by land or sea; it is already begun,” he said, alluding to the battle of Tippecanoe, fought a month before; yet if ever a war was aggressive, it was the war which Harrison had begun for no other object than to win the valley of the Wabash, and England had interfered neither directly nor indirectly to produce the outbreak of these hostilities.

Grundy’s next argument was still less convincing. The pledge given to France, he said, made necessary the Non-importation Law against England; but this act was an intolerable burden to the United States:—

“Ask the Northern man, and he will tell you that any state of things is better than the present. Inquire of the Western people why their crops are not equal to what they were in former years, they will answer that industry has no stimulus left, since their surplus products have no markets. Notwithstanding these objections to the present restrictive system, we are bound to retain it; this, and our plighted faith to the French government have tied the Gordian knot. We cannot untie it. We can cut it with the sword.”

Reasoning like this was dear to John Randolph, never so happy as when he had such a slip to expose. In defiance of remonstrance, the President and Congress had insisted upon imposing the non-importation, on the ground that they had entered into a contract with France; and no sooner had they done so, than, in order to free themselves from their contract with France, they insisted upon war with England. On the same reasoning their only means of rendering the contract void was by annexing themselves to the empire of Napoleon.

Finally Grundy appealed to an argument wholly new:—

“This war, if carried on successfully, will have its advantages. We shall drive the British from our continent.... I am willing to receive the Canadians as adopted brethren. It will have beneficial political effects; it will preserve the equilibrium of the government. When Louisiana shall be fully peopled, the Northern States will lose their power; they will be at the discretion of others; they can be depressed at pleasure, and then this Union might be endangered. I therefore feel anxious not only to add the Floridas to the South, but the Canadas to the North of this empire.”

Grundy was the first of Southern statesmen to express publicly the Southern belief that when Louisiana and Florida should be peopled, the Northern States would lose their power and be at the discretion of others, to be depressed at pleasure. Such was the theory of the time, and the political history of the United States seemed to support it; but the Republican party in 1798 would have looked on any of its representatives as insane who had proposed to make war on England in order to give more power to the Northern States.