Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812. Volume 1
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Title: Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812. Volume 1
Author: A. T. Mahan
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[Illustration: The Impressment of an American Seaman]
SEA POWER IN ITS RELATIONS
TO THE WAR OF
1812
BY
CAPTAIN A.T. MAHAN, D.C.L., LL.D.
United States Navy
AUTHOR OF "THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER UPON HISTORY, 1660-1783," "THE
INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER UPON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
AND EMPIRE," "THE INTEREST OF AMERICA
IN SEA POWER," ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
LONDON
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & COMPANY
LIMITED
PREFACE
The present work concludes the series of "The Influence of Sea Power
upon History," as originally framed in the conception of the author.
In the previous volumes he has had the inspiring consciousness of
regarding his subject as a positive and commanding element in the
history of the world. In the War of 1812, also, the effect is real and
dread enough; but to his own country, to the United States, as a
matter of national experience, the lesson is rather that of the
influence of a negative quantity upon national history. The phrase
scarcely lends itself to use as a title; but it represents the truth
which the author has endeavored to set forth, though recognizing
clearly that the victories on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain do
illustrate, in a distinguished manner, his principal thesis, the
controlling influence upon events of naval power, even when
transferred to an inland body of fresh water. The lesson there,
however, was the same as in the larger fields of war heretofore
treated. Not by rambling operations, or naval duels, are wars decided,
but by force massed, and handled in skilful combination. It matters
not that the particular force be small. The art of war is the same
throughout; and may be illustrated as really, though less
conspicuously, by a flotilla as by an armada; by a corporal's guard,
or the three units of the Horatii, as by a host of a hundred
thousand.
The interest of the War of 1812, to Americans, has commonly been felt
to lie in the brilliant evidence of high professional tone and
efficiency reached by their navy, as shown by the single-ship actions,
and by the two decisive victories achieved by little squadrons upon
the lakes. Without in the least overlooking the permanent value of
such examples and such traditions, to the nation, and to the military
service which they illustrate, it nevertheless appears to the writer
that the effect may be even harmful to the people at large, if it be
permitted to conceal the deeply mortifying condition to which the
country was reduced by parsimony in preparation, or to obscure the
lessons thence to be drawn for practical application now. It is
perhaps useless to quarrel with the tendency of mankind to turn its
eyes from disagreeable subjects, and to dwell complacently upon those
which minister to self-content. We mostly read the newspapers in which
we find our views reflected, and dispense ourselves easily with the
less pleasing occupation of seeing them roughly disputed; but a writer
on a subject of national importance may not thus exempt himself from
the unpleasant features of his task.
The author has thought it also essential to precede his work by a
somewhat full exposition of the train of causes, which through a long
series of years led to the war. It may seem at first far-fetched to go
back to 1651 for the origins of the War of 1812; but without such
preliminary consideration it is impossible to understand, or to make
due allowance for, the course of Great Britain. It will be found,
however, that the treatment of the earlier period is brief, and only
sufficient for a clear comprehension of the five years of intense
international strain preceding the final rupture; years the full
narrative of which is indispensable to appreciating the grounds and
development of the quarrel,--to realize what they fought each other
for.
That much of Great Britain's action was unjustifiable, and at times
even monstrous, regarded in itself alone, must be admitted; but we
shall ill comprehend the necessity of preparation for war, if we
neglect to note the pressure of emergency, of deadly peril, upon a
state, or if we fail to recognize that traditional habits of thought
constitute with nations, as with individuals, a compulsive moral force
which an opponent can control only by the display of adequate physical
power. Such to the British people was the conviction of their right
and need to compel the service of their native seamen, wherever found
on the high seas. The conclusion of the writer is, that at a very
early stage of the French Revolutionary Wars the United States should
have obeyed Washington's warnings to prepare for war, and to build a
navy; and that, thus prepared, instead of placing reliance upon a
system of commercial restrictions, war should have been declared not
later than 1807, when the news of Jena, and of Great Britain's refusal
to relinquish her practice of impressing from American ships, became
known almost coincidently. But this conclusion is perfectly compatible
with a recognition of the desperate character of the strife that Great
Britain was waging; that she could not disengage herself from it,
Napoleon being what he was; and that the methods which she pursued did
cause the Emperor's downfall, and her own deliverance, although they
were invasions of just rights, to which the United States should not
have submitted.
If war is always avoidable, consistently with due resistance to evil,
then war is always unjustifiable; but if it is possible that two
nations, or two political entities, like the North and South in the
American Civil War, find the question between them one which neither
can yield without sacrificing conscientious conviction, or national
welfare, or the interests of posterity, of which each generation in
its day is the trustee, then war is not justifiable only; it is
imperative. In these days of glorified arbitration it cannot be
affirmed too distinctly that bodies of men--nations--have convictions
binding on their consciences, as well as interests which are vital in
character; and that nations, no more than individuals, may surrender
conscience to another's keeping. Still less may they rightfully
pre-engage so to do. Nor is this conclusion invalidated by a triumph
of the unjust in war. Subjugation to wrong is not acquiescence in
wrong. A beaten nation is not necessarily a disgraced nation; but the
nation or man is disgraced who shirks an obligation to defend right.
From 1803 to 1814 Great Britain was at war with Napoleon, without
intermission; until 1805 single handed, thenceforth till 1812 mostly
without other allies than the incoherent and disorganized mass of the
Spanish insurgents. After Austerlitz, as Pitt said, the map of Europe
became useless to indicate distribution of political power.
Thenceforth it showed a continent politically consolidated, organized
and driven by Napoleon's sole energy, with one aim, to crush Great
Britain; and the Continent of Europe then meant the civilized world,
politically and militarily. How desperate the strife, the author in a
previous work has striven fully to explain, and does not intend here
to repeat. In it Great Britain laid her hand to any weapon she could
find, to save national life and independence. To justify all her
measures at the bar of conventional law, narrowly construed, is
impossible. Had she attempted to square herself to it she would have
been overwhelmed; as the United States, had it adhered rigidly to its
Constitution, must have foregone the purchase of the territories
beyond the Mississippi. The measures which overthrew Napoleon
grievously injured the United States; by international law grievously
wronged her also. Should she have acquiesced? If not, war was
inevitable. Great Britain could not be expected to submit to
destruction for another's benefit.
The author has been indebted to the Officers of the Public Records
Office in London, to those of the Canadian Archives, and to the Bureau
of Historical Research of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, for
kind and essential assistance in consulting papers. He owes also an
expression of personal obligation to the Marquis of Londonderry for
permission to use some of the Castlereagh correspondence, bearing on
the peace negotiations, which was not included in the extensive
published Memoirs and Correspondence of Lord Castlereagh; and to Mr.
Charles W. Stewart, the Librarian of the United States Navy
Department, for inexhaustible patience in searching for, or verifying,
data and references, needed to make the work complete on the naval
side.
A.T. MAHAN.
SEPTEMBER, 1905.
CONTENTS
ANTECEDENTS OF THE WAR
CHAPTER I
COLONIAL CONDITIONS
Page
Remote origin of the causes of the War of 1812 1
Two principal causes: impressment and the carrying trade 2
Claim of Great Britain as to impressment 3
Counter-claim of the United States 4
Lack of unanimity among the American people 5
Prevailing British ideas as to sea power and its relations to
carrying trade and impressment 9
The Navigation Acts 10
Distinction between "Commerce" and "Navigation" 11
History and development of the Navigation Acts, and of the
national opinions relating to them 13
Unanimity of conviction in Great Britain 22
Supposed benefit to the British carrying trade from loss of the
American colonies 23
British _entrepot_ legislation 24
Relation of the _entrepot_ idea to the Orders in Council
of 1807 27
Colonial monopoly a practice common to all European maritime
states 27
Effect of the Independence of the United States upon
traditional commercial prepossessions 29
Consequent policy of Great Britain 29
Commercial development of the British transatlantic colonies
during the colonial period 31
Interrelation of the continental and West India colonies of
Great Britain 35
Bearing of this upon the Navigation Acts 36
Rivalry of American-built ships with British navigation during
the colonial period 37
Resultant commercial rivalry after Independence 40
Consequent disagreements, derived from colonial restrictions,
and leading to war 41
CHAPTER II
FROM INDEPENDENCE TO JAY'S TREATY
Rupture of the colonial relation 42
Transitional character of the period 1774-1794, to the United
States 43
Epochal significance of Jay's Treaty 43
The question of British navigation, as affected by the loss of
the colonies 45
British commercial expectations from the political weakness of
the United States, 1783-1789 46
System advocated by Lord Sheffield 47
Based upon considerations of navigation and naval power 49
Navigation Acts essentially military in purpose 51
Jefferson's views upon this question 52
Imperial value of the British Navigation Act before American
Independence 53
Influence of the inter-colonial trade at the same period 55
Essential rivalry between it and British trade in general 55
Common interest of continental America and of Great Britain in
the West Indies 56
Pitt's Bill, of March, 1783 58
Controversy provoked by it in Great Britain 60
British jealousy of American navigation 63
Desire to exclude American navigation from British colonial
trade 65
Lord Sheffield's pamphlet 65
Reply of the West India planters 66
Lapse of Pitt's bill 67
Navigation Acts applied in full rigor to intercourse between the
United States and West Indies 68
This policy continues till Jay's Treaty 69
Not a wrong to the United States, though an injury 70
Naval impotence of the United States 71
Dependence on Portugal against Barbary pirates 72
Profit of Great Britain from this impotence 74
Apparent success of Sheffield's trade policy, 1783-1789 75
Increase of British navigation 75
American counteractive legislation after the adoption of the
Constitution 76
Report of the committee of the British Privy Council on this
subject, 1790 77
Aggressive spirit of the Navigation Acts 79
Change of conditions through American navigation laws 80
Recommendations of the British committee 81
Effects of the French Revolution 85
Collapse of French colonial system 85
Failure of Sheffield's policy, in supplying the West Indies
from Canada 86
Great Britain's war necessities require aid of American shipping 86
Her resolve to deprive France of the same aid 88
Consequent lawless measures towards American ships and commerce 88
Jay's mission.--Impressment not mentioned in his instructions 88
CHAPTER III
FROM JAY'S TREATY TO THE ORDERS IN COUNCIL, 1794-1807
Arbitrary war measures of Great Britain, 1793 89
Rule of 1756 90
Peculiar relation of the United States to this Rule 92
Jay's arrival in London 93
Characteristics of his negotiations 94
Great Britain concedes direct trade with West Indies 95
Rejection of this article by the Senate, on account of
accompanying conditions 96
Concession nevertheless continued by British order 97
Reasons for this tolerance 97
Conditions of trade from Jay's mission to the Peace of 1801 97
No concession of the principle of the Rule of 1756 98
Renewal of war between Great Britain and France, 1803 99
Prosperity of American commerce 100
Question raised of "direct trade" 100
Decision in British Admiralty Court adverse to United States,
1805 101
United States subjected again to colonial regulation 103
Remonstrance and negotiation of Monroe, American Minister in
London 104
Death of Pitt. Change of ministry in Great Britain. Position of
Charles James Fox 105
Fox's attempt at compromise 108
The blockade of May 16, 1806 108
Its lawfulness contested by the United States 110
Its importance in history 112
Retaliatory commercial action by the United States 113
Pinkney sent to England as colleague to Monroe 113
Colonial trade, and impressment of seamen from American
vessels, the leading subjects mentioned in their
instructions 114
Historical summary of the impressment question 114
Opening of negotiations by Monroe and Pinkney 128
Death of Fox 131
Course of the negotiations 131
Provisional treaty, signed December 31, 1806 133
Rejected by United States Government 133
Monroe and Pinkney directed to reopen negotiations 133
Change of ministry in Great Britain. Canning becomes Foreign
Secretary 134
The British Government refuses further negotiation 135
Monroe leaves England, Pinkney remaining as minister 135
"Free Trade and Sailors' Rights" 135
Consistency of Jefferson's Administration on the subject of
impressment 137
It neglects to prepare for war 138
CHAPTER IV
FROM THE ORDERS IN COUNCIL TO WAR
Reservation of the British Government in signing the treaty of
December 31, 1806 141
The Berlin Decree 142
Ambiguity of its wording 143
The question of "private property," so called, embarked in
commercial venture at sea. Discussion 144
Wide political scope of the Berlin Decree 148
Twofold importance of the United States in international policy 149
Consequent aims of France and Great Britain 149
British Order in Council of January 7, 1807 150
Attitude of the United States Government 152
Military purpose of the Berlin Decree and the Continental System 153
The "Chesapeake" affair 155
Conference concerning it between Canning and Monroe 156
Action of President Jefferson 160
Use made of it by Canning 161
Correspondence concerning the "Chesapeake" affair 161
Rose appointed envoy to Washington to negotiate a settlement 165
Failure of his mission 167
Persistent British refusal to punish the offending officer 169
Significance of the "Chesapeake" affair in the relations of the
two nations 168
Its analogy to impressment 170
Enforcement of the Berlin Decree by Napoleon 172
Its essential character 174
The Decree and the Continental System are supported by the
course of the American Government 175
Pinkney's conviction of Great Britain's peril 177
The British Orders in Council, November, 1807 177
Their effect upon the United States 178
Just resentment in America 178
Action of the Administration and Congress 181
The Embargo Act of December, 1807 182
Explanations concerning it to Great Britain 183
Its intentions, real and alleged 185
Its failure, as an alternative to war 186
Jefferson's aversion to the carrying trade 187
Growing ill-feeling between the United States and Great Britain 190
Relief to Great Britain from the effects of the Continental
System, by the Spanish revolt against Napoleon 191
Depression of United States industries under the Embargo 192
Difficulty of enforcement 194
Evasions and smuggling 195
The Embargo beneficial to Canada and Nova Scotia 198
Effects in Great Britain 199
Relief to British navigation through the Embargo 200
Effect of the Embargo upon American revenue 202
Numbers of American vessels remain abroad, submitting to the
Orders in Council, and accepting British licenses and British
convoy 203
Napoleon's Bayonne Decree against them; April 17, 1808 203
Illustrations of the working of Napoleon's Decrees and of the
Orders in Council 204
Vigorous enforcement of the Embargo in 1808 206
Popular irritation and opposition 207
Act for its further enforcement, January 9, 1809 208
Evidences of overt resistance to it 209
Act for partial repeal, introduced February 8 210
Conflicting opinions as to the Embargo, in and out of Congress 211
The Non-Intercourse Act, March 1, 1809 214
Its effect upon commercial restrictions 215
Canning's advances, in consequence of Non-Intercourse Act 215
Instructions sent to Erskine, British Minister at Washington 216
Erskine's misleading communication of them, April 18, 1809 218
Consequent renewal of trade with Great Britain 219
Erskine disavowed. Non-Intercourse resumed, August 9, 1809 219
Orders in Council of November, 1807, revoked; and substitute
issued, April 26, 1809 220
Consequent partial revival of American commerce 220
Francis J. Jackson appointed as Erskine's successor 221
His correspondence with the American Secretary of State 222
Further communication with him refused 225
Criticism of the American side of this correspondence 226
Wellesley succeeds Canning as British Foreign Secretary 229
Jackson's dismissal communicated to Wellesley by Pinkney 229
Wellesley delays action 230
British view of the diplomatic situation 231
Failure of the Non-Intercourse Act 232
Difficulty of finding a substitute 233
Act of May 1, 1810.--Its provisions 234
Napoleon's Rambouillet Decree, March 23, 1810 235
Act of May 1, 1810, communicated to France and Great Britain 236
Napoleon's action. Champagny's letter, August 5, 1810 237
Madison accepts it as revoking the French Decrees 238
The arguments for and against this interpretation 239
Great Britain refuses to accept it 242
Statement of her position in the matter 243
Wellesley's procrastinations 245
Pinkney states to him the American view, at length, December
10, 1810 245
Wellesley's reply 246
Inconsistent action of the French Government 247
Non-Intercourse with Great Britain revived by statute, March
2, 1811 249
The American Minister withdraws from London, February 28, 1811 251
Non-Intercourse with Great Britain remains in vigor to, and
during, the war 252
Augustus J. Foster appointed British Minister to the United
States, February, 1811 252
His instructions 253
His correspondence with the Secretary of State 254
Settlement of the "Chesapeake" affair 255
The collision between the "President" and the "Little Belt" 256
Special session of Congress summoned 259
The President's Message to Congress, November 5, 1811 259
Increase of the army voted 259
Debate on the navy 260
Congress refuses to increase the navy, January 27, 1812 263
Embargo of ninety days preparatory to war, April 4 263
The evasions of this measure 264
Increasing evidence of the duplicity of Napoleon's action 266
Report of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, March 10, 1812 269
Consequent British declaration 270
Use of these papers by Barlow, American Minister to France 271
The spurious French Decree of April 28, 1811, communicated to
Barlow 272
Communicated to the British Government 273
Considerations influencing the British Government 274
The Orders in Council revoked 276
Madison sends a war message to Congress, June 1, 1812 279
Declaration of war, June 18, 1812 279
Conditions of the army, navy, and treasury 279
CHAPTER V
THE THEATRE OF OPERATIONS
Limitations on American action through deficient sea power 283
Warfare against commerce considered 284
Its financial and political effects 285
Its military bearing 285
Distinction between military and commercial blockade 286
Commercial blockade identical in essence with commerce-destroying
by cruisers 287
Recognition of this by Napoleon 287
Commerce destruction by blockade the weapon of the stronger
navy; by cruisers, of the weaker 288
Inefficiency of the American Government shown in the want of
naval preparation 289
Conditions in the army even worse 290
Jefferson's sanguine expectations 291
Propriety of the invasion of Canada discussed 292
The United States, weak on the seaboard, relatively strong
towards Canada 295
Function of the seaboard in the war; defensive 296
Offensive opportunity essential to any scheme of defence 298
Application of this principle; in general, and to 1812 298
Conditions on the Canada frontier, favoring the offensive by
the United States 300
Importance of the Great Lakes to military operations 301
Over-confidence of Americans 303
Corresponding apprehension of British officers 304
Decisive points on the line between the countries 305
Importance of the Indians as an element in the situation 306
Proper offensive policy of the United States 307
Natural advantages favoring the United States 309
The land frontier the proper scene of American offensive action 310
Seaboard conditions, for offence and defence 311
CHAPTER VI
EARLY CRUISES AND ENGAGEMENTS. HULL'S OPERATIONS AND SURRENDER
Composition of Commodore Rodgers' squadron at outbreak of war 314
Indecisions of the Navy Department 315
Question between small squadrons and single cruisers for
commerce-destroying 315
Opinions of prominent officers 316
British convoy system for protecting trade 319
The Navy Department formulates a plan of operations 320
Discussion of its merits 321
Rodgers sails without receiving Department's plan 322
Encounter with the "Belvidera" 323
The cruise unproductive, offensively 324
But not therefore unsuccessful, defensively 325
Its effect upon the movements of British vessels 326
The sailing of the "Constitution" 328
Chased by a British squadron 329
Cruise of the "Constitution" under Hull 329
Engagement with the "Guerriere" 330
Hull and Rodgers meet in Boston 335
Misfortune on land 336
Wretched condition of the American army 336
Appointment of Henry Dearborn and William Hull as generals. Hull
to command in the Northwest 337
Isaac Brock, the British general commanding in Upper Canada 337
His well-considered scheme of operation 338
Incompetency of the American War Department 339
Hull takes command at Dayton 340
Advances to Detroit 341
Crosses to Canada 341
Brock causes seizure of Michilimackinac 341
Hull's delays in Canada, before Malden 343
The danger of his position 343
The British attack his communications 345
Hull recrosses to Detroit 345
Brock's difficulties 346
Moves against Hull, and reaches Malden 346
Crosses to Detroit, and advances 346
Hull surrenders 347
Criticism of his conduct 348
Extenuating circumstances 349
Ultimate responsibility lies upon the Governments which had been
in power for ten years 350
CHAPTER VII
OPERATIONS ON THE NORTHERN FRONTIER AFTER HULL'S SURRENDER.
EUROPEAN EVENTS BEARING ON THE WAR
Brock returns to Niagara from Detroit 351
Prevost, Governor-General of Canada, arranges with Dearborn a
suspension of hostilities 352
Suspension disapproved by the American Government. Hostilities
resumed 353
Brock's advantage by control of the water 353
Two of his vessels on Lake Erie taken from him by Lieutenant
Elliott, U.S. Navy 354
Brock's estimate of this loss 356
American attack upon Queenston 357
Repulsed, but Brock killed 357
Abortive American attack on the Upper Niagara 358
Inactivity of Dearborn on the northern New York frontier 359
Military inefficiency throughout the United States 360
Improvement only in the naval situation on the lakes 361
Captain Chauncey appointed to command on Lakes Erie and Ontario 361
His activity and efficiency 362
Disadvantages of his naval base, Sackett's Harbor 363
Chauncey's early operations, November, 1812 364
Fleet lays up for the winter 366
Effect of his first operations 366
General Harrison succeeds to Hull's command 367
Colonel Procter commands the British forces opposed 367
His instructions from Prevost and Brock 367
Harrison's plan of operations 368
The American disaster at Frenchtown 370
Effect upon Harrison's plans 371
The army remains on the defensive, awaiting naval control of
Lake Erie 371
Chauncey visits Lake Erie 374
Disadvantages of Black Rock as a naval station 374
Chauncey selects Presqu'Isle (Erie) instead 375
Orders vessels built there 375
Advantages and drawbacks of Erie as a naval base 375
Commander Perry ordered to the lakes 376
Assigned by Chauncey to command on Lake Erie 376
Naval conditions on Lakes Erie and Ontario, at close of 1812 377
Contemporary European conditions 378
Napoleon's expedition against Russia 379
Commercial embarrassments of Great Britain 379
Necessity of American supplies to the British armies in Spain 381
Preoccupation of the British Navy with conditions in Europe and
the East 382
Consequent embarrassment from the American war 383
Need of the American market 384
Danger to British West India trade from an American war 384
Burden thrown upon the British Admiralty 385
British anxiety to avoid war 385
CHAPTER VIII
OCEAN WARFARE AGAINST COMMERCE--PRIVATEERING--BRITISH
LICENSES--NAVAL ACTIONS: "WASP" AND "FROLIC," "UNITED STATES"
AND "MACEDONIAN"
Consolidation of British transatlantic naval commands 387
Sir John Borlase Warren commander-in-chief 387
British merchant ships forbidden to sail without convoy 388
Continued hope for restoration of peace 389
Warren instructed to make propositions 390
Reply of the American Government 391
Cessation of impressment demanded. Negotiation fails 391
Warren's appreciation of the dangers to British commerce 392
Extemporized character of the early American privateering 394
Its activities therefore mainly within Warren's station 394
Cruise of the privateer "Rossie," Captain Barney 395
Privateering not a merely speculative undertaking 396
Conditions necessary to its success 397
Illustrated by the privateer "America" 398
Comparative immunity of American shipping and commerce at the
beginning of hostilities 399
Causes for this 400
Controversial correspondence between Warren and the Admiralty 401
Policy of the Admiralty. Its effects 404
American ships of war and privateers gradually compelled to
cruise in distant seas 406
American commerce excluded from the ocean 406
Sailing of the squadrons of Rodgers and Decatur 407
Their separation 408
Cruise of Rodgers' squadron 409
British licenses to American merchant vessels 410
Action between the "Wasp" and "Frolic" 412
Cruise of the "Argus," of Decatur's division 415
Action between the "United States" and "Macedonian" 416
The "United States" returns with her prize 422
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
VOLUME ONE.
THE IMPRESSMENT OF AN AMERICAN SEAMAN _Frontispiece_
From a drawing by Stanley M. Arthurs.
GOUVERNEUR MORRIS Page 6
From the painting by Marchant, after Sully, in Independence
Hall, Philadelphia.
JOHN JAY Page 88
From the painting by Gilbert Stuart, in Bedford (Jay) House,
Katonah, N.Y.
JAMES MONROE Page 104
From the painting by Gilbert Stuart, in the possession of
Hon. T. Jefferson Coolidge.
THOMAS JEFFERSON Page 120
From the painting by Gilbert Stuart, in Bowdoin College,
Brunswick, Me.
JAMES MADISON Page 223
From the painting by Gilbert Stuart, in Bowdoin College,
Brunswick, Me.
THE CHASE OF THE _Belvidera_ Page 322
From a drawing by Carlton T. Chapman.
THE FORECASTLE OF THE _Constitution_ DURING THE CHASE Page 328
From a drawing by Henry Reuterdahl.
CAPTAIN ISAAC HULL Page 330
From the engraving by D. Edwin, after the painting by
Gilbert Stuart.
THE BURNING OF THE _Guerriere_ Page 334
From a drawing by Henry Reuterdahl.
CAPTAIN STEPHEN DECATUR Page 420
From the painting by Gilbert Stuart, in Independence Hall,
Philadelphia.
MAPS AND BATTLE PLANS.
VOLUME ONE.
Theatre of Land and Coast Warfare Page 283
The Atlantic Ocean, showing the positions of the Ocean Actions
of the War of 1812 and the Movements of the Squadrons in
July and August, 1812 Page 326
Plan of the Engagement between the _Constitution_ and
_Guerriere_ Page 332
Map of Lake Frontier to illustrate Campaigns of 1812-1814 Page 370
The Cruises of the Three American Squadrons in the Autumn
of 1812 Page 408
Plan of the Engagement between the _United States_ and
_Macedonian_ Page 418
Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812
ANTECEDENTS OF THE WAR
CHAPTER I
COLONIAL CONDITIONS
The head waters of the stream of events which led to the War of 1812,
between the United States and Great Britain, must be sought far back
in the history of Europe, in the principles governing commercial,
colonial, and naval policy, accepted almost universally prior to the
French Revolution. It is true that, before that tremendous epoch was
reached, a far-reaching contribution to the approaching change in
men's ideas on most matters touching mercantile intercourse, and the
true relations of man to man, of nation to nation, had been made by
the publication, in 1776, of Adam Smith's "Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations;" but, as is the case with most marked
advances in the realm of thought, the light thus kindled, though
finding reflection here and there among a few broader intellects, was
unable to penetrate at once the dense surface of prejudice and
conservatism with which the received maxims of generations had
incrusted the general mind. Against such obstruction even the most
popular of statesmen--as the younger Pitt soon after this
became--cannot prevail at once; and, before time permitted the
British people at large to reach that wider comprehension of issues,
whereby alone radical change is made possible, there set in an era of
reaction consequent upon the French Revolution, the excesses of which
involved in one universal discredit all the more liberal ideas that
were leavening the leaders of mankind.
The two principal immediate causes of the War of 1812 were the
impressment of seamen from American merchant ships, upon the high
seas, to serve in the British Navy, and the interference with the
carrying trade of the United States by the naval power of Great
Britain. For a long time this interference was confined by the British
Ministry to methods which they thought themselves able to defend--as
they did the practice of impressment--upon the ground of rights,
prescriptive and established, natural or belligerent; although the
American Government contended that in several specific measures no
such right existed,--that the action was illegal as well as
oppressive. As the war with Napoleon increased in intensity, however,
the exigencies of the struggle induced the British cabinet to
formulate and enforce against neutrals a restriction of trade which it
confessed to be without sanction in law, and justified only upon the
plea of necessary retaliation, imposed by the unwarrantable course of
the French Emperor. These later proceedings, known historically as the
Orders in Council,[1] by their enormity dwarfed all previous causes of
complaint, and with the question of impressment constituted the vital
and irreconcilable body of dissent which dragged the two states into
armed collision. Undoubtedly, other matters of difficulty arose from
time to time, and were productive of dispute; but either they were of
comparatively trivial importance, easily settled by ordinary
diplomatic methods, or there was not at bottom any vital difference as
to principle, but only as to the method of adjustment. For instance,
in the flagrant and unpardonable outrage of taking men by force from
the United States frigate "Chesapeake," the British Government,
although permitted by the American to spin out discussion over a
period of four years, did not pretend to sustain the act itself; the
act, that is, of searching a neutral ship of war. Whatever the motive
of the Ministry in postponing redress, their pretexts turned upon
points of detail, accessory to the main transaction, or upon the
subsequent course of the United States Government, which showed
conscious weakness by taking hasty, pettish half-measures; instead of
abstaining from immediate action, and instructing its minister to
present an ultimatum, if satisfaction were shirked.
In the two causes of the war which have been specified, the difference
was fundamental. Whichever was right, the question at stake was in
each case one of principle, and of necessity. Great Britain never
claimed to impress American seamen; but she did assert that her
native-born subjects could never change their allegiance, that she had
an inalienable right to their service, and to seize them wherever
found, except within foreign territory. From an admitted premise, that
the open sea is common to all nations, she deduced a common
jurisdiction, in virtue of which she arrested her vagrant seamen. This
argument of right was reinforced by a paramount necessity. In a life
and death struggle with an implacable enemy, Great Britain with
difficulty could keep her fleet manned at all; even with indifferent
material. The deterioration in quality of her ships' companies was
notorious; and it was notorious also that numerous British seamen
sought employment in American merchant ships, hoping there to find
refuge from the protracted confinement of a now dreary maritime war.
Resort to impressment was not merely the act of a high-handed
Government, but the demand of both parties in the state, coerced by
the sentiment of the people, whose will is ultimately irresistible. No
ministry could hope to retain power if it surrendered the claim to
take seamen found under a neutral flag. This fact was thoroughly
established in a long discussion with United States plenipotentiaries,
five years before the war broke out.
On the other hand, the United States maintained that on the sea common
the only jurisdiction over a ship was that of its own nation. She
could not admit that American vessels there should be searched, for
other purposes than those conceded to the belligerent by international
law; that is, in order to determine the nature of the voyage, to
ascertain whether, by destination, by cargo, or by persons carried,
the obligations of neutrality were being infringed. If there was
reasonable cause for suspicion, the vessel, by accepted law and
precedent, might be sent to a port of the belligerent, where the
question was adjudicated by legal process; but the actual captor could
not decide it on the spot. On the contrary, he was bound, to the
utmost possible, to preserve from molestation everything on board the
seized vessel; in order that, if cleared, the owner might undergo no
damage beyond the detention. So deliberate a course was not suited to
the summary methods of impressment, nor to the urgent needs of the
British Navy. The boarding officer, who had no authority to take away
a bale of goods, decided then and there whether a man was subject to
impressment, and carried him off at once, if he so willed.
It is to the credit of the American Government under Jefferson, that,
though weak in its methods of seeking redress, it went straight back
of the individual sufferer, and rested its case unswervingly on the
broad principle.[2] That impressment, thus practised, swept in
American seamen, was an incident only, although it grievously
aggravated the injury. Whatever the native allegiance of individuals
on board any vessel on the open ocean, their rights were not to be
regulated by the municipal law of the belligerent, but by that of the
nation to which the ship belonged, of whose territory she was
constructively a part, and whose flag therefore was dishonored, if
acquiescence were yielded to an infringement of personal liberty,
except as conceded by obligations of treaty, or by the general law of
nations. Within British waters, the United States suffered no wrong by
the impressment of British subjects--the enforcement of local
municipal law--on board American vessels; and although it was
suggested that such visits should not be made, and that an arriving
crew should be considered to have the nationality of their ship, this
concession, if granted, would have been a friendly limitation by Great
Britain of her own municipal jurisdiction. It therefore could not be
urged upon the British Government by a nation which took its stand
resolutely upon the supremacy of its own municipal rights, on board
its merchant shipping on the high seas.
It is to be noted, furthermore, that the voice of the people in the
United States, the pressure of influence upon the Government, was not
as unanimous as that exerted upon the British Ministry. The feeling of
the country was divided; and, while none denied the grievous wrong
done when an American was impressed, a class, strong at least in
intellectual power, limited its demands to precautions against such
mistakes and to redress when they occurred. The British claim to
search, with the object of impressing British subjects, was considered
by these men to be valid. Thus Gouverneur Morris, who on a
semi-official visit to London in 1790 had had occasion to remonstrate
upon the impressment of Americans in British ports, and who, as a
pamphleteer, had taken strong ground against the measures of the
British Government injurious to American commerce, wrote as follows in
1808 about the practice of seizing British subjects in American ships:
"That we, the people of America, should engage in ruinous warfare to
support a rash opinion, that foreign sailors in our merchant ships are
to be protected against the power of their sovereign, is downright
madness." "Why not," he wrote again in 1813, while the war was raging,
"waiving flippant debate, lay down the broad principle of national
right, on which Great Britain takes her native seamen from our
merchant ships? Let those who deny the right pay, suffer, and fight,
to compel an abandonment of the claim. Men of sound mind will see, and
men of sound principle will acknowledge, its existence." In his
opinion, there was but one consistent course to be pursued by those
who favored the war with Great Britain, which was to insist that she
should, without compensation, surrender her claim. "If that ground be
taken," he wrote, "the war [on our part] will be confessedly, as it is
now impliedly, unjust."[3] Morris was a man honorably distinguished in
our troubled national history--a member of the Congress of the
Revolution and of the Constitutional Convention, a trained lawyer, a
practised financier, and an experienced diplomatist; one who
throughout his public life stood high in the estimation of Washington,
with whom he was in constant official and personal correspondence. It
is to be added that those to whom he wrote were evidently in sympathy
with his opinions.
[Illustration: GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
From the painting by Marchant, after Sully, in Independence
Hall, Philadelphia.]
So again Representative Gaston, of North Carolina, a member of the
same political party as Morris, speaking from his seat in the House in
February, 1814,[4] maintained the British doctrine of inalienable
allegiance. "Naturalization granted in another country has no effect
whatever to destroy the original primary allegiance." Even
Administration speakers did not deny this, but they maintained that
the native allegiance could be enforced only within its territorial
limits, not on the high seas. While perfectly firm and explicit as to
the defence of American seamen,--even to the point of war, if
needful,--Gaston spoke of the British practice as a right. "If you
cannot by substitute obtain an abandonment of the right, or practice,
to search our vessels, regulate it so as to prevent its abuse; waiving
for the present, not relinquishing, your objections to it." He
expressed sympathy, too, for the desperate straits in which Great
Britain found herself. "At a time when her floating bulwarks were her
whole safeguard against slavery, she could not view without alarm and
resentment the warriors who should have manned those bulwarks pursuing
a more gainful occupation in American vessels. Our merchant ships were
crowded with British seamen, most of them deserters from their ships
of war, and all furnished with fraudulent protections to prove them
Americans. To us they were not necessary." On the contrary, "they ate
the bread and bid down the wages of native seamen, whom it was our
first duty to foster and encourage." This competition with native
seamen was one of the pleas likewise of the New England opposition,
too much of which was obstinately and reprehensibly factious. "Many
thousands of British seamen," said Governor Strong of Massachusetts,
in addressing the Legislature, May 28, 1813, "deserted that service
for a more safe and lucrative employment in ours." Had they not, "the
high price for that species of labor would soon have induced a
sufficient number of Americans to become seamen. It appears,
therefore, that British seamen have been patronized at the expense of
our own; and should Great Britain now consent to relinquish the _right
of taking her own subjects_, it would be no advantage to our native
seamen; it would only tend to reduce their wages by increasing the
numbers of that class of men."[5] Gaston further said, that North
Carolina, though not a commercial state, had many native seamen; but,
"at the moment war was declared, though inquiry was made, I could not
hear of a single native seaman detained by British impressment."
It is desirable, especially in these days, when everything is to be
arbitrated, that men should recognize both sides of this question, and
realize how impossible it was for either party to acquiesce in any
other authority than their own deciding between them. "As I never had
a doubt," said Morris, "so I thought it a duty to express my
conviction that British ministers would not, _dared not_, submit to
mediation a question of essential right."[6] "The way to peace is open
and clear," he said the following year. "Let the right of search and
impressment be acknowledged as maxims of public law."[7]
These expressions, uttered in the freedom of private correspondence,
show a profound comprehension of the constraint under which the
British Government and people both lay. It was impossible, at such a
moment of extreme national peril, to depart from political convictions
engendered by the uniform success of a policy followed consistently
for a hundred and fifty years. For Great Britain, the time had long
since passed into a dim distance, when the national appreciation of
the sea to her welfare was that of mere defence, as voiced by
Shakespeare:
England, hedged in with the main,
That water-walled bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes.[8]
This little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happier lands.[9]
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the perception of Great
Britain's essential need to predominate upon the sea had dawned upon
men's minds, and thence had passed from a vague national consciousness
to a clearly defined national line of action, adopted first through a
recognition of existing conditions of inferiority, but after these had
ceased pursued without any change of spirit, and with no important
changes of detail. This policy was formulated in a series of measures,
comprehensively known as the Navigation Acts, the first of which was
passed in 1651, during Cromwell's Protectorate. In 1660, immediately
after the Restoration, it was reaffirmed in most essential features,
and thenceforward continued to and beyond the times of which we are
writing. In form a policy of sweeping protection, for the development
of a particular British industry,--the carrying trade,--it was soon
recognized that, in substance, its success had laid the foundations of
a naval strength equally indispensable to the country. Upon this
ground it was approved even by Adam Smith, although in direct
opposition to the general spirit of his then novel doctrine. While
exposing its fallacies as a commercial measure, he said it exemplified
one of two cases in which protective legislation was to be justified.
"The defence of Great Britain, for example, depends very much upon the
number of its sailors and shipping. The Act of Navigation therefore
very properly endeavors to give the sailors and shipping of Great
Britain the monopoly of the trade of their own country.... It is not
impossible that some of the regulations of this famous Act may have
proceeded from national animosity. They are as wise, however, as
though they had all been dictated by the most deliberate wisdom....
The Act is not favorable to foreign commerce, nor to the opulence
which can arise from that; but defence is of much more importance than
opulence. The Act of Navigation is perhaps the wisest of all the
commercial regulations of England."[10] It became a dominant
prepossession of British statesmen, even among Smith's converts, in
the conduct of foreign relations, that the military power of the state
lay in the vast resources of native seamen, employed in its merchant
ships. Even the wealth returned to the country, by the monopoly of the
imperial markets, and by the nearly exclusive possession of the
carrying trade, which was insured to British commerce by the elaborate
regulations of the Act, was thought of less moment. "Every commercial
consideration has been repeatedly urged," wrote John Adams, the first
United States Minister to Great Britain, "but to no effect; seamen,
the Navy, and power to strike an awful blow to an enemy at the first
outbreak of war, are the ideas which prevail."[11] This object, and
this process, are familiar to us in these later days under the term
"mobilization;" the military value of which, if rapidly effected, is
well understood.
In this light, and in the light of the preceding experience of a
hundred and fifty years, we must regard the course of the British
Ministry through that period, extremely critical to both nations,
which began when our War of Independence ended, and issued in the War
of 1812. We in this day are continually told to look back to our
fathers of the Revolutionary period, to follow their precepts, to
confine ourselves to the lines of their policy. Let us then either
justify the British ministries of Pitt and his successors, in their
obstinate adherence to the traditions they had received, or let us
admit that even ancestral piety may be carried too far, and that
venerable maxims must be brought to the test of existing conditions.
The general movement of maritime intercourse between countries is
commonly considered under two principal heads: Commerce and
Navigation. The first applies to the interchange of commodities,
however effected; the second, to their transportation from port to
port. A nation may have a large commerce, of export and import,
carried in foreign vessels, and possess little shipping of its own.
This is at present the condition of the United States; and once, in
far gone days, it was in great measure that of England. In such case
there is a defect of navigation, consequent upon which there will be a
deficiency of native seamen; of seamen attached to the country and its
interests, by ties of birth or habit. For maritime war such a state
will have but small resources of adaptable naval force; a condition
dangerous in proportion to its dependence upon control of the sea.
Therefore the attention of British statesmen, during the period in
which the Navigation Act flourished, fastened more and more upon the
necessity of maintaining the navigation of the kingdom, as
distinguished from its commerce. Subsidiary to the movement of
commerce, there is a third factor, relatively stationary, the
consideration of which is probably less familiar now than it was to
the contemporaries of the Navigation Act, to whom it was known under
the name _entrepot_. This term was applied to those commercial
centres--in this connection maritime centres--where goods accumulate
on their way to market; where they are handled, stored, or
transshipped. All these processes involve expenditure, which inures to
the profit of the port, and of the nation; the effect being the exact
equivalent of the local gains of a railroad centre of the present day.
It was a dominant object with statesmen of the earlier period to draw
such accumulations of traffic to their own ports, or nations; to force
trade, by ingenious legislation, or even by direct coercion, to bring
its materials to their own shores, and there to yield to them the
advantages of the _entrepot_. Thus the preamble to one of the series
of Navigation Acts states, as a direct object, the "making this
Kingdom a staple[12] [emporium], not only of the commodities of our
plantations, but also of the commodities of other countries, and
places, for the supply of the plantations."[13] An instructive example
of such indirect effort was the institution of free ports; ports
which, by exemption from heavy customary tolls, or by the admission of
foreign ships or goods, not permitted entrance to other national
harbors, invited the merchant to collect in them, from surrounding
regions, the constituents of his cargoes. On the other hand, the
Colonial System, which began to assume importance at the time of the
Navigation Act, afforded abundant opportunity for the compulsion of
trade. Colonies being part of the mother country, and yet transoceanic
with reference to her, maritime commerce between them and foreign
communities could by direct legislation be obliged first to seek the
parent state, which thus was made the distributing centre for both
their exports and imports.
For nearly three centuries before the decisive measures taken by the
Parliament of the Commonwealth, the development and increase of
English shipping, by regulation of English trade, had been recognized
as a desirable object by many English rulers. The impulse had taken
shape in various enactments, giving to English vessels privileges,
exclusive or qualified, in the import or export carriage of the
kingdom; and it will readily be understood that the matter appeared of
even more pressing importance, when the Navy depended upon the
merchant service for ships, as well as for men; when the war fleets of
the nation were composed of impressed ships, as well as manned by
impressed sailors. These various laws had been tentative in character.
Both firmness of purpose and continuity of effort were lacking to
them; due doubtless to the comparative weakness of the nation in the
scale of European states up to the seventeenth century. During the
reigns of the first two Stuarts, this weakness was emphasized by
internal dissensions; but the appreciation of the necessity for some
radical remedy to the decay of English naval power remained and
increased. To this conviction the ship-money of Charles the First
bears its testimony; but it was left to Cromwell and his associates to
formulate the legislation, upon which, for two centuries to come, the
kingdom was thought to depend, alike for the growth of its merchant
shipping and for the maintenance of the navy. All that preceded has
interest chiefly as showing the origin and growth of an enduring
national conviction, with which the United States came into collision
immediately after achieving independence.
The ninth of October, 1651, is the date of the passing of the Act, the
general terms of which set for two hundred years the standard for
British legislation concerning the shipping industry. The title of the
measure, "Goods from foreign ports, by whom to be imported," indicated
at once that the object in view was the carrying trade; navigation,
rather than commerce. Commerce was to be manipulated and forced into
English bottoms as an indispensable agency for reaching British
consumers. At this time less than half a century had elapsed since the
first English colonists had settled in Massachusetts and Virginia. The
British plantation system was still in its beginnings, alike in
America, Asia, and Africa. When the then recent Civil War ended, in
the overthrow of the royal power, it had been "observed with concern
that the merchants of England had for several years usually freighted
Dutch ships for fetching home their merchandise, because the freights
were lower than in English ships. Dutch ships, therefore, were used
for importing our own American products, while English ships lay
rotting in harbor."[14] "Notwithstanding the regulations made for
confining that branch of navigation to the mother country, it is said
that in the West India Islands there used, at this time, out of forty
ships to be thirty-eight ships Dutch bottoms."[15] English mariners
also, for want of employment, went into the Dutch service. In this way
seamen for the navy disappeared, just as, at a later day, they did
into the merchant shipping of the United States.
The one great maritime rival of England, Holland, had thus engrossed,
not only the carrying trade of Europe at large, most of which, from
port to port, was done by her seamen, but that of England as well.
Even of the English coasting trade much was done by Dutch ships. Under
this competition, the English merchant marine was dwindling, and had
become so inadequate that, when the exclusion of foreigners was
enforced by the Act, the cry at once arose in the land that the
English shipping was not sufficient for the work thus thrust upon it.
"Although our own people have not shipping enough to import from all
parts what they want, they are needlessly debarred from receiving new
supplies of merchandise from other nations, who alone can, and until
now did, import it."[16] The effect of this decadence of shipping upon
the resources of men for the navy is apparent.
The existence of strained relations between England and Holland
facilitated the adoption of the first Navigation Act, which, as things
were, struck the Dutch only; they being the one great carrying
community in Europe. Although both the letter and the purpose of the
new law included in its prohibitions all foreign countries, the
commercial interests of other states were too slight, and their
commercial spirit too dull, to take note of the future effect upon
themselves; whether absolutely, or in relation to the maritime power
of Great Britain, the cornerstone of which was then laid. This first
Act directed that no merchandise from Asia, Africa, or America,
including therein English "plantations," as the colonies were then
styled,[17] should be imported into England in other than
English-built ships, belonging to English subjects, and of which "the
master and mariners are also, for the most part of them, of the people
of this commonwealth." This at once reserved a large part of the
external trade to English ships; and also, by the regulation of the
latter, constituted them a nursery for English seamen. To the general
tenor of this clause, confining importation wholly to English vessels,
an exception was made for Europe only; importations from any part of
which was permitted to "such foreign ships and vessels as do truly and
properly belong to the people of that country or place of which the
said goods are the growth, production, or manufacture."[18] Foreign
merchantmen might therefore import into England the products of their
own country; but both they and English vessels must ship such cargoes
in the country of origin, not at any intermediate port. The purpose of
these provisos, especially of the second, was to deprive Holland of
the profit of the middleman, or the _entrepot_, which she had enjoyed
hitherto by importing to herself from various regions, warehousing the
goods, and then re-exporting. The expense of these processes, pocketed
by Dutch handlers, and the exaction of any dues levied by the Dutch
Treasury, reappeared in increased cost to foreign consumers. This
appreciation of the value of the _entrepot_ underlay much of the
subsequent colonial regulation of England, and actuated the famous
Orders in Council of 1807, which were a principal factor in causing
the War of 1812. A second effect of these restrictions, which in later
times was deemed even more important than the pecuniary gain, was to
compel English ships to go long voyages, to the home countries of the
cargoes they sought, instead of getting them near by in Dutch depots.
This gave a corresponding development to the carrying trade--the
navigation--of the Commonwealth; securing greater employment for ships
and seamen, increasing both their numbers and experience, and
contributing thereby to the resources of the navy in men. "A
considerable carrying trade would be lost to us, and would remain with
the merchants of Holland, of Hamburg, and other maritime towns, if our
merchants were permitted to furnish themselves by short voyages to
those neighboring ports, and were not compelled to take upon
themselves the burden of bringing these articles from the countries
where they were produced."[19]
The Act of 1660, officially known as that of 12 Charles II., modified
the provisos governing the European trade. The exclusion of goods of
European origin from all transportation to England, save in ships of
their own nation, was to some extent removed. This surrender was
censured by some, explicitly, because it again enabled the Dutch to
collect foreign articles and send them to England, thereby "permitting
competition with this country in the longer part of the voyage;" to
the injury, therefore, of British navigation. The remission, though
real, was less than appeared; for the prohibitions of the Commonwealth
were still applied to a large number of specified articles, the
produce chiefly of Russia and Turkey, which could be imported only in
their national ships, or those of England. As those countries had
substantially no long voyage shipping, trade with them was to all
practical purposes confined to English vessels.[20] The concession to
foreign vessels, such as it was, was further qualified by heavier
duties, called aliens' duties, upon their cargoes; and by the
requirement that three-fourths of their crew, entering English ports,
should be of the same nationality as the ship. The object of this
regulation was to prevent the foreign state from increasing its
tonnage, by employing seamen other than its own. This went beyond mere
protection of English vessels, and was a direct attack, though by
English municipal law, upon the growth of foreign shipping.
This purpose indeed was authoritatively announced from the bench,
construing the Act in the decision of a specific case. "Parliament had
wisely foreseen that, if they restrained the importation or
exportation of European goods, unless in our own ships, and manned
with our own seamen, other states would do the same; and this, in its
consequences, would amount to a prohibition of all such goods, which
would be extremely detrimental to trade, and in the end defeat the
very design of the Act. It was seen, however, that many countries in
Europe, as France, Spain, and Italy, could more easily buy ships than
build them; that, on the other hand, countries like Russia, and others
in the North, had timber and materials enough for building ships, but
wanted sailors. It was from a consideration of this inaptness in most
countries to accomplish a complete navigation, that the Parliament
prohibited the importation of most European goods, unless in ships
owned and navigated by English, or in ships of the _build of_ and
manned by sailors of that country of which the goods were the growth.
The consequence would be that foreigners could not make use of ships
they bought, though English subjects might. This would force them to
have recourse to our shipping, and the general intent of the Act, to
secure the carrying trade to the English, would be answered as far as
it possibly could." It was therefore ruled that the tenor of the Act
forbade foreigners to import to England in ships not of their own
building; and, adds the reporter, "This exposition of the Act of
Navigation is certainly the true one."[21] Having thus narrowed
foreign competition to the utmost extent possible to municipal
statutes, Parliament made the carrying industry even more exclusively
than before a preserve for native seamen. The Commonwealth's
requirement, that "the most" of the crew should be English, was
changed to a definite prescription that the master and three-fourths
of the mariners should be so.
Under such enactments, with frequent modification of detail, but no
essential change of method, British shipping and seamen continued to
be "protected" against foreign competition down to and beyond the War
of 1812. In this long interval there is no change of conception, nor
any relaxation of national conviction. The whole history affords a
remarkable instance of persistent policy, pursued consecutively for
five or six generations. No better evidence could be given of its hold
upon the minds of the people, or of the serious nature of the obstacle
encountered by any other state that came into collision with it; as
the United States during the Napoleonic period did, in matters of
trade and carriage, but especially in the closely related question of
Impressment.
Whether the Navigation Act, during its period of vigor, was successful
in developing the British mercantile marine and supporting the British
Navy has been variously argued. The subsequent growth of British
navigation is admitted; but whether this was the consequence of the
measure itself has been disputed. It appears to the writer that those
who doubt its effect in this respect allow their convictions of the
strength of economical forces to blind them to the power of
unremitting legislative action. To divert national activities from
natural channels into artificial may be inexpedient and wasteful; and
it may be reasonable to claim that ends so achieved are not really
successes, but failures. Nevertheless, although natural causes, till
then latent, may have conspired to further the development which the
Navigation Act was intended to promote, and although, since its
abolition, the same causes may have sufficed to sustain the imposing
national carrying trade built up during its continuance, it is
difficult to doubt the great direct influence of the Act itself;
having in view the extent of the results, as well as the corroborative
success of modern states in building up and maintaining other
distinctly artificial industries, sometimes to the injury of the
natural industries of other peoples, which the Navigation Act also in
its day was meant to effect.
The condition of British navigation in 1651 has been stated. The
experience of the remaining years of the Protectorate appears to have
confirmed national opinion as to the general policy of the Act, and to
have suggested the modifications of the Restoration. To trace the full
sequence of development, in legislation or in shipping, is not here
permissible; the present need being simply to give an account, and an
explanation, of the strength of a national prepossession, which in its
manifestation was a chief cause of the events that are the theme of
this book. A few scattered details, taken casually, seem strikingly to
sustain the claims of the advocates of the system, bearing always in
mind the depression of the British shipping industry before the
passage of the law. In 1728 there arrived in London from all parts
beyond sea 2052 ships, of which only 213 were under foreign flags;
less than one in nine. In Liverpool, in 1765, of 1533 entered and
cleared, but 135 were foreign; in Bristol, the same year, of 701 but
91 foreign. Of the entire import of that year only 28 per cent, in
money value, came from Europe; the carriage of the remaining 72 per
cent was confined to British ships. It may, of course, be maintained
that this restriction of shipping operated to the disadvantage of the
commerce of the kingdom; that there was direct pecuniary loss. This
would not be denied, for the object of the Act was less national gain
than the upbuilding of shipping as a resource for the navy.
Nevertheless, at this same period, in 1764, of 810 ships entering the
great North German commercial centre, Hamburg, 267--over
one-third--were British; the Dutch but 146, the Hamburgers themselves
157. A curious and suggestive comparison is afforded by the same port
in 1769. From the extensive, populous, and fruitful country of France,
the _entrepot_ of the richest West Indian colony, Santo Domingo, there
entered Hamburg 203 ships, of which not one was French; whereas from
Great Britain there came a slightly larger total, 216, of which 178
were British.
Such figures seem to substantiate the general contemporary opinion of
the efficacy of the Navigation Act, and to support the particular
claim of a British writer of the day, that the naval weakness of
Holland and France was due to the lack of similar measures. "The Dutch
have indeed pursued a different policy, but they have thereby fallen
to a state of weakness, which is now the object of pity, or of
contempt. It was owing to the want of sailors, and not to the fault of
their officers, that the ten ships of the line, which during their
late impudent quarrel with Britain had been stipulated to join the
French fleet, never sailed."[22] "The French Navy, which at all times
depended chiefly upon the West India trade for a supply of seamen,
must have been laid up, if the war (of American Independence) had
continued another year."[23] Whatever the accuracy of these
statements,[24]--and they are those of a well-informed man,--they
represented a general conviction, not in Great Britain only but in
Europe, of the results of the Navigation legislation. A French writer
speaks of it as the source of England's greatness,[25] and sums up his
admiration in words which recognize the respective shares of natural
advantages and sagacious supervision in the grand outcome. "Called to
commerce by her situation, it became the spirit of her government and
the lever of her ambition. In other monarchies, it is private
individuals who carry on commerce; but in that happy constitution it
is the state, or the nation in its entirety."
In Great Britain itself there was substantial unanimity. This colored
all its after policy towards its lately rebellious and now independent
children, who as carriers had revived the once dreaded rivalry of the
Dutch. To quote one writer, intimately acquainted with the whole
theory and practice of the Navigation Acts, they "tend to the
establishment of a monopoly; but our ancestors ... considered the
defence of this island from foreign invasion as the first law in the
national policy. Judging that the dominion of the land could not be
preserved without possessing that of the sea, they made every effort
to procure to the nation a maritime power of its own. They wished that
the merchants should own as many ships, and employ as many mariners as
possible. To induce, and sometimes to force, them to this application
of their capital, restrictions and prohibitions were devised. The
interests of commerce were often sacrificed to this object." Yet he
claims that in the end commerce also profited, for "the increase in
the number of ships became a spur to seek out employment for them." In
1792, British registered shipping amounted to 1,365,000 tons,
employing 80,000 seamen. Of these, by common practice, two-thirds--say
50,000--were available for war, during which it was the rule to relax
the Act so far as to require only one-fourth of the crew to be
British. "That the increase in our shipping is to be ascribed to our
navigation system appears in the application of it to the trade of the
United States. When those countries were part of our plantations, a
great portion of our produce was transported to Great Britain and our
West India Islands in American bottoms; they had a share in the
freight of sugars from those islands to Great Britain; they built
annually more than one hundred ships, which were employed in the
carrying trade of Great Britain; but since the Independence of those
states, since their ships have been excluded from our plantations, and
that trade is wholly confined to British ships, we have gained that
share of our carrying trade from which they are now excluded."[26] In
corroboration of the same tendency, it was also noted during the war
with the colonies, that "the shipyards of Britain in every port were
full of employment, so that new yards were set up in places never
before so used."[27] That is, the war, stopping the intrusion of
American colonists into the British carrying trade, just as the
Navigation Act prohibited that of foreign nations, created a demand
for British ships to fill the vacancy; a result perfectly in keeping
with the whole object of the navigation system. But when hostilities
with France began again in 1793, and lasted with slight intermission
for twenty years, the drain of the navy for seamen so limited the
development of the British navigation as to afford an opening for
competition, of which American maritime aptitude took an advantage,
threatening British supremacy and arousing corresponding jealousy.
Besides the increase of national shipping, the idea of _entrepot_
received recognition in both the earlier and later developments of the
system. Numerous specified articles, produced in English colonies,
could be carried nowhere but to England, Ireland, or another colony,
where they must be landed before going farther. Because regularly
listed, such articles were technically styled "enumerated;"
"enumerated commodities being such as must first be landed in England
before being taken to foreign parts."[28] From this privilege Ireland
was soon after excepted; enumerated goods for that country having
first to be landed in England.[29] Among such enumerated articles,
tobacco and rice held prominent places and illustrate the system. Of
the former, in the first half of the eighteenth century, it was
estimated that on an average seventy-two million pounds were sent
yearly to England, of which fifty-four million were re-exported; an
export duty of sixpence per pound being then levied, besides the cost
of handling. Rice, made an enumerated article in 1705, exemplifies
aptly the ideas which influenced the multifold manipulation of the
nation's commerce in those days. The restriction was removed in 1731,
so far as to permit this product to be sent direct from South Carolina
and Georgia to any part of Europe south of Cape Finisterre; but only
in British ships navigated according to the Act. In this there is a
partial remission of the _entrepot_ exaction, while the nursing of the
carrying trade is carefully guarded. The latter was throughout the
superior interest, inseparably connected in men's minds with the
support of the navy. At a later date, West India sugar received the
same indulgence as rice; it being found that the French were gaining
the general European market, by permitting French vessels to carry the
products of their islands direct to foreign continental ports. Rice
and sugar for northern Europe, however, still had to be landed in
England before proceeding.
The colonial trade in general was made entirely subservient to the
support and development of English shipping, and to the enrichment of
England, as the half-way storehouse. Into England foreign goods could
be imported in some measure by foreign vessels, though under marked
restrictions and disabilities; but into the colonies it was early
forbidden to import any goods, whatever their origin, except in
English-built ships, commanded and manned in accordance with the Act.
Further, even in such ships they must be imported from England itself,
not direct; not from the country of origin. The motive for this
statute of 1663[30] is avowed in the preamble: to be with a view of
maintaining a greater correspondence and kindness between them and the
mother country, keeping the former in a firmer dependence upon the
latter, and to make this kingdom the staple both of the commodities of
the plantations, and of other countries in order to supply them.
Further, it was alleged that it was the usage of nations to keep their
plantation trade to themselves.[31] In compensation for this
subjection of their trade to the policy of the mother country, the
supplying of the latter with West India products was reserved to the
colonists.
Thus, goods for the colonies, as well as those from the colonies, from
or to a foreign country,--from or to France, for example,--must first
be landed in England before proceeding to the ultimate destination.
Yet even this cherished provision, enforced against the foreigner, was
made to subserve the carrying trade--the leading object; for, upon
re-exportation to the colonies, there was allowed a drawback of duties
paid upon admission to England, and permanent upon residents there.
The effect of this was to make the articles cheaper in the colonies
than in England itself, and so to induce increased consumption. It was
therefore to the profit of the carrier; and the more acceptable,
because the shipping required to bring home colonial goods was much in
excess of that required for outward cargoes, to the consequent
lowering of outward freights. "A regard to the profits of freights,"
writes a contemporary familiar with the subject, "as much as the
augmentation of seamen, dictated this policy."[32] From the
conditions, it did not directly increase the number of seamen; but by
helping the shipping merchant it supported the carrying industry as a
whole.
Upon the legislative union of Scotland with England, in 1707, this
_entrepot_ privilege, with all other reserved advantages of English
trade and commerce, was extended to the northern kingdom, and was a
prominent consideration in inducing the Scotch people to accept a
political change otherwise distasteful, because a seeming sacrifice of
independence. Before this time they had had their own navigation
system, modelled on the English; the Acts of the two parliaments
embodying certain relations of reciprocity. Thenceforward, the
Navigation Act is to be styled more properly a British, than an
English, measure; but its benefits, now common to all Great Britain,
were denied still to Ireland.
It will be realized that the habit of receiving exclusive favors at
the expense of a particular set of people--the colonist and the
foreigner--readily passed in a few generations into an unquestioning
conviction of the propriety, and of the necessity, of such measures.
It should be easy now for those living under a high protective tariff
to understand that, having built up upon protection a principal
national industry,--the carrying trade,--involving in its
ramifications the prosperity of a large proportion of the
wealth-producers of the country, English statesmen would fear to touch
the fabric in any important part; and that their dread would be
intensified by the conviction, universally held, that to remove any of
these artificial supports would be to imperil at the same time the
Royal Navy, the sudden expansion of which, from a peace to a war
footing, depended upon impressment from the protected merchant ships.
It will be seen also that with such precedents of _entrepot_, for the
nourishing of British commerce, it was natural to turn to the same
methods,--although in a form monstrously exaggerated,--when Napoleon
by his decrees sought to starve British commerce to death. In
conception and purpose, the Orders in Council of 1807 were simply a
development of the _entrepot_ system. Their motto, "No trade save
through England,"--the watchword of the ministry of Canning,
Castlereagh, and Perceval, 1807-12,--was merely the revival towards
the United States, as an independent nation, of the methods observed
towards her when an assemblage of colonies, forty years before; the
object in both cases being the welfare of Great Britain, involved in
the monopoly of an important external commerce, the material of which,
being stored first in her ports, paid duty to her at the expense of
continental consumers.
Nor was there in the thought of the age, external to Great Britain,
any corrective of the impressions which dominated her commercial
policy. "Commercial monopoly," wrote Montesquieu, "is the leading
principle of colonial intercourse;" and an accomplished West Indian,
quoting this phrase about 1790, says: "The principles by which the
nations of Europe were influenced were precisely the same: (1) to
secure to themselves respectively the most important productions of
their colonies, and (2) to retain to themselves exclusively the
advantage of supplying the colonies with European goods and
manufactures."[33] "I see," wrote John Adams from France, in 1784,
"that the French merchants regard their colonies as English merchants
considered us twenty years ago." The rigor of the French colonial
trade system had been relaxed during the War of American Independence,
as was frequently done by all states during hostilities; but when
Louis XVI., in 1784, sought to continue this, though in an extremely
qualified concession, allowing American vessels of under sixty tons a
limited trade between the West Indies and their own country, the
merchants of Marseilles, Bordeaux, Rochelle, Nantes, St. Malo, all
sent in excited remonstrances, which found support in the provincial
parliaments of Bordeaux and Brittany.[34]
A further indication of the economical convictions of the French
people, and of the impression made upon Europe generally by the
success of the British Navigation Act, is to be seen in the fact that
in 1794, under the Republic, the National Convention issued a decree
identical in spirit, and almost identical in terms, with the English
Act of 1651. In the latter year, said the report of the Committee to
the Convention, "one-half the navigation of England was carried on by
foreigners. She has imperceptibly retaken her rights. Towards the year
1700 foreigners possessed no more than the fifth part of this
navigation; in 1725 only a little more than the ninth; in 1750 a
little more than a twelfth; and in 1791 they possessed only the
fourteenth part of it."[35] It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the
colonial system of Spain was as rigid as that of Great Britain, though
far less capably administered. So universal was the opinion of the
day as to the relation of colonies to navigation, that a contemporary
American, familiar with the general controversy, wrote: "Though
speculative politicians have entertained doubts in regard to favorable
effects from colonial possessions, taking into view the expenses of
their improvement, defence, and government, no question has been made
but that the monopoly of their trade greatly increases the commerce of
the nations to which they are appurtenant."[36] Very soon after the
adoption of the Constitution, the Congress of the United States, for
the development of the carrying trade, enacted provisions analogous to
the Navigation Act, so far as applicable to a nation having no
colonies, but with large shipping and coasting interests to be
favored.
To such accepted views, and to such traditional practice, the
independence of the thirteen British colonies upon the American
continent came not only as a new political fact, but as a portentous
breach in the established order of things. As such, it was regarded
with uneasy jealousy by both France and Spain; but to Great Britain it
was doubly ominous. Not only had she lost a reserved market, singly
the most valuable she possessed, but she had released, however
unwillingly, a formidable and recognized rival for the carrying trade,
the palladium of her naval strength. The market she was not without
hopes of regaining, by a compulsion which, though less direct, would
be in effect as real as that enforced by colonial regulation; but the
capacity of the Americans as carriers rested upon natural conditions
not so easy to overcome. The difficulty of the problem was increased
by the fact that the governments of the world generally were awaking
to the disproportionate advantages Great Britain had been reaping from
them for more than a century, during which they had listlessly
acquiesced in her aggressive absorption of the carriage of the seas.
America could count upon their sympathies, and possible co-operation,
in her rivalry with the British carrier. "It is manifest," wrote Coxe
in 1794, "that a prodigious and almost universal revolution in the
views of nations has taken place with regard to the carrying trade."
When John Adams spoke of the United States retaliating upon Great
Britain, by enacting a similar measure of its own, the minister of
Portugal, then a country of greater weight than now, replied: "Not a
nation in Europe would suffer a Navigation Act to be made by any other
at this day. That of England was made in times of ignorance, when few
nations cultivated commerce, and no country but she understood or
cared anything about it, but now all courts are attentive to it;"[37]
so much so, indeed, that it has been said this was the age of
commercial treaties. It was the age also of commercial regulation,
often mistaken and injurious, which found its ideals largely in the
Navigation Act of Great Britain, and in the resultant extraordinary
processes of minute and comprehensive interference, with every species
of commerce, and every article of export or import; for, while the
general principles of the Navigation Act were few and simple enough,
in application they entailed a watchful and constant balancing of
advantages by the Board of Trade, and a consequent manipulation of the
course of commerce,--a perfectly idealized and sublimated protection.
The days of its glory, however, were passing fast. Great Britain was
now in the position of one who has been first to exploit a great
invention, upon which he has an exclusive patent. Others were now
entering the field, and she must prepare for competition, in which she
most of all feared those of her own blood, the children of her loins;
for the signs of the menacing conditions following the War of
Independence had been apparent some time before the revolt of the
colonies gained for them liberty of action, heretofore checked in
favor of the mother country. In these conditions, and in the national
sentiment concerning them, are to be found the origin of a course of
action which led to the War of 1812.
Under the Navigation Act, and throughout the colonial period, the
transatlantic colonies of Great Britain had grown steadily; developing
a commercial individuality of their own, depending in each upon local
conditions. The variety of these, with the consequent variety of
occupations and products, and the distance separating all from the
mother country, had contributed to develop among them a certain degree
of mutual dependence, and consequent exchange; the outcome of which
was a commercial system interior to the group as a whole, and distinct
from the relations to Great Britain borne by them individually and
collectively. There was a large and important intercolonial
commerce,[38] consistent with the letter of the Navigation Act, as
well as a trade with Great Britain; and although each of these exerted
an influence upon the other, it was indirect and circuitous. The two
were largely separate in fact, as well as in idea; and the interchange
between the various colonies was more than double that with the mother
country. It drew in British as well as American seamen, and was
considered thus to entail the disadvantage that, unless America were
the scene of war, the crews there were out of reach of impressment;
that measure being too crude and unsystematic to reach effectively so
distant a source of supply. Curiously enough, also, by an act passed
in the reign of Queen Anne, seamen born in the American colonies were
exempted from impressment.[39] "During the late Civil War (of American
Independence) it has been found difficult sufficiently to man our
fleet, from the seamen insisting that, since they had been born in
America, they could not be pressed to serve in the British navy."[40]
In these conditions, and especially in the difficulty of
distinguishing the place of birth by the language spoken, is seen the
foreshadowing of the troubles attending the practice of Impressment,
after the United States had become a separate nation.
The British American colonies were divided by geographical conditions
into two primary groups: those of the West India Islands, and those of
the Continent. The common use of the latter term, in the thought and
speech of the day, is indicated by the comprehensive adjective
"Continental," familiarly applied to the Congress, troops, currency,
and other attributes of sovereignty, assumed by the revolted colonies
after their declaration of independence. Each group had special
commercial characteristics--in itself, and relatively to Great
Britain. The islands, whatever their minor differences of detail, or
their mutual jealousies, or even their remoteness from one
another,--Jamaica being a thousand miles from her eastern
sisters,--were essentially a homogeneous body. Similarity of latitude
and climate induced similarity of social and economical conditions;
notably in the dependence on slave labor, upon which the industrial
fabric rested. Their products, among which sugar and coffee were the
most important, were such as Europe did not yield; it was therefore to
their advantage to expend labor upon these wholly, and to depend upon
external sources for supplies of all kinds, including food. Their
exports, being directed by the Navigation Act almost entirely upon
Great Britain, were, in connection with Virginia tobacco, the most
lucrative of the "enumerated" articles which rendered tribute to the
_entrepot_ monopoly of the mother country. It was in this respect
particularly, as furnishing imports to be handled and re-exported,
that the islands were valuable to the home merchants. To the welfare
of the body politic they contributed by their support of the carrying
trade; for the cargoes, being bulky, required much tonnage, and the
entire traffic was confined to British ships, manned three-fourths by
British seamen. As a market also the islands were of consequence; all
their supplies coming, by law, either from or through Great Britain,
or from the continental colonies. Intercourse with foreign states was
prohibited, and that with foreign colonies allowed only under rare and
disabling conditions. But although the West Indies thus maintained a
large part of the mother country's export trade, the smallness of
their population, and the simple necessities of the slaves, who formed
the great majority of the inhabitants, rendered them as British
customers much inferior to the continental colonies; and this
disparity was continually increasing, for the continent was growing
rapidly in numbers, wealth, and requirements. In the five years
1744-48, the exports from Great Britain to the two quarters were
nearly equal; but a decade later the continent took double the amount
that the islands demanded. The figures quoted for the period 1754-58
are: to the West Indies, L3,765,000; to North America, L7,410,000.[41]
In the five years ending 1774 the West Indies received L6,748,095; the
thirteen continental colonies, L13,660,180.[42]
Imports from the continent also supported the carrying trade of Great
Britain, but not to an extent proportionate to those from the islands;
for many of the continental colonies were themselves large carriers.
The imports to them, being manufactured articles, less bulky than the
exports of the islands, also required less tonnage. The most marked
single difference between the West India communities and those of the
continent was that the latter, being distributed on a nearly north and
south line, with consequent great divergences of climate and products,
were essentially not homogeneous. What one had, another had not. Such
differences involve of course divergence of interests, with consequent
contentions and jealousies, the influence of which was felt most
painfully prior to the better Union of 1789, and never can wholly
cease to act; but, on the other hand, it tends also to promote
exchange of offices, where need and facility of transport combine to
make such exchange beneficial to both. That the intercourse between
the continental colonies required a tonnage equal to that employed
between them and the West Indies,--testified by the return of 1770
before quoted,[43]--shows the existence of conditions destined
inevitably to draw them together. The recognition of such mutual
dependence, when once attained, furthers the practice of mutual
concession for the purpose of combined action. Consequently, in the
protracted struggle between the centripetal and centrifugal forces in
North America, the former prevailed, though not till after long and
painful wavering.
While thus differing greatly among themselves in the nature of their
productions, and in their consequent wants, the continental colonists
as a whole had one common characteristic. Recent occupants of a new,
unimproved, and generally fertile country, they turned necessarily to
the cultivation of the soil as the most remunerative form of activity,
while for manufactured articles they depended mainly upon external
supplies, the furnishing of which Great Britain reserved to herself.
For these reasons they afforded the great market which they were to
her, and which by dint of habit and of interest they long continued to
be. But, while thus generally agricultural by force of circumstances,
the particular outward destinations of their surplus products varied.
Those of the southern colonies, from Maryland to Georgia, were classed
as "enumerated," and, with the exception of the rice of South Carolina
and Georgia, partially indulged as before mentioned, must be directed
upon Great Britain. Tobacco, cotton, indigo, pitch, tar, turpentine,
and spars of all kinds for ships, were specifically named, and
constituted much the larger part of the exports of those colonies.
These were carried also chiefly by British vessels, and not by
colonial. The case was otherwise in the middle colonies, Pennsylvania,
New York, New Jersey, and in Connecticut and Rhode Island of the
eastern group. They were exporters of provisions,--of grain, flour,
and meat, the latter both as live stock and salted; of horses also. As
the policy of the day protected the British farmer, these articles
were not required to be sent to Great Britain; on the contrary, grain
was not allowed admission except in times of scarcity, determined by
the price of wheat in the London market. The West Indies, therefore,
were the market of the middle colonies; the shortness of the voyage,
and the comparatively good weather, after a little southing had been
gained, giving a decisive advantage over European dealers in the
transportation of live animals. Flour also, because it kept badly in
the tropics, required constant carriage of new supplies from sources
near at hand. Along with provisions the continental vessels took
materials for building and cooperage, both essential to the industry
of the islands,--to the housing of the inhabitants, and to the
transport of their sugar, rum, and molasses. In short, so great was
the dependence of the islands upon this trade, that a well-informed
planter of the time quotes with approval the remark of "a very
competent judge," that, "if the continent had been wholly in foreign
hands, and England wholly precluded from intercourse with it, it is
very doubtful whether we should now have possessed a single acre in
the West Indies."[44]
Now this traffic, while open to all British shipping, was very largely
in the hands of the colonists, who built ships decidedly cheaper than
could be done in England, and could distribute their tonnage in
vessels too small to brave the Atlantic safely, but, from their
numbers and size, fitted to scatter to the numerous small ports of
distribution, which the badness of internal communications rendered
advantageous for purposes of supply. A committee of the Privy Council
of Great Britain, constituted soon after the independence of the
United States to investigate the conditions of West India trade,
reported that immediately before the revolt the carriage between the
islands and the continent had occupied 1610 voyages, in vessels
aggregating 115,634 tons, navigated by 9718 men. These transported
what was then considered "the vast" American cargo, of L500,000
outward and L400,000 inward. But the ominous feature from the point of
view of the Navigation Act was that this was carried almost wholly in
American bottoms.[45] In short, not to speak of an extensive practice
of smuggling, facilitated by a coast line too long and indented to be
effectually watched,--mention of which abounds in contemporary
annals,[46]--a very valuable part of the British carrying trade was in
the hands of the middle colonists, whose activity, however, did not
stop even there; for, not only did they deal with foreign West
Indies,[47] but the cheapness of their vessels, owing to the abundance
of the materials, permitted them to be used also to advantage in a
direct trade with southern Europe, their native products being for the
most part "not enumerated." As early as 1731, Pennsylvania employed
eight thousand tons of shipping, while the New England colonies at the
same time owned forty thousand tons, distributed in six hundred
vessels, manned by six thousand seamen.
The New Englanders, like their countrymen farther south, were mostly
farmers; but the more rugged soil and severer climate gave them little
or no surplus for export. For gain by traffic, for material for
exchange, they therefore turned to the sea, and became the great
carriers of America, as well as its great fishers. An English
authority, writing of the years immediately preceding the War of
Independence, states that most of the seamen sailing out of the
southern ports were British; from the middle colonies, half British
and half American; but in the New England shipping he admits
three-fourths were natives.[48] This tendency of British seamen to
take employment in colonial ships is worthy of note, as foreshadowing
the impressment difficulties of a later day. These, like most of the
disagreements which led to the War of 1812, had their origin in
ante-revolutionary conditions. For example, Commodore Palliser, an
officer of mark, commanding the Newfoundland station in 1767, reported
to the Admiralty the "cruel custom," long practised by commanders of
fishing ships, of leaving many men on the desert coast of
Newfoundland, when the season was over, whereby "these men were
obliged to sell themselves to the colonists, or piratically run off
with vessels, which they carry to the continent of America. By these
practices the Newfoundland fishery, supposed to be one of the most
valuable nurseries for seamen,[49] has long been an annual drain."[50]
In the two years, 1764-65, he estimates that 2,500 seamen thus went to
the colonies; in the next two years, 400. The difference was probably
due to the former period being immediately after a war, the effects of
which it reflected.
The general conditions of 1731 remained thirty years later, simply
having become magnified as the colonies grew in wealth and population.
In 1770 twenty-two thousand tons of shipping were annually built by
the continental colonists. They even built ships for Great Britain;
and this indulgence, for so it was considered, was viewed jealously by
a class of well-informed men, intelligent, but fully imbued with the
ideas of the Navigation Act, convinced that the carrying trade was the
corner-stone of the British Navy, and realizing that where ships were
cheaply built they could be cheaply sailed, even if they paid higher
wages. It is true, and should be sedulously remembered, especially now
in the United States, that the strength of a merchant shipping lies in
its men even more than in its ships; and therefore that the policy of
a country which wishes a merchant marine should be to allow its ships
to be purchased where they most cheaply can, in order that the owner
may be able to spend more on his crew, and the nation consequently to
keep more seamen under its flag. But in 1770 the relative conditions
placed Great Britain under serious disadvantages towards America in
the matter of ship-building; for the heavy drafts upon her native oak
had caused the price to rise materially, and even the forests of
continental Europe felt the strain, while the colonies had scarcely
begun to touch their resources. In 1775, more than one-third of the
foreign trade of Great Britain was carried in American-built ships;
the respective tonnage being, British-built, 605,545; American,
373,618.[51]
British merchants and ship-owners knew also that the colonial carriers
were not ardent adherents of the Navigation Act, but conducted their
operations in conformity with it only when compelled.[52] They traded
with the foreigner as readily as with the British subject; and, what
was quite unpardonable in the ideas of that time, after selling a
cargo in a West Indian port, instead of reloading there, they would
take the hard cash of the island to a French neighbor, buying of him
molasses to be made into rum at home. In this commercial shrewdness
the danger was not so much in the local loss, or in the single
transaction, for in the commercial supremacy of England the money was
pretty sure to find its way back to the old country. The sting was
that the sharp commercial instinct, roving from port to port, with a
keen scent for freight and for bargains, maintained a close rivalry
for the carrying trade, which was doubly severe from the natural
advantages of the shipping and the natural aptitudes of the
ship-owners. Already the economical attention of the New Englanders to
the details of their shipping business had been noted, and had earned
for them the name of the Dutchmen of North America; an epithet than
which there was then none more ominous to British ears, and especially
where with the carrying trade was associated the twin idea of a
nursery of seamen for the British Navy.
A fair appreciation of the facts and relations, summarized in the
preceding pages from an infinitude of details, is necessary to a
correct view of the origin and course of the misunderstandings and
disagreements which finally led to the War of 1812. In 1783, the
restoration of peace and the acknowledgment of the independence of the
former colonies removed from commerce the restrictions incident to
hostilities, and replaced in full action, essentially unchanged, the
natural conditions which had guided the course of trade in colonial
days. The old country, retaining all the prepossessions associated
with the now venerable and venerated Navigation Act, saw herself
confronted with the revival of a commercial system, a commercial
independence, of which she had before been jealous, and which could no
longer be controlled by political dependence. It was to be feared that
supplying the British West Indies would increase American shipping,
and that British seamen would more and more escape into it, with
consequent loss to British navigation, both in tonnage and men, and
discouragement to British maritime industries. Hence, by the ideas of
the time, was to be apprehended weakness for war, unless some
effective check could be devised.
What would have been the issue of these anxieties, and of the measures
to which they gave rise, had not the French Revolution intervened to
aggravate the distresses of Great Britain, and to constrain her to
violent methods, is bootless to discuss. It remains true that, both
before and during the conflict with the French Republic and Empire,
the general character of her actions, to which the United States took
exception, was determined by the conditions and ideas that have been
stated, and can be understood only through reference to them. No
sooner had peace been signed, in 1783, than disagreements sprang up
again from the old roots of colonial systems and ideals. To these
essentially was due the detailed sequence of events which, influenced
by such traditions of opinion and policy as have been indicated,
brought on the War of 1812, which has not inaptly been styled the
second War of Independence. Madison, who was contemporary with the
entire controversy, and officially connected with it from 1801 to the
end of the war, first as Secretary of State, and later as President,
justly summed up his experience of the whole in these words: "To have
shrunk from resistance, under such circumstances, would have
acknowledged that, on the element which forms three-fourths of the
globe which we inhabit, and where all independent nations have equal
and common rights, the American People were not an independent people,
but colonists and vassals. With such an alternative war was
chosen."[53] The second war was closely related to the first in fact,
though separated by a generation in time.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Order in Council was a general term applied to all orders touching
affairs, internal as well as external, issued by the King in Council.
The particular orders here in question, by their extraordinary
character and wide application, came to have a kind of sole title to
the expression in the diplomatic correspondence between the two
countries.
[2] Instructions of Madison, Secretary of State, to Monroe, Minister
to Great Britain, January 5, 1804. Article I. American State Papers,
vol. iii. p. 82.
[3] Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, vol. ii. pp. 508, 546.
[4] Annals of Congress. Thirteenth Congress, vol. ii. pp. 1563;
1555-1558.
[5] Niles' Register, vol. iv. p. 234. Author's italics.
[6] Diary and Letters, vol. ii. p. 553.
[7] Ibid., p. 560. Those unfamiliar with the subject should be
cautioned that the expression "right of search" is confined here, not
quite accurately, to searching for British subjects liable to
impressment. This right the United States denied. The "right of
search" to determine the nationality of the vessel, and the character
of the voyage, was admitted to belligerents then, as it is now, by all
neutrals.
[8] King John, Act II. Scene 1.
[9] King Richard II., Act II. Scene 1.
[10] Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Edited by J.E. Thorold Rogers. Oxford, 1880, pp. 35-38. In a
subsequent passage (p. 178), Smith seems disposed somewhat to qualify
the positive assertion here quoted, on the ground that the Navigation
Act had not had time to exert much effect, at the period when some of
the most decisive successes over the Dutch were won. It is to be
observed, however, that a vigorous military government, such as
Cromwell's was, can assert itself in the fleet as well as in the army,
creating an effective organization out of scanty materials, especially
when at war with a commercial state of weak military constitution,
like Holland. It was the story of Rome and Carthage repeated. Louis
XIV. for a while accomplished the same. But under the laxity of a
liberal popular government, which England increasingly enjoyed after
the Restoration, naval power could be based securely only upon a
strong, available, and permanent maritime element in the civil body
politic; that is, on a mercantile marine.
As regards the working of the Navigation Act to this end, whatever may
be argued as to the economical expediency of protecting a particular
industry, there is no possible doubt that such an industry can be
built up, to huge proportions, by sagacious protection consistently
enforced. The whole history of protection demonstrates this, and the
Navigation Act did in its day. It created the British carrying trade,
and in it provided for the Royal Navy an abundant and accessible
reserve of raw material, capable of being rapidly manufactured into
naval seamen in an hour of emergency.
[11] Works of John Adams, vol. viii. pp. 389-390.
[12] This primary meaning of the word "staple" seems to have
disappeared from common use, in which it is now applied to the
commercial articles, the concentration of which at a particular port
made that port a "staple."
[13] Bryan Edwards, West Indies, vol. ii. p. 448.
[14] Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, vol. ii. p. 443.
[15] Reeves, History of the Law of Navigation, Dublin, 1792, p. 37.
[16] Macpherson, vol. ii. p. 444.
[17] Reeves, writing in 1792, says that there seemed then no
distinction of meaning between "plantation" and "colony." Plantation
was the earlier term; "'colony' did not come much into use till the
reign of Charles II., and it seems to have denoted the political
relation." (p. 109.) By derivation both words express the idea of
cultivating new ground, or establishing a new settlement; but
"plantation" seems to associate itself more with the industrial
beginnings, and "colony" with the formal regulative purpose of the
parent state.
[18] The Navigation Acts of 1651, 1660, 1662, and 1663, as well as
other subsequent measures of the same character, can be found,
conveniently for American readers, in MacDonald's Select Charters
Illustrative of American History. Macmillan, New York. 1899.
[19] Reeves, History of the Law of Navigation, p. 162.
[20] For instance, in 1769, eighteen hundred and forty vessels passed
the Sound in the British trade. Of these only thirty-five were
Russian. Considerably more than half of the trade of St. Petersburg
with Europe at large was done in British ships. Macpherson, vol. iii.
p. 493.
[21] Opinion of Chief Baron Parker, quoted by Reeves, pp. 187-189.
[22] Chalmers, Opinions on Interesting Subjects of Public Law and
Commercial Policy Arising from American Independence, p. 32.
[23] Ibid., p. 55.
[24] A French naval historian supports them, speaking of the year
1781: "The considerable armaments made since 1778 had exhausted the
resources of personnel. To remedy the difficulty the complements were
filled up with coast-guard militia, with marine troops until then
employed only to form the guards of the ships, and finally with what
were called 'novices volontaires,' who were landsmen recruited by
bounties. It may be imagined what crews were formed with such
elements."--Troude, Batailles Navales, vol. ii. p. 202.
[25] Raynal, Histoire Philosophique des deux Indes, vol. vii. p. 287
(Edition 1820). Raynal's reputation is that of a plagiarist, but his
best work is attributed to far greater names of his time. He died in
1796.
[26] Reeves, pp. 430-434.
[27] Macpherson, vol. iv. p. 10.
[28] Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, vol. i. p. 485-486.
[29] Bryan Edwards, West Indies, vol. ii. p. 450.
[30] Officially, Statute of 15 Charles II.
[31] Reeves, p. 50.
[32] Chalmers, Opinions on Interesting Subjects, p. 28.
[33] Bryan Edwards, West Indies, vol. ii. p. 443-444 (3d Edition).
[34] Works of John Adams, vol. viii. p. 228.
[35] Compare with Sheffield, Observations on the Commerce of the
American States (Edition February, 1784), p. 137, note; from which,
indeed, these figures seem to have been taken, or from some common
source.
[36] Coxe's View of the United States of America, Philadelphia, 1794,
p. 330.
[37] Works of John Adams, vol. viii. p. 341. Adams says again,
himself: "It is more and more manifest every day that there is, and
will continue, a general scramble for navigation. Carrying trade,
ship-building, fisheries, are the cry of every nation."--Vol. viii. p.
342.
[38] From an official statement, made public in 1784, it appears that
in the year 1770 the total trade, inward and outward, of the colonies
on the American Continent, amounted to 750,546 tons. Of this 32 per
cent was coastwise, to other members of the group; 30 with the West
Indies; 27 with Great Britain and Ireland; and 11 with Southern
Europe. Bermuda and the Bahamas, inconsiderable as to trade, were
returned among continental colonies by the Custom House.--Sheffield,
Commerce of the American States, Table VII.
[39] Chalmers, Opinions, p. 73.
[40] Ibid., p. 18.
[41] Macpherson, vol. iii. p. 317.
[42] Report of Committee of Privy Council, Jan. 28, 1791, pp. 21-23.
[43] Ante, p. 31 (note).
[44] Bryan Edwards, West Indies, vol. ii. p. 486.
[45] Chalmers, Opinions, p. 133.
[46] See, for instance, the Colden Papers, Proceedings N.Y. Historical
Society, 1877. There is in these much curious economical information
of other kinds.
[47] A comparison of the figures just quoted, as to the British West
Indies, with Sheffield's Table VII., indicates that the trade of the
Continent with the foreign islands about equalled that with the
British. The trade with the French West Indies, "open or clandestine,
was considerable, and wholly in American vessels."--Macpherson, vol.
iii. p. 584.
[48] Sheffield, Commerce of the American States, p. 108.
[49] That is, for the navy.
[50] Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, vol. iii. p. 472.
[51] Macpherson, vol. iv. p. 11. The great West India cargo of 1772,
an especial preserve of the Navigation Act, was carried to England in
679 ships, of which one-third were built in America.
[52] "The contraband trade carried on by plantation ships in defiance
of the Act of Navigation was a subject of repeated complaint." "The
laws of Navigation were nowhere disobeyed and contemned so openly as
in New England. The people of Massachusetts Bay were from the first
disposed to act as if independent of the mother country."--Reeves, pp.
54, 58. The particular quotations apply to the early days of the
measure, 1662-3; but the complaint continued to the end. In 1764-5,
"one of the great grievances in the American trade was, that great
quantities of foreign molasses and syrups were clandestinely run on
shore in the British Colonies."--p. 79.
[53] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 82.
CHAPTER II
FROM INDEPENDENCE TO JAY'S TREATY, 1794
The colonial connection between Great Britain and the thirteen
communities which became the original States of the American Union was
brought to a formal conclusion in 1776, by their Declaration of
Independence. Substantially, however, it had already terminated in
1774. This year was marked by the passage of the Boston Port Bill,
with its accessory measures, by the British Parliament, and likewise
by the renewal, in the several colonies, of the retaliatory
non-importation agreements of 1765. The fundamental theory of the
eighteenth century concerning the relations between a mother country
and her colonies, that of reciprocal exclusive benefit, had thus in
practice yielded to one of mutual injury; to coercion and deprivation
on the one side, and to passive resistance on the other. On September
5 the representatives of twelve colonies assembled in Philadelphia;
Georgia alone sending no delegates, but pledging herself in
anticipation to accept the decisions taken by the others. One of the
first acts of this Congress of the Continental Colonies was to indorse
the resolutions by which Massachusetts had placed herself in an
attitude of contingent rebellion against the Crown, and to pledge
their support to her in case of a resort to arms. These several steps
were decisive and irrevocable, except by an unqualified abandonment,
by one party or the other, of the principles which underlay and
dictated them. The die was cast. To use words attributed to George the
Third, "the colonies must now either submit or triumph."
The period which here began, viewed in the aggregate of the national
life of the United States, was one of wavering transition and
uncertain issue in matters political and commercial. Its ending, in
these two particulars, is marked by two conspicuous events: the
adoption of the Constitution and the Commercial Treaty with Great
Britain. The formation of the Federal Government, 1788-90, gave to the
Union a political stability it had hitherto lacked, removing elements
of weakness and dissensions, and of consequent impotence in foreign
relations; the manifestation of which since the acknowledgment of
independence had justified alike the hopes of enemies and the
forebodings of friends. Settled conditions being thus established at
home, with institutions competent to regulate a national commerce,
internal and external, as well as to bring the people as a whole into
fixed relations with foreign communities, there was laid the
foundations of a swelling prosperity to which the several parts of the
country jointly contributed. The effects of these changes were soon
shown in a growing readiness on the part of other nations to enter
into formal compacts with us. Of this, the treaty negotiated by John
Jay with Great Britain, in 1794, is the most noteworthy instance;
partly because it terminated one long series of bickerings with our
most dangerous neighbor, chiefly because the commercial power of the
state with which it was contracted had reached a greater eminence, and
exercised wider international effect, than any the modern world had
then seen.
Whatever the merits of the treaty otherwise, therefore, the
willingness of Great Britain to enter into it at all gave it an
epochal significance. Since independence, commercial intercourse
between the two peoples had rested on the strong compelling force of
natural conditions and reciprocal convenience, the true foundation,
doubtless, of all useful relations; but its regulation had been by
municipal ordinance of either state, changeable at will, not by
mutual agreement binding on both for a prescribed period. Since the
separation, this condition had seemed preferable to Great Britain,
which, as late as 1790, had evaded overtures towards a commercial
arrangement.[54] Her consenting now to modify her position was an
implicit admission that in trade, as in political existence, the
former mother country recognized at last the independence of her
offspring. The latter, however, was again to learn that independence,
to be actual, must rest on something stronger than words, and surer
than the acquiescence of others. This was to be the lesson of the
years between 1794 and 1815, administered to us not only by the
preponderant navy of Great Britain, but by the petty piratical fleets
of the Barbary powers.
From the Boston Port Bill to Jay's Treaty was therefore a period of
transition from entire colonial dependence, under complete regulation
of all commercial intercourse by the mother country, to that of
national commercial power, self-regulative and efficient, through the
adoption of the Constitution. Upon this followed international
influence, the growing importance of which Great Britain finally
recognized by formal concessions, hitherto refused or evaded. During
these years the policy of her government was undergoing a process of
adjustment, conditioned on the one hand by the still vigorous
traditional prejudices associated with the administration of
dependencies, and on the other by the radical change in political
relations between her remaining colonies in America and the new states
which had broken from the colonial bond. This change was the more
embarrassing, because the natural connection of specific mutual
usefulness remained, although the tie of a common allegiance had been
loosed. The old order was yielding to the new, but the process was
signalized by the usual slowness of men to accept events in their
full significance. Hitherto, all the western hemisphere had been
under a colonial system of complete monopoly by mother countries, and
had been generally excluded from direct communication with Europe,
except the respective parent states. In the comprehensive provisions
of the British Navigation Act, America was associated with Asia and
Africa. Now had arisen there an independent state, in political
standing identical with those of Europe, yet having towards colonial
America geographical and commercial relations very different from
theirs. Consequently there was novelty and difficulty in the question,
What intercourse with the remaining British dominions, and especially
with the American colonies, should be permitted to the new nation?
Notwithstanding the breach lately made, it continued a controlling aim
with the British people, and of the government as determined by
popular pressure, to restore the supremacy of British trade, by the
subjection of America, independent as well as colonial, to the welfare
of British commerce. Notably this was to be so as regards the one
dominant interest called Navigation, under which term was comprised
everything relating to shipping,--ship-building, seafaring men, and
the carrying trade. Independence had deprived Great Britain of the
right she formerly had to manipulate the course of the export and
import trade of the now United States. It remained to try whether
there did not exist, nevertheless, the ability effectually to control
it to the advantage of British navigation, as above defined. "Our
remaining colonies on the Continent, and the West India Islands," it
was argued, "with the favorable state of English manufactures, may
still give us almost exclusively the trade of America;" provided these
circumstances were suitably utilized, and their advantages rigorously
enforced, where power to do so still remained, as it did in the West
Indies.
Although by far the stronger and more flourishing part of her
colonial dominions had been wrested from Great Britain, there yet
remained to her upon the continent, in Canada and the adjacent
provinces, a domain great in area, and in the West India Islands
another of great productiveness. Whatever wisdom had been learned as
regards the political treatment of colonies, the views as to the
nature of their economical utility to the mother country, and their
consequent commercial regulation, had undergone no enlargement, but
rather had been intensified in narrowness and rigor by the loss of so
valuable a part of the whole. No counteractive effect to this
prepossession was to be found in contemporary opinion in Europe. The
French Revolution itself, subversive as it was of received views in
many respects, was at the first characterized rather by an
exaggeration of the traditional exclusive policy of the eighteenth
century relating to colonies, shipping, and commerce. In America, the
unsettled commercial and financial conditions which succeeded the
peace, the divergence of interests between the several new states, the
feebleness of the confederate government, its incompetency to deal
assuredly with external questions, and lack of all power to regulate
commerce, inspired a conviction in Great Britain that the continent
could not offer strong, continued resistance to commercial aggression,
carried on under the peaceful form of municipal regulation. It was
generally thought that the new states could never unite, but instead
would drift farther apart.
The belief was perfectly reasonable; a gift of prophecy only could
have foretold the happy result, of which many of the most prominent
Americans for some time despaired. "It will not be an easy matter,"
wrote Lord Sheffield,[55] "to bring the American States to act as a
nation; they are not to be feared as such by us. It must be a long
time before they can engage, or will concur, in any material
expense.... We might as reasonably dread the effects of combinations
among the German as among the American states, and deprecate the
resolves of the Diet, as those of Congress." "No treaty can be made
that will be binding on the whole of them." "A decided cast has been
given to public opinion here," wrote John Adams from London, in
November, 1785, "by two presumptions. One is, that the American states
are not, and cannot, be united."[56] Two years later Washington wrote:
"The situation of the General Government, if it can be called a
government, is shaken to its foundation, and liable to be overturned
at every blast. In a word, it is at an end.... The primary cause of
all our disorders lies in the different state governments, and in the
tenacity of that power which underlies the whole of their systems.
Independent sovereignty is so ardently contended for." "At present,
under our existing form of confederation, it would be idle to think of
making commercial regulations on our part. One state passes a
prohibitory law respecting one article; another state opens wide the
avenue for its admission. One assembly makes a system, another
assembly unmakes it."[57]
Under such conditions it was natural that a majority of Englishmen
should see power and profit for Great Britain in availing herself of
the weakness of her late colonists, to enforce upon them a commercial
dependence as useful as the political dependence which had passed
away. Were this realized, she would enjoy the emoluments of the land
without the expense of its protection. This gospel was preached at
once to willing ears, and found acceptance; not by the strength of its
arguments, for these, though plausible, were clearly inferior in
weight to the facts copiously adduced by those familiar with
conditions, but through the prejudices which the then generation had
received from the three or four preceding it. The policy being
adopted, the instrument at hand for enforcing it was the relation of
colonies to mother countries, as then universally maintained by the
governments of the day. The United States, like other independent
nations, was to be excluded wholly from carrying trade with the
British colonies, and as far as possible from sending them supplies.
It was urged that Canada, and the adjacent British dominions,
encouraged by this reservation of the West India market for their
produce, would prove adequate to furnishing the provisions and lumber
previously derived from the old continental colonies. The prosperity
once enjoyed by the latter would be transferred, and there would be
reconstituted the system of commercial intercourse, interior to the
empire, which previously had commanded general admiration. The new
states, acting commercially as separated communities, could oppose no
successful rivalry to this combination, and would revert to isolated
commercial dependence; tributary to the financial supremacy of Great
Britain, as they recently had been to her political power. In debt to
her for money, and drawing from her manufactures, returns for both
would compel their exports to her ports chiefly, whence distribution
would be, as of old, in the hands of British middlemen and navigators.
Just escaped from the fetters of the carrying trade and _entrepot_
regulations, the twin monopolies in which consisted the value of a
colonial empire, it was proposed to reduce them again under bondage by
means for which the West India Islands furnished the leverage; for
"the trade carried on by Great Britain with the countries now become
the United States was, and still is, so connected with the trade
carried on to the remaining British colonies in America, and the
British islands in the West Indies, that it is impossible to form a
true judgment of the past and present of the first, without taking a
comprehensive view of all, as they are connected with, and influence,
each other."[58]
Before the peace of 1783, the writings of Adam Smith had gravely
shaken belief in the mercantile system of extraordinary trade
regulation and protection as conducive to national prosperity. Though
undermined, however, it had not been overthrown; and even to doubters
there remained the exception, which Smith himself admitted, of the
necessity to protect navigation as a nursery for the navy, and
consequently as a fundamental means of national defence. Existence
takes precedence of prosperity; the life is more than the meat.
Commercial regulation, though unfitted to increase wealth, could be
justified as a means to promote ship-building; to retain ship-builders
in the country; to husband the raw materials of their work; to force
the transport of merchandise in British-built ships and by British
seamen; and thus to induce capital to invest, and men to embark their
lives, in maritime trade, to the multiplication of ships and seamen,
the chief dependence of the nation in war. "Keeping ships for
freight," said Sheffield, "is not the most profitable branch of trade.
It is necessary, for the sake of our marine, to force or encourage it
by exclusive advantages." "Comparatively with the number of our people
and the extent of our country, we are doomed almost always to wage
unequal war; and as a means of raising seamen it cannot be too often
repeated that it is not possible to be too jealous on the head of
navigation." He proceeds then at once to draw the distinction between
the protection of navigation and that of commerce generally. "This
jealousy should not be confounded with that towards neighboring
countries as to trade and manufactures; nor is the latter jealousy in
many instances reasonable or well founded. Competition is useful,
forcing our manufacturers to act fairly, and to work reasonably."
Sheffield was the most conspicuous, and probably the most influential,
of the controversialists on this side of the question at this period;
the interest of the public is shown by his pamphlet passing through
six editions in a twelvemonth. He was, however, far from singular in
this view. Chalmers, a writer of much research, said likewise: "In
these considerations of nautical force and public safety we discover
the fundamental principle of Acts of Navigation, which, though
established in opposition to domestic and foreign clamors, have
produced so great an augmentation of our native shipping and sailors,
and which therefore should not be sacrificed to any projects of
private gain,"--that is, of commercial advantage. "There are
intelligent persons who suggest that the imposing of alien duties on
alien ships, rather than on alien merchandise, would augment our naval
strength."[59]
Colonies therefore were esteemed desirable to this end chiefly. To use
the expression of a French officer,[60] they were the fruitful nursery
of seamen. French writers of that day considered their West India
islands the chief nautical support of the state. But in order to
secure this, it was necessary to exercise complete control of their
trade inward and outward; of the supplies they needed as well as of
the products they raised, and especially to confine the carriage of
both to national shipping. "The only use and advantage of the
(remaining) American colonies[61] or West India islands to Great
Britain," says Sheffield, "are the monopoly of their consumption and
the carriage of their produce. It is the advantage to our navigation
which in any degree countervails the enormous expense of protecting
our islands. Rather than give up their carrying trade it would be
better to give up themselves." The _entrepot_ system herein found
additional justification, for not only did it foster navigation by the
homeward voyage, confined to British ships, and extort toll in
transit, but the re-exportation made a double voyage which was more
than doubly fruitful in seamen; for from the nearness of the British
Islands to the European continent, which held the great body of
consumers, this second carriage could be done, and actually was done,
by numerous small vessels, able to bear a short voyage but not to
brave an Atlantic passage. Economically, trade by many small vessels
is more expensive than by a few large, because for a given aggregate
tonnage it requires many more men; but this economical loss was
thought to be more than compensated by the political gain in
multiplying seamen. It was estimated in 1795 that there was a
difference of from thirty-five to forty men in carrying the same
quantity of goods in one large or ten small vessels. This illustrates
aptly the theory of the Navigation Act, which sought wealth indeed,
but, as then understood, subordinated that consideration distinctly to
the superior need of increasing the resources of the country in ships
and seamen. Moreover, the men engaged in these short voyages were more
immediately at hand for impressment in war, owing to the narrow range
of their expeditions and their frequent returns to home ports.
In 1783, therefore, the Navigation Act had become in general
acceptance a measure not merely commercial, but military. It was
defended chiefly as essential to the naval power of Great Britain,
which rested upon the sure foundation of maritime resources thus laid.
Nor need this view excite derision to-day, for it compelled then the
adhesion of an American who of all in his time was most adverse to the
general commercial policy of Great Britain. In a report on the subject
made to Congress in 1793, by Jefferson, as Secretary of State, he
said: "Our navigation involves still higher considerations than our
commerce. As a branch of industry it is valuable, but as a resource of
defence essential. It will admit neither neglect nor forbearance. The
position and circumstances of the United States leave them nothing to
fear on their land-board; ... but on their seaboard they are open to
injury, and they have there too a commerce (coasting) which must be
protected. This can only be done by possessing a respectable body of
citizen-seamen, and of artists and establishments in readiness for
ship-building."[62] The limitations of Jefferson's views appear here
clearly, in the implicit relegation of defence, not to a regular and
trained navy, but to the occasional unskilled efforts of a distinctly
civil force; but no stronger recognition of the necessities of Great
Britain could be desired, for her nearness to the great military
states of the world deprived her land-board of the security which the
remoteness of the United States assured. With such stress laid upon
the vital importance of merchant seamen to national safety, it is but
a step in thought to perceive how inevitable was the jealousy and
indignation felt in Great Britain, when she found her fleets, both
commercial and naval, starving for want of seamen, who had sought
refuge from war in the American merchant service, and over whom the
American Government, actually weak and but yesterday vassal, sought to
extend its protection from impressment.
Up to the War of American Independence, the singular geographical
situation of Great Britain, inducing her to maritime enterprise and
exempting her from territorial warfare, with the financial and
commercial pre-eminence she had then maintained for three-fourths of a
century, gave her peculiar advantages for enforcing a policy which
until that time had thriven conspicuously, if somewhat illusively, in
its commercial results, and had substantially attained its especial
object of maritime preponderance. Other peoples had to submit to the
compulsion exerted by her overweening superiority. The obligation upon
foreign shipping to be three-fourths manned by their own citizens, for
instance, rested only upon a British law, and applied only in a
British port; but the accumulations of British capital, with the
consequent facility for mercantile operations and ability to extend
credits, the development of British manufactures, the extent of the
British carrying trade, the enforced storage of colonial products in
British territory, with the correlative obligation that foreign goods
for her numerous and increasing colonists must first be brought to her
shores and thence transshipped,--all these circumstances made the
British islands a centre for export and import, towards which foreign
shipping was unavoidably drawn and so brought under the operation of
the law. The nation had so far out-distanced competition that her
supremacy was unassailable, and remained unimpaired for a century
longer. To it had contributed powerfully the economical distribution
of her empire, greatly diversified in particulars, yet symmetrical in
the capacity of one part to supply what the other lacked. There was in
the whole a certain self-sufficingness, resembling that claimed in
this age for the United States, with its compact territory but wide
extremes of boundary, climates, and activities.
This condition, while it lasted, in large degree justified the
Navigation Act, which may be summarily characterized as a great
protective measure, applied to the peculiar conditions of a particular
maritime empire, insuring reciprocal and exclusive benefit to the
several parts. It was uncompromisingly logical in its action, not
hesitating at rigid prohibition of outside competition. Protection, in
its best moral sense, may be defined as the regulation of all the
business of the nation, considered as an interrelated whole, by the
Government, for the best interests of the entire community, likewise
regarded as a whole. This the Navigation Act did for over a century
after its enactment; and it may be plausibly argued that, as a war
resort at least, it afterwards measurably strengthened the hands of
Great Britain during the wars of the French Revolution. No men
suffered more than did the West India planters from its unrelieved
enforcement after 1783; yet in their vehement remonstrance they said:
"The policy of the Act is justly popular. Its regulations, until the
loss of America, under the various relaxations which Parliament has
applied to particular events and exigencies as they arose, have guided
the course of trade without oppressing it; for the markets which those
regulations left open to the consumption of the produce of the
colonies were sufficient to take off the whole, and no foreign country
could have supplied the essential part of their wants materially
cheaper than the colonies of the mother country could supply one
another."
Thus things were, or were thought to be, up to the time when the
revolt of the continental colonies made a breach in the wall of
reciprocal benefit by which the whole had been believed to be
enclosed. The products of the colonies sustained the commercial
prosperity of the mother country, ministering to her export trade, and
supplying a reserve of consumers for her monopoly of manufactures,
which they were forbidden to establish for themselves, or to receive
from foreigners. She on her part excluded from the markets of the
empire foreign articles which her colonies produced, constituting for
them a monopoly of the imperial home market, as well in Great Britain
as in the sister colonies. The carriage of the whole was confined to
British navigation, the maintenance of which by this means raised the
British Navy to the mastery of the seas, enabling it to afford to the
entire system a protection, of which convincing and brilliant evidence
had been afforded during the then recent Seven Years' War. As a matter
of political combination and adjustment, for peace or for war, the
general result appeared to most men of that day to be consummate in
conception and in development, and therefore by all means to be
perpetuated. In that light men of to-day must realize it, if they
would adequately understand the influence exercised by this
prepossession upon the course of events which for the United States
issued in the War of 1812.
In this picture, so satisfactory as a whole, there had been certain
shadows menacing to the future. Already, in the colonial period, these
had been recognized by some in Great Britain as predictive of
increasing practical independence on the part of the continental
colonies, with results injurious to the empire at large, and to the
particular welfare of the mother kingdom. In the last analysis, this
danger arose from the fact that, unlike the tropical West Indies,
these children were for the most part too like their parent in
political and economical character, and in permanent natural
surroundings. There was, indeed, a temporary variation of activities
between the new communities, where the superabundance of soil kept
handicrafts in abeyance, and the old country, where agriculture was
already failing to produce food sufficient for the population, and men
were being forced into manufactures and their export as a means of
livelihood. There was also a difference in their respective products
which ministered to beneficial exchange. Nevertheless, in their
tendencies and in their disposition, Great Britain and the United
States at bottom were then not complementary, but rivals. The true
complement of both was the West Indies; and for these the advantage of
proximity, always great, and especially so with regard to the special
exigencies of the islands, lay with the United States. Hence it came
to pass that the trade with the West Indies, which then had almost a
monopoly of sugar and coffee production for the world, became the most
prominent single factor in the commercial contentions between the two
countries, and in the arbitrary commercial ordinances of Great
Britain, which step by step led the two nations into war. The
precedent struggle was over a market; artificial regulation and
superior naval power seeking to withstand the natural course of
things, and long successfully retarding it.
The suspension of intercourse during the War of Independence had
brought the economical relations into stronger relief, and
accomplished independence threatened the speedy realization of their
tendencies. There were two principal dangers dreaded by Great Britain.
The West India plantation industry had depended upon the continental
colonies for food supplies, and to a considerable extent also
financially; because these alone were the consumers of one important
product--rum. Again, ship-building and the carrying trade of the
empire had passed largely into the hands of the continental colonists,
keeping on that side of the Atlantic, it was asserted, a great number
of British-born seamen. While vessels from America visited many parts
of the world, the custom-house returns showed that of the total inward
and outward tonnage of the thirteen colonies, over sixty per cent had
been either coastwise or with the West Indies; and this left out of
account the considerable number engaged in smuggling. Of the
remainder, barely twenty-five per cent went to Great Britain or
Ireland. In short, there had been building upon the western side of
the ocean, under the colonial connection, a rival maritime system,
having its own products, its own special markets, and its own carrying
trade. The latter also, being done by very small vessels, adapted to
the short transit, had created for itself, or absorbed from
elsewhere, a separate and proportionately large maritime population,
rivalling that of the home country, while yet remaining out of easy
reach of impressment and remote from immediate interest in European
wars. One chief object of the Navigation Act was thus thwarted; and
indeed, as might be anticipated from quotations already made, it was
upon this that British watchfulness more particularly centred. As far
as possible all interchange was to be internal to the empire, a kind
of coasting trade, which would naturally, as well as by statute, fall
to British shipping. Protective regulation therefore should develop in
the several parts those productions which other parts needed,--the
material of commerce; but where this could not be done, and supplies
must be sought outside, they should go and come in British vessels,
navigated according to the Act. "Our country," wrote Sheffield, in
concluding his work, "does not entirely depend upon the monopoly of
the commerce of the thirteen American states, and it is by no means
necessary to sacrifice any part of our carrying trade for imaginary
advantages never to be attained."[63]
A further injury was done by the cheapness with which the Americans
built and sold ships, owing to their abundance of timber. They built
them not only to order, but as it were for a market. Although
acceptable to the mercantile interest, and even indirectly beneficial
by sparing the resources for building ships of war, this was an
invasion of the manufacturing industry of the kingdom, in a particular
peculiarly conducive to naval power. The returns of the British
underwriters for twenty-seven shipping ports of Great Britain and
Ireland, during a series of years immediately preceding the American
revolt, no ship being counted twice, showed the British-built vessels
entered to be 3,908, and the American 2,311.[64] The tonnage of the
latter was more than one-third of the total. The intercourse between
the American continent and the West Indies, not included in this
reckoning, was almost wholly in American bottoms. The proportion of
American-built shipping in the total of the empire is hence apparent,
as well as the growth of the ship-building industry. This of course
was accompanied by a tendency of mechanics, as well as seamen, to
remove to a situation so favorable for employment. But the maintenance
of home facilities for building ships was as essential to the
development of naval power as was the fostering of a class of seamen.
In this respect, therefore, the ship-building of America was
detrimental to the objects of the Navigation Act; and the evil
threatened to increase, because of a discernible approaching shortness
of suitable timber in the overtaxed forests of Europe.
Such being the apparent tendency of things, owing to circumstances
relatively permanent in character, the habit of mind traditional with
British merchants and statesmen, formed by the accepted colonial and
mercantile systems, impelled them at once to prohibitory measures of
counteraction, as soon as the colonies, naturally rival, had become by
independence a foreign nation. For a moment, indeed, it appeared that
broader views might prevail, based upon a sounder understanding of
actual conditions and of the principles of international commerce. The
second William Pitt was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time the
provisional articles of peace with the United States were signed, in
November, 1782; and in March, 1783, he introduced into the House of
Commons a bill for regulating temporarily the intercourse between the
two nations, so far as dependent upon the action of Great Britain,
until it should be possible to establish a mutual arrangement by
treaty. This measure reflected not only a general attitude of good
will towards America, characteristic of both father and son, but also
the impression which had been made upon the younger man by the
writings of Adam Smith. Professing as its objects "to establish
intercourse on the most enlarged principles of reciprocal benefit,"
and "to evince the disposition of Great Britain to be on terms of most
perfect amity with the United States of America," the bill admitted
the ships and vessels of the United States, with the merchandise on
board, into all the ports of Great Britain in the same manner as the
vessels of other independent states; that is, manned three-fourths by
American seamen. This preserved the main restrictions of the
Navigation Act, protective of British navigation; but the merchandise,
even if brought in American ships, was relieved of all alien duties.
These, however, wherever still existing for other nations, were light,
and this remission slight;[65] a more substantial concession was a
rebate upon all exports from Great Britain to the United States, equal
to that allowed upon goods exported to the colonies. As regarded
intercourse with the West Indies, there was to be made in favor of the
thirteen states a special and large remission in the rigor of the Act;
one affecting both commerce and navigation. To British colonies, by
long-standing proscription, no ships except British had been admitted
to export or import. By the proposed measure, the United States, alone
among the nations of the world, were to be allowed to import freely
any goods whatsoever, of their own growth, produce, or manufacture, in
their own ships; on the same terms exactly as British vessels, if
these should engage in the traffic between the American continent and
the islands. Similarly, freedom to export colonial produce was granted
to American bottoms from the West Indies to the United States. Both
exports and imports, thus to be authorized, were to be "liable to the
same duties and charges only as the same merchandise would be subject
to, if it were the property of British native-born subjects, and
imported in British ships, navigated by British seamen."[66] In short,
while the primary purpose doubtless was the benefit of the islands,
the effect of the measure, as regarded the West India trade, was to
restore the citizens of the now independent states to the privileges
they had enjoyed as colonists. The carrying trade between the islands
and the continent was conceded to them, and past experience gave
ground to believe it would be by them absorbed.
It was over this concession that the storm of controversy arose and
raged, until the outbreak of the French Revolution, by the
conservative reaction it provoked in other governments, arrested for
the time any change of principle in regard to colonial administration,
whatever modifications might from time to time be induced by momentary
exigencies of policy. The question immediately argued was probably on
all hands less one of principle than of expediency. Superior as
commercial prosperity and the preservation of peace were to most other
motives in the interest of Pitt's mind, he doubtless would have
admitted, along with his most earnest opponents, that the fostering of
the national carrying trade, as a nursery to the navy and so
contributory to national defence, took precedence of purely commercial
legislation. With all good-will to America, his prime object
necessarily was the welfare of Great Britain; but this he, contrary to
the mass of public opinion, conceived to lie in the restoration of the
old intercourse between the two peoples, modified as little as
possible by the new condition of independence. He trusted that the
habit of receiving everything from England, the superiority of British
manufactures, a common tongue, and commercial correspondences only
temporarily interrupted by the war, would tend to keep the new states
customers of Great Britain chiefly, as they had been before; and what
they bought they must pay for by sending their own products in return.
This constraint of routine and convenience received additional force
from the scarcity of capital in America, and its abundance in Great
Britain, relatively to the rest of Europe. The wealthiest nation could
hold the Americans by their need of accommodations which others could
not extend.
In so far there probably was a general substantial agreement in Great
Britain. The Americans had been consumers to over double the amount of
the West Indies before the war, and it was desirable to retain their
custom. Nor was the anticipation of success deceived. Nine years
later, despite the rejection of Pitt's measure, an experienced
American complained "that we draw so large a proportion of our
manufactures from one nation. The other European nations have had the
eight years of the war (of Independence) exclusively, and the nine
years of peace in fair competition, and do not yet supply us with
manufactures equivalent to half of the stated value of the shoes made
by ourselves."[67] In the first year of the government under the
Constitution, from August, 1789, to September 30, 1790, after seven
years of independence, out of a total of not quite $20,000,000 imports
to the United States, over $15,000,000 were from the dominions of
Great Britain;[68] and nearly half the exports went to the same
destination, either as raw material for manufactures, or as to the
distributing centre for Europe. The commercial dependence is evident;
it had rather increased than diminished since the Peace. As regards
American navigation, the showing was somewhat better; but even here
217,000 tons British had entered United States ports, against a total
of only 355,000 American. As of the latter only 50,000 had sailed from
Great Britain, it is clear that the empire had retained its hold upon
its carrying trade, throughout the years intervening between the Peace
and the adoption of the Constitution.
As regards the commercial relations between the two nations, these
results corresponded in the main with the expectations of those who
frustrated Pitt's measure. He had conceived, however, that it was wise
for Great Britain not only to preserve a connection so profitable, but
also to develop it; to multiply the advantage by steps which would
promote the prosperity and consequent purchasing power of the
communities involved. This was the object of his proposed concession.
During the then recent war, no part of the British dominions--save
besieged Gibraltar--had suffered so severely as the West Indies.
Though other causes concurred, this was due chiefly to the cessation
of communications with the revolted colonies, entailing failure of
supplies indispensable to their industries. Despite certain
alleviations incidental to the war, such as the capture of American
vessels bound to foreign islands, and the demand for tropical products
by the British armies and fleets, there had been great misery among
the population, as well as financial loss. The restoration of
commercial intercourse would benefit the continent as well as the
islands; but the latter more. The prosperity of both would redound to
the welfare of Great Britain; for the one, though now politically
independent, was chained to her commercial system by imperative
circumstances, while of the trade of the other she would have complete
monopoly, except for this tolerance of a strictly local traffic with
the adjoining continent. As for British navigation, the supreme
interest, Pitt believed that it would receive more enlargement from
the increase of productiveness in the islands, and of consequent
demand for British manufactures, than it would suffer loss by American
navigation. More commerce, more ships. Then, as at the present day,
the interests of Great Britain and of the United States, in their
relations to a matter of common external concern, were not opposed,
but complementary; for the prosperity of the islands through America
would make for the prosperity of Great Britain through the islands.
This, however, was just the point disputed; and, in default of the
experience which the coming years were to furnish, fears not wholly
unreasonable, from the particular point of view of sea power, as then
understood, were aroused by the known facts of American shipping
enterprise, both as ship-builders and carriers, even under colonial
trammels. John Adams, who was minister to Great Britain from 1785 to
1788, had frequent cause to note the deep and general apprehension
there entertained of the United States as a rival maritime state. The
question of admission to the colonial trade, as it presented itself to
most men of the day, was one of defence and of offence, and was
complicated by several considerations. As a matter of fact, there was
no denying the existence of that transatlantic commercial system, in
which the former colonies had been so conspicuous a factor, the sole
source of certain supplies to an important market, reflecting therein
exactly Great Britain's own position relatively to the consumers of
the European continent. The prospect of reviving what had always been
an _imperium in imperio_, but now uncontrolled by the previous
conditions of political subjection, seemed ominous; and besides, there
was cherished the hope, ill-founded and delusive though it was, that
the integrity of the empire as a self-sufficing whole, broken by
recent revolt, might be restored by strong measures, coercive towards
the commerce of the United States, and protective towards Canada and
the other remaining continental colonies. It was believed by some that
the agriculture, shipping, and fisheries of Canada, Nova Scotia, and
Newfoundland, despite the obstacles placed by nature, could be so
fostered as to supply the needs of the West Indies, and to develop
also a population of consumers bound to take off British manufactures,
as the lost colonists used to do. This may be styled the constructive
idea, in Sheffield's series of propositions, looking to the
maintenance of the British carrying trade at the expense of that of
the United States. This expectation proved erroneous. Up to and
through the War of 1812, the British provinces, so far from having a
surplus for export, had often to depend upon the United States for
much of the supplies which Sheffield expected them to send to the West
Indies.
The proposition was strongly supported also by a wish to aid the
American loyalists, who, to the number of many thousands, had fled
from the old colonies to take refuge in the less hospitable North.
These men, deprived of their former resources, and having a new start
in life to make, desired that the West India market should be reserved
for them, to build up their local industries. Their influence was
exerted in opposition to the planters, and the mother country justly
felt itself bound to their relief by strong obligation. Conjoined to
this was doubtless the less worthy desire to punish the successful
rebellion, as well as to hinder the growth of a competitor. "If I had
not been here and resided here some time," wrote John Adams, in 1785,
"I should not have believed, nor could have conceived, such an union
of all Parliamentary factions against us, which is a demonstration of
the unpopularity of our cause."[69] "Their direct object is not so
much the increase of their own wealth, ships, or sailors, as the
diminution of ours. A jealousy of our naval power is the true motive,
the real passion which actuates them. They consider the United States
as their rival, and the most dangerous rival they have in the world. I
can see clearly they are less afraid of the augmentation of French
ships and sailors than American. They think they foresee that if the
United States had the same fisheries, carrying trade, and same market
for ready-built ships, they had ten years ago, they would be in so
respectable a position, and in so happy circumstances, that British
seamen, manufacturers, and merchants too, would hurry over to
them."[70] These statements, drawn from Adams's association with many
men, reflect so exactly the line of argument in the best known of the
many controversial pamphlets published about that time,--Lord
Sheffield's "Observations on the Commerce of the American States,"--as
to prove that it represented correctly a preponderant popular feeling,
not only adverse to the restoration of the colonial privileges
contemplated by Pitt, but distinctly inimical to the new nation; a
feeling born of past defeat and of present apprehension.
Inextricably associated with this feeling was the conviction that the
navigation supported by the sugar islands, being a monopoly always
under the control of the mother country, and ministering to the
_entrepot_ on which so much other shipping depended, was the one sure
support of the general carrying trade of the nation. "Considering the
bulk of West India commodities," Sheffield had written, "and the
universality and extent of the consumption of sugar, a consumption
still in its infancy even in Europe, and still more in America, it is
not improbable that in a few ages the nation which may be in
possession of the most extensive and best cultivated sugar islands,
_subject to a proper policy_,[71] will take the lead at sea." Men of
all schools concurred in this general view, which is explanatory of
much of the course pursued by the British Government, alike in
military enterprise, commercial regulation, and political belligerent
measures, during the approaching twenty years of war with France. It
underlay Pitt's subsequent much derided, but far from unwise, care to
get the whole West India region under British control, by conquering
its sugar islands. It underlay also the other measures, either
instituted or countenanced by him, or inherited from his general war
policy, which led through ever increasing exasperation to the war with
the United States. The question, however, remained, "What is the
proper policy conducive to the end which all desire?" Those who
thought with Pitt in 1783 urged that to increase the facilities of the
islands, by abundant supplies from the nearest and best source, in
America, would so multiply the material of commerce as most to promote
the necessary navigation. The West India planters pressed this view
with forcible logic. "Navigation and naval power are not the parents
of commerce, but its happy fruits. If mutual wants did not furnish the
subject of intercourse between distant countries, there would soon be
an end of navigation. The carrying trade is of great importance, but
it is of greater still to have trade to carry." To this the reply
substantially was that if the trade were thrown open to Americans, by
allowing them to carry in their own vessels, the impetus so given to
their navigation, with the cheapness of their ships, owing to the
cheapness of materials, would make them carriers to the whole world,
breaking up the monopoly of British merchants, and supplanting the
employment of British ships.
A few statesmen, more far seeing and deeper reasoning,--notably Edmund
Burke,--came to Pitt's support, and the West India proprietors,
largely resident in England, by their knowledge of details contributed
much to elucidate the facts; but their efforts were unavailing. Their
argument ran thus: "Only the American continent can furnish at
reasonable rates the animals required for the agriculture of the
islands, the food for the slaves, the lumber for buildings and for
packing produce. Only the continent will take the rum which Europe
refuses, and with which the planter pays his running expenses. Owing
to irreversible currents of trade, neither British nor island shipping
can carry this traffic at a profit to themselves, except by ruinously
overcharging the planter. Americans only can do it. Concede the
exchange by this means, and the development of sugar and coffee
raising, owing to their bulk as freight, will enlarge British shipping
to Europe by an amount much beyond that lost in the local transport.
Of the European carriage you will retain a monopoly, as you will of
the produce, which goes into your storehouses alone; whence you reap
the advantage of brokerage and incidental handling, at the expense of
the continental consumer, while your home navigation is enlarged by
its export. Refuse this privilege, and your islands sink under French
and Spanish competition. French Santo Domingo, especially, exceeds by
far all your possessions, both in the extent of soil and quality of
product." Very shortly they were able also to say that the French
allowed ships to be bought from Americans; and, although in their
treaty with the United States they had refused free intercourse to
American vessels, a royal ordinance of 1784 permitted it to vessels of
under sixty tons' burden.
Within a month of the introduction of Pitt's bill the ministry to
which he then belonged fell. The one which followed refrained from
dealing at all with the subject, except by recourse to an expedient
not uncommon with party leaders, dealing with a new question of
admitted intricacy. They passed a bill leaving the whole matter to the
Crown for executive action. Accordingly, in July, 1783, a proclamation
was issued permitting intercourse between the islands and the
American continent, in a long list of specified articles, but only by
British ships, owned and navigated as required by the Navigation Act.
American vessels were excluded by omission, and while most necessaries
for food, agriculture, and commerce were admitted, one staple article,
salt fish, urgently requested by the planters, was forbidden. This was
partly to encourage the Newfoundland fisheries and those of Great
Britain, and partly to injure American. Both objects were in the line
of the Navigation Act, to foster home navigation and impede that of
foreigners; fisheries being considered a prime support of each. A
generation before, the elder Pitt had inveighed against the Peace of
Paris, in 1763, on account of the concession of the cod fisheries.
"You leave to France," he said, "the opportunity of reviving her
navy." Before the separation, the near and great market of the West
India negro population had consumed one-third of the American catch of
fish. So profitable a condition could no longer be continued. Salt
provisions also, butter, and cheese, were not allowed, being reserved
for Irish producers.[72]
The next December the enabling bill was renewed and the proclamation
re-issued. At this moment Pitt returned to office. A few months later,
in the spring of 1784, Parliament was dissolved, and the ensuing
elections carried him into power at the head of a great majority. He
made no immediate attempt to resume legislation favoring the American
trade with the West Indies. The disposition of the majority of
Englishmen in the matter had been plainly shown, and other more urgent
commercial reforms engaged his attention. Soon after the receipt of
the news in America, some of the states passed retaliatory measures,
on their own account, or authorized the Continental Congress so to act
for them. The bad feeling already caused by the non-fulfilment, on
both sides, of certain stipulations of the treaty of peace was
particularly exasperated by this proclamation; for anticipation,
aroused by Pitt's proposed measure, had been nursed into confident
expectation during the four months' interval, in which intercourse had
been openly or tacitly allowed. It was at this period that Nelson
first came conspicuously into public notice, by checking the
connivance of the West Indian governors in the infractions of the
Navigation Laws; the Act authorizing commanders of Kings' ships to
seize offending vessels, and bring them before the Court of
Admiralty.[73] It is said also that his experience had much to do with
shaping subsequent legislation upon the same prohibitory lines. In
America disappointment was bitter. Little concern was felt in England.
Concerted action by several states was thought most unlikely, and a
more perfect union impossible. While Massachusetts, for example, in
1785 forbade import or export in any vessel belonging in whole or in
part to British subjects, the state then next to her in maritime
importance, Pennsylvania, in 1786 repealed laws imposing extra charges
on British ships, and admitted all nations on equal terms with her
sister states. "The ministry in England," wrote Adams, "build all
their hopes and schemes upon the supposition of such divisions in
America as will forever prevent a combination of the States, either in
prohibition or in retaliatory duties."[74]
Effective retaliation consequently was not feared, and as for results
otherwise, it was doubtless thought best to await the test of
experience. Proclamation, annually authorized and re-issued, remained
therefore the mode of regulating commerce between the British
dominions and the United States up to the date of Jay's treaty. Once
only, in 1788, Parliament interfered so far as to pass a law,
confining the trade with the West Indies to British-built ships and
to certain enumerated articles, in the strict spirit of the Navigation
system. Otherwise, intercourse with the United States was throughout
this period subject at any moment to be modified or annulled by the
single will of the Executive; whereas that with other nations, fixed
by statute,--the Navigation Act,--could be altered only by the
legislature.[75]
Of this British commercial policy, following immediately upon the
recognition of independence, Americans had not the slightest reason to
complain. They had insisted upon being independent, and it would be
babyish to fret about the consequences, when unpalatable. It was
unpleasant to find that Great Britain, satisfied that the carrying
trade was the first of her interests, upon which depended her naval
supremacy, rigorously excluded Americans from branches of that trade
before permitted to them; but in so doing she was simply seeking her
own advantage by means of her own laws, as a nation does, for
instance, when it imposes heavy protective duties. It is quite as
legitimate to protect the carrying trade as any other form of
industry; and the Navigation Act was no new device, for the special
annoyance of Americans. It is very possible that the action of Great
Britain at this time was so stupid, that, to use words of Jefferson's,
the only way to prophesy what she would do was to ascertain what she
ought to do, and infer the contrary. The rule, he said, never failed.
This particular stupidity, if such it were,--and there was at least
partial ground for the charge,--was simply another case of a most
common form of human dulness of perception, preoccupation with a fixed
idea. But were the policy wise or foolish, as regards herself, towards
the Americans it was not a wrong, but an injury; and, consequently,
what the newly independent people had to do was not to complain, but
to strike back with retaliatory commercial measures. Jefferson, no
friend generally to coercive action, wrote concerning this particular
situation, "It is not to the moderation or justice of others we are to
trust for fair and equal access to market with our productions, or for
our due share in the transportation of them; but to our own means of
independence, and the firm will to use them."[76]
Equally, when Great Britain, under the emergencies of the French
Revolution, resorted to measures that overpassed her rights, either
municipal or international, and infringed our own, the resort should
have been to the remedy with which nations defend their rights, as
distinct from their interest. The American people, then poor, and
habituated to colonial dependence, failed to create for themselves in
due time the power necessary to self-assertion; nor did they as a
nation realize, what men like John Adams and Gouverneur Morris saw and
preached, that in the complicated tangle of warring interests which
constitutes every contemporary situation, the influence of any single
factor depends, not merely upon its own value, but upon that value
taken in connection with other conditions. A pound is but a pound; but
when the balance is nearly equal, a pound may turn a scale. Because
America could not possibly put afloat the hundred--or two
hundred--ships-of-the-line which Great Britain had in commission,
therefore, many argued, as many do to-day, it was vain to have any
navy. "I believe," wrote Morris in 1794,[77] and few men better
understood financial conditions, "that we could now maintain twelve
ships-of-the-line, perhaps twenty, with a due proportion of frigates
and smaller vessels. And I am tolerably certain that, while the United
States of America pursue a just and liberal conduct, _with twenty
sail-of-the-line at sea_, no nation on earth will dare to insult them.
I believe also, that, not to mention individual losses, five years of
war would involve more national expense than the support of a navy for
twenty years. One thing I am thoroughly convinced of, that, if we do
not render ourselves respectable, we shall continue to be insulted."
A singular, and too much disregarded, instance of the insults to which
the United States was exposed, by the absence of naval strength, is
found in the action of the Barbary Powers towards our commerce, which
scarcely dared to enter the Mediterranean. It is less known that this
condition of things was eminently satisfactory to British politicians
of the old-fashioned school, and as closely linked as was the
Navigation system itself to the ancient rivalry with Holland. "Our
ships," wrote the Dutch statesman De Witt, who died in 1672, "should
be well guarded by convoy against the Barbary pirates. Yet it would by
no means be proper to free that sea of those pirates, because we
should hereby be put upon the same footing with East-landers, [_i.e._,
Baltic nations, Denmark, Sweden, etc.] English, Spaniards, and
Italians; wherefore it is best to leave that thorn in the sides of
those nations, whereby they will be distressed in that trade, while we
by convoy engross all the European traffic and navigation."[78] This
cynical philosophy was echoed in 1784 by the cultured English
statesman, Lord Sheffield, the intimate friend of the historian
Gibbon, and editor of his memoirs. "If the great maritime powers know
their interests," he wrote, "they will not encourage the Americans to
be carriers. That the Barbary States are an advantage to the maritime
powers is obvious. If they were suppressed, the little states of
Italy, etc., would have much more of the carrying trade. The Armed
Neutrality would be as hurtful to the great maritime powers as the
Barbary States are useful."[79]
It may be a novel thought to many Americans, that at that time
American commerce in the Mediterranean depended largely for protection
upon Portuguese cruisers; its own country extending none. When peace
was unexpectedly made between Portugal and Algiers in 1793, through
the interposition of a British consular officer, a wail of dismay went
up to heaven from American shipmen. "The conduct of the British in
this business," wrote the American consul at Lisbon, "leaves no room
to doubt or mistake their object, which was evidently aimed at us, and
that they will leave nothing unattempted to effect our ruin." It
proved, indeed, that the British consul's action was not that of his
Government, but taken on his own initiative; but the incident not only
recalls the ideas of the time, long since forgotten, but in its
indications, both of British commercial security and American
exposure, illustrates the theory of the Navigation Act as to the
reciprocal influence of the naval and merchant services. There was
then nothing, in the economical conditions of the United States, to
forbid a navy stronger than the Portuguese; yet the consul, in his
pitiful appeal to the Portuguese Court, had to write: "My countrymen
have been led into their present embarrassment by confiding in the
friendship, power, and protection of her Most Faithful Majesty," ...
which "lulled our citizens into a fatal security."[80] Our lamentable
dependence upon others, for the respect we should have extorted
ourselves, is shown in the instructions issued to Jay, on his mission
to England in 1794. "It may be represented to the British Ministry,
how productive of perfect conciliation it might be to the people of
the United States, if Great Britain would use her influence with the
Dey of Algiers for the liberation of the American citizens in
captivity, and for a peace upon reasonable terms. It has been
communicated from abroad, to be the fixed policy of Great Britain to
check our trade in grain to the Mediterranean. This is too doubtful to
be assumed, but fit for inquiry."[81] The Dey had declared war in
1785, this being with the Barbary rulers the customary method of
opening piratical action. "If the Dey makes peace with every one,"
said one of his captains to Nelson, "what is he to do with his ships?"
The experience of the succeeding fifteen years was to give ample
demonstration of the truth of Morris's prophecy; but what is
interesting now to observe is, that he, who certainly did not imagine
twenty ships to be equal to a hundred, accurately estimated the
deterrent force of such a body, prepared to act upon an enemy's
communications,--or interests,--at a great distance from the strategic
centre of operations. A valuable military lesson of the War of 1812 is
just this: that a comparatively small force--a few frigates and
sloops--placed as the United States Navy was, can exercise an
influence utterly disproportionate to its own strength. Instances of
Great Britain's extremity, subsequent to Morris's prediction, are
easily cited. In 1796, her fleet was forced to abandon the
Mediterranean. In 1799, a year after the Nile, Nelson had to implore a
small Portuguese division not to relinquish the blockade of Malta,
which he could not otherwise maintain. Under such conditions,
apprehension of even a slight additional burden of hostility imposes
restraint. Had Morris's navy existed in 1800, we probably should have
had no War of 1812; that is, if Jefferson's passion for peace, and
abhorrence of navies, could have been left out of the account. War, as
Napoleon said, is a business of positions. The commercial importance
of the United States, and the position of its navy relatively to the
major interests of Great Britain, would together have produced an
effect, to which, under the political emergency of the time, the mere
commercial retaliation then attempted was quite inadequate. This
distressed the enemy, but did not reduce him; and it bitterly
alienated a large part of our own community, so that we went into the
war a discordant, almost a disunited, nation.
During the years of American impotence under the early confederation,
the trade regulations of the British Government, framed on the lines
advocated by Lord Sheffield, met with a measure of success which was
perhaps more apparent than real; due attention being scarcely paid to
the actual loss entailed upon British planters by the heightened cost
of supplies, and the consequent effect upon British commerce and
navigation. "Under the present limited intercourse with America,"
wrote the planter, Edwards, "the West Indies are subject to three sets
of devouring monopolies: 1, the British ship-owners; 2, their agents
in American ports; 3, their agents in the ports of the islands; all of
whom exact an unnatural profit of the planters."[82] Chalmers, looking
only to the navigation of the kingdom, which these culprits
represented, admits that in the principal supplies Great Britain
cannot compete with America; but, "whatever may be the difference in
price to the West Indians, this is but a small equivalent which they
ought to pay to the British consumer, for enjoying the exclusive
supply of sugar, rum, and other West India products."[83] A few
figures show conclusively that under all disadvantages the islands
increased in actual prosperity, although they fell behind their French
competitors, favored by a more liberal policy. In the quiet year 1770,
before the revolt of the continent, the British West Indies shipped
to the home country produce amounting to L3,279,204;[84] in 1787 this
had risen to L4,839,145,[85] a gain of over 30 per cent. Between the
same years, exports to the United States, limited after the peace to
British ships, had fallen from L481,407 to L196,461. American produce,
confined to British bottoms for admission to British colonies, had
gone largely to the French islands, with which before the Revolution
they could have only surreptitious intercourse. The result was that
the British planter had to pay much more for his plantation supplies
than did the French, who were furnished by American vessels, built and
run much cheaper than British.[86] He was rigidly forbidden also to
seek stores in the French islands. Such circuitous intercourse with
America, by depriving British ships of the long voyage to the
continent, would place the French islands in the obnoxious relation of
_entrepot_ to their neighbors, which Holland had once occupied towards
England. In all legislation minute care was taken to prevent such
injury to navigation. Direct trade with British dominions was the
fetich of British policy; circuitous trade its abomination.
Despite drawbacks, a distinct advance was observable also in British
navigation; in the development of the British-American colonies,
continental and island; and in the intercolonial intercourse and
shipping. Immediately after the institution of the new government, the
United States enacted laws protective of her own navigation; notably
by an alien duty laid upon all foreign tonnage. To consider the
probable effects of this legislation, and of the new American
institutions, upon British commerce and navigation, a committee of the
Privy Council was appointed, to which we owe a digested and
authoritative summary of the change of conditions effected by the
British measures, between 1783 and 1790. From its report, based upon
averages of several years, it appears that in the direct trade between
Great Britain and the United States, in which American ships stood on
equal terms with British, there had been little variation in value of
imports or exports, with the single exception of tobacco and rice.
These two articles, which formerly had to pass through Great Britain
as an _entrepot_, now went direct to their destination. The American
shipping--navigation--employed in the trade with Great Britain
herself, was only one-third of the British; the respective tonnage
being 26,564 and 52,595. As this was nearly the proportion of American
to British built ships in the colonial period, American shipping
before the adoption of the Constitution had not gained at all, under
the most favorable treatment conceded to it in British dominions. The
Report, indeed, estimated that it had lost by nearly 20 per cent.[87]
In the colonial trade, on the other hand, very marked British gains
could be reported. The commercially backward communities of Canada,
etc., forbidden now to admit American ships, or to import many
articles from the United States, and given special privileges in the
West Indies, had more than doubled their imports from the mother
country; the amount rising from L379,411 to L829,088. These sums are
not to be regarded in their own triviality, but as harbingers of a
development, which it was hoped would fill the void in the British
imperial system caused by the loss of the former colonies. The West
Indies showed a more gradual increase, though still satisfactory;
their exports since 1774 had risen 20 per cent. It was, however, in
navigation, avowedly the chief aim of the protective legislation, that
the intercolonial results were most encouraging. Through the exclusion
of American competition, British tonnage to Canada and the neighboring
colonies had enlarged fourfold, from 11,219 to 46,106. The national
tonnage engaged between the West Indies and the mother country had
grown from 80,482 to 133,736; 60 per cent. More encouraging still,
from the ideal point of view of a restored system of mutual support,
embracing both sides of the Atlantic, the tonnage employed between
Canada and the West Indies had risen from 996 only in 1774, to 14,513
in 1789. In brief, after a careful and systematic examination of the
whole field, the committee considered that British navigation had
gained 111,638 tons by excluding Americans from branches of trade they
had once shared, and still eagerly desired.
The effects of the system were most conspicuous in the trade between
the West Indies and the United States. The tonnage here employed had
fallen from 107,739, before the war, to 62,738. The reflections of the
Committee upon this particular are so characteristic of national
convictions as to be worth quoting.[88] "This decrease is rather less
than half what it was before the war;[89] but before the war
five-eighths belonged to merchants, permanent inhabitants of the
countries now under the dominion of the United States, and
three-eighths to British merchants residing occasionally in the said
countries. At that time, very few vessels belonging to British
merchants, resident in the British European dominions, or in the
British Islands in the West Indies, had a share in this trade. The
vessels employed in this trade can now only belong to British subjects
_residing_ in the present British dominions. Many vessels now go from
the ports of Great Britain, carrying British manufactures to the
United States, there load with lumber and provisions for the British
Islands in the West Indies, and return with the produce of these
islands to Great Britain. The whole of this branch of freight may also
be considered as a new acquisition, and was obtained by your Majesty's
Order in Council before mentioned,[90] which has operated to the
increase of British Navigation, compared to that of the United States
in a double ratio; _but it has taken from the navigation of the United
States more than it has added to that of Great Britain_."
The last sentence emphasizes the fact, which John Adams had noted,
that the object of the Navigation system was scarcely more defensive
than offensive, in the military sense of the word. The Act carried
provisions meant distinctly to impede the development of foreign
shipping, as far as possible to do so by municipal regulation. The
prohibition of entrance to a port of Great Britain by a foreign
trader, unless three-fourths manned by citizens of the country whose
flag she bore, was distinctly offensive in intent. But for this, other
states might increase their tonnage by employing seamen not their own,
which Great Britain could not do without weakening the reserves
available for her navy, and imperative to her defence. Rivalry was
thus engendered, and became bitter and apprehensive in proportion to
the national interests involved; but at no time had such
considerations persuaded the country to depart from its purpose. "The
foreign war which those measures first brought upon us, and the odium
which they have never ceased to cause, to the present day (1792) among
neighboring nations, have not induced the legislature to give up any
one of its principles."[91] In the case of the United States, the
exasperation aroused was very great. It perpetuated the national
animosity surviving from the War of Independence, and provoked
retaliation. Before the formation of the better Union this was too
desultory and divided to have much effect, and the artificial system
of which Sheffield was the chief public champion had the appearance of
success which has been described; but as soon as the thirteen states
could wield their power as one whole, under a system at once
consistent and permanent, American navigation began to make rapid
headway. In 1790 there entered American ports from abroad 355,000 tons
of American shipping and 251,000 foreign, of which 217,000 were
British.[92] After one year of the discriminating tonnage dues laid by
the national Congress, the American tonnage entering home ports from
Great Britain had risen, from the 26,564 average of the three years,
1787 to 1789, ascertained by the British committee, to 43,580.[93] In
1801 there entered 799,304 tons of native shipping,[94] and but
138,000 foreign.[95] The amount of British among the latter is not
stated; but in the year 1800 there cleared from Great Britain, under
her own flag, for the United States, but 14,381 tons.[96] This
reversal of the conditions in 1787-89, before quoted,[97] was the
result of a gradual progress, noticeable immediately after the
American imposition of tonnage duties, and increasing up to 1793, when
it was accelerated by the war between Great Britain and France.
It is carefully to be remembered that the British committee,
representing strictly the prepossessions of the body by which it was
constituted, looked primarily to the development of national carrying
trade. "As the security of the British dominions principally depends
on the greatness of your Majesty's naval power, it has ever been the
policy of the British Government to watch with a jealous eye every
attempt that has been made by foreign nations to the detriment of its
navigation; and even in cases where the interests of commerce and
those of navigation could not be wholly reconciled, the Government of
Great Britain has always given the preference to the interests of
navigation; and it has never yet submitted to the imposition of any
tonnage duties by foreign nations on British ships trading to their
ports, without proceeding immediately to retaliation."[98] It had,
however, submitted to several such measures, retaliatory for the
exclusion from the West India trade, enacted by the separate states in
the years 1783 to 1789; as well as to other legislation, taxing
British shipping by name much above that of other foreigners. This
quiescence was due to confidence, that the advantages possessed by
Great Britain would enable her to overcome all handicaps. It was
therefore with satisfaction that, after six years of commercial
antagonism, the committee was able, not only to report the growth of
British shipping, already quoted, but to show by the first official
statement of entries issued by the American Government,[99] for the
first year of its own existence, that for every five American tons
entering American ports from over sea, there entered also three
British; and that of the whole foreign tonnage there were six British
to one of all other nations together.
Upon the whole, therefore, while regretting the evidence in the
American statement which showed increasing activity by American
shipping over that ascertained by themselves for the previous
years,--to be accounted for, as was believed, by transient
circumstances,--the committee, after consultation with the leading
merchants in the American trade, thought better to postpone
retaliation for the new tonnage duties, which contained no invidious
distinction in favor of other foreign shipping against British. The
system of trade regulation so far pursued had given good results, and
its continuance was recommended; though bitterly antagonizing
Americans, and maintaining ill-will between the two countries. Upon
one point, especially desired by the United States, the committee was
particularly firm. It considered that its Government might judiciously
make one proposition--and one only--for a commercial treaty; namely,
that there should be entire equality of treatment, as to duties and
tonnage, towards the ships of both nations in the home ports of each
other. "But if Congress should propose (as they certainly will) that
this principle of equality should be extended to the ports of our
Colonies and Islands, and that the ships of the United States should
there be treated as British ships, it should be answered that this
demand cannot be admitted even as a subject of negotiation.... This
branch of freight is of the same nature with the freight from one
American state to another" (that is, trade internal to the empire is
essentially a coasting trade). "Congress has made regulations to
confine the freight, employed between the different states, to the
ships of the United States, and Great
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