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Jefferson and His Colleagues: A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty

by Allen Johnson · English · Gutenberg #3004 · 419,484 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Jefferson and His Colleagues: A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty

Author: Allen Johnson


        
Release date: January 1, 2002 [eBook #3004]
                Most recently updated: February 5, 2009

Language: English

Original publication: S.l.: s.n., 1918

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3004

Credits: Produced by The James J. Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's
        University, Alev Akman, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JEFFERSON AND HIS COLLEAGUES: A CHRONICLE OF THE VIRGINIA DYNASTY ***




Produced by The James J. Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's
University, and Alev Akman






JEFFERSON AND HIS COLLEAGUES,

A CHRONICLE OF THE VIRGINIA DYNASTY


By Allen Johnson




CONTENTS

     I.    PRESIDENT JEFFERSON'S COURT

     II.   PUTTING THE SHIP ON HER REPUBLICAN TACK

     III.  THE CORSAIRS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

     IV.   THE SHADOW OF THE FIRST CONSUL

     V.    IN PURSUIT OF THE FLORIDAS

     VI.   AN AMERICAN CATILINE

     VII.  AN ABUSE OF HOSPITALITY

     VIII. THE PACIFISTS OF 1807

     IX.   THE LAST PHASE OF PEACEABLE COERCION

     X.    THE WAR-HAWKS

     XI.   PRESIDENT MADISON UNDER FIRE

     XII.  THE PEACEMAKERS

     XIII. SPANISH DERELICTS IN THE NEW WORLD

     XIV.  FRAMING AN AMERICAN POLICY

     XV.   THE END OF AN ERA

     BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE




JEFFERSON AND HIS COLLEAGUES



CHAPTER I. PRESIDENT JEFFERSON'S COURT

The rumble of President John Adams's coach had hardly died away in
the distance on the morning of March 4,1801, when Mr. Thomas Jefferson
entered the breakfast room of Conrad's boarding house on Capitol
Hill, where he had been living in bachelor's quarters during his
Vice-Presidency. He took his usual seat at the lower end of the table
among the other boarders, declining with a smile to accept the chair
of the impulsive Mrs. Brown, who felt, in spite of her democratic
principles, that on this day of all days Mr. Jefferson should have the
place which he had obstinately refused to occupy at the head of the
table and near the fireplace. There were others besides the wife of the
Senator from Kentucky who felt that Mr. Jefferson was carrying
equality too far. But Mr. Jefferson would not take precedence over the
Congressmen who were his fellow boarders.

Conrad's was conveniently near the Capitol, on the south side of the
hill, and commanded an extensive view. The slope of the hill, which
was a wild tangle of verdure in summer, debouched into a wide plain
extending to the Potomac. Through this lowland wandered a little stream,
once known as Goose Creek but now dignified by the name of Tiber. The
banks of the stream as well as of the Potomac were fringed with native
flowering shrubs and graceful trees, in which Mr. Jefferson took great
delight. The prospect from his drawing-room windows, indeed, quite as
much as anything else, attached him to Conrad's.

As was his wont, Mr. Jefferson withdrew to his study after breakfast and
doubtless ran over the pages of a manuscript which he had been preparing
with some care for this Fourth of March. It may be guessed, too, that
here, as at Monticello, he made his usual observations-noting in his
diary the temperature, jotting down in the garden-book which he kept
for thirty years an item or two about the planting of vegetables, and
recording, as he continued to do for eight years, the earliest and
latest appearance of each comestible in the Washington market. Perhaps
he made a few notes about the "seeds of the cymbling (cucurbita
vermeosa) and squash (cucurbita melopipo)" which he purposed to send to
his friend Philip Mazzei, with directions for planting; or even wrote a
letter full of reflections upon bigotry in politics and religion to
Dr. Joseph Priestley, whom he hoped soon to have as his guest in the
President's House.

Toward noon Mr. Jefferson stepped out of the house and walked over to
the Capitol--a tall, rather loose-jointed figure, with swinging stride,
symbolizing, one is tempted to think, the angularity of the American
character. "A tall, large-boned farmer," an unfriendly English observer
called him. His complexion was that of a man constantly exposed to the
sun--sandy or freckled, contemporaries called it--but his features were
clean-cut and strong and his expression was always kindly and benignant.

Aside from salvos of artillery at the hour of twelve, the inauguration
of Mr. Jefferson as President of the United States was marked by extreme
simplicity. In the Senate chamber of the unfinished Capitol, he was met
by Aaron Burr, who had already been installed as presiding officer, and
conducted to the Vice-President's chair, while that debonair man of the
world took a seat on his right with easy grace. On Mr. Jefferson's left
sat Chief Justice John Marshall, a "tall, lax, lounging Virginian," with
black eyes peering out from his swarthy countenance. There is a dramatic
quality in this scene of the President-to-be seated between two men who
are to cause him more vexation of spirit than any others in public
life. Burr, brilliant, gifted, ambitious, and profligate; Marshall,
temperamentally and by conviction opposed to the principles which seemed
to have triumphed in the election of this radical Virginian, to whom
indeed he had a deep-seated aversion. After a short pause, Mr. Jefferson
rose and read his Inaugural Address in a tone so low that it could be
heard by only a few in the crowded chamber.

Those who expected to hear revolutionary doctrines must have been
surprised by the studied moderation of this address. There was not
a Federalist within hearing of Jefferson's voice who could not have
subscribed to all the articles in this profession of political faith.
"Equal and exact justice to all men"--"a jealous care of the right of
election by the people"--"absolute acquiescence in the decisions of
the majority"--"the supremacy of the civil over the military
authority"--"the honest payments of our debts"--"freedom of
religion"--"freedom of the press"-"freedom of person under the
protection of the habeas corpus"--what were these principles but the
bright constellation, as Jefferson said, "which has guided our steps
through an age of revolution and reformation?" John Adams himself might
have enunciated all these principles, though he would have distributed
the emphasis somewhat differently.

But what did Jefferson mean when he said, "We have called by different
names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans--we are all
Federalists." If this was true, what, pray, became of the revolution
of 1800, which Jefferson had declared "as real a revolution in the
principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form?" Even
Jefferson's own followers shook their heads dubiously over this passage
as they read and reread it in the news-sheets. It sounded a false note
while the echoes of the campaign of 1800 were still reverberating. If
Hamilton and his followers were monarchists at heart in 1800, bent
upon overthrowing the Government, how could they and the triumphant
Republicans be brethren of the same principle in 1801? The truth of
the matter is that Jefferson was holding out an olive branch to his
political opponents. He believed, as he remarked in a private letter,
that many Federalists were sound Republicans at heart who had been
stampeded into the ranks of his opponents during the recent troubles
with France. These lost political sheep Jefferson was bent upon
restoring to the Republican fold by avoiding utterances and acts
which would offend them. "I always exclude the leaders from these
considerations," he added confidentially. In short, this Inaugural
Address was less a great state paper, marking a broad path for the
Government to follow under stalwart leadership, than an astute effort to
consolidate the victory of the Republican party.

Disappointing the address must have been to those who had expected a
declaration of specific policy. Yet the historian, wiser by the march of
events, may read between the lines. When Jefferson said that he desired
a wise and frugal government--a government "which should restrain men
from injuring one another but otherwise leave them free to regulate
their own pursuits--" and when he announced his purpose "to support the
state governments in all their rights" and to cultivate "peace with all
nations--entangling alliances with none," he was in effect formulating a
policy. But all this was in the womb of the future.

It was many weeks before Jefferson took up his abode in the President's
House. In the interval he remained in his old quarters, except for a
visit to Monticello to arrange for his removal, which indeed he was in
no haste to make, for "The Palace," as the President's House was dubbed
satirically, was not yet finished; its walls were not fully plastered,
and it still lacked the main staircase-which, it must be admitted, was a
serious defect if the new President meant to hold court. Besides, it
was inconveniently situated at the other end of the, straggling, unkempt
village. At Conrad's Jefferson could still keep in touch with those
members of Congress and those friends upon whose advice he relied in
putting "our Argosie on her Republican tack," as he was wont to
say. Here, in his drawing-room, he could talk freely with practical
politicians such as Charles Pinckney, who had carried the ticket
to success in South Carolina and who might reasonably expect to be
consulted in organizing the new Administration.

The chief posts in the President's official household, save one,
were readily filled. There were only five heads of departments to be
appointed, and of these the Attorney-General might be described as a
head without a department, since the duties of his office were few and
required only his occasional attention. As it fell out, however,
the Attorney-General whom Jefferson appointed, Levi Lincoln of
Massachusetts, practically carried on the work of all the Executive
Departments until his colleagues were duly appointed and commissioned.
For Secretary of War Jefferson chose another reliable New Englander,
Henry Dearborn of Maine. The naval portfolio went begging, perhaps
because the navy was not an imposing branch of the service, or because
the new President had announced his desire to lay up all seven frigates
in the eastern branch of the Potomac, where "they would be under
the immediate eye of the department and would require but one set of
plunderers to look after them." One conspicuous Republican after another
declined this dubious honor, and in the end Jefferson was obliged to
appoint as Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith, whose chief qualification
was his kinship to General Samuel Smith, an influential politician of
Maryland.

The appointment by Jefferson of James Madison as Secretary of State
occasioned no surprise, for the intimate friendship of the two
Virginians and their long and close association in politics led
everyone to expect that he would occupy an important post in the new
Administration, though in truth that friendship was based on something
deeper and finer than mere agreement in politics. "I do believe,"
exclaimed a lady who often saw both men in private life, "father never
loved son more than Mr. Jefferson loves Mr. Madison." The difference in
age, however, was not great, for Jefferson was in his fifty-eighth
year and Madison in his fiftieth. It was rather mien and character that
suggested the filial relationship. Jefferson was, or could be if he
chose, an imposing figure; his stature was six feet two and one-half
inches. Madison had the ways and habits of a little man, for he was only
five feet six. Madison was naturally timid and retiring in the presence
of other men, but he was at his best in the company of his friend
Jefferson, who valued his attainments. Indeed, the two men supplemented
each other. If Jefferson was prone to theorize, Madison was disposed
to find historical evidence to support a political doctrine. While
Jefferson generalized boldly, even rashly, Madison hesitated,
temporized, weighed the pros and cons, and came with difficulty to
a conclusion. Unhappily neither was a good judge of men. When pitted
against a Bonaparte, a Talleyrand, or a Canning, they appeared
provincial in their ways and limited in their sympathetic understanding
of statesmen of the Old World.

Next to that of Madison, Jefferson valued the friendship of Albert
Gallatin, whom he made Secretary of the Treasury by a recess
appointment, since there was some reason to fear that the Federalist
Senate would not confirm the nomination. The Federalists could never
forget that Gallatin was a Swiss by birth--an alien of supposedly
radical tendencies. The partisan press never exhibited its crass
provincialism more shamefully than when it made fun of Gallatin's
imperfect pronunciation of English. He had come to America, indeed, too
late to acquire a perfect control of a new tongue, but not too late to
become a loyal son of his adopted country. He brought to Jefferson's
group of advisers not only a thorough knowledge of public finance but
a sound judgment and a statesmanlike vision, which were often needed to
rectify the political vagaries of his chief.

The last of his Cabinet appointments made, Jefferson returned to
his country seat at Monticello for August and September, for he was
determined not to pass those two "bilious months" in Washington. "I have
not done it these forty years," he wrote to Gallatin. "Grumble who will,
I will never pass those two months on tidewater." To Monticello, indeed,
Jefferson turned whenever his duties permitted and not merely in the
sickly months of summer, for when the roads were good the journey was
rapidly and easily made by stage or chaise. There, in his garden
and farm, he found relief from the distractions of public life. "No
occupation is so delightful to me," he confessed, "as the culture of the
earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden." At Monticello,
too, he could gratify his delight in the natural sciences, for he was a
true child of the eighteenth century in his insatiable curiosity about
the physical universe and in his desire to reduce that universe to an
intelligible mechanism. He was by instinct a rationalist and a foe
to superstition in any form, whether in science or religion. His
indefatigable pen was as ready to discuss vaccination and yellow fever
with Dr. Benjamin Rush as it was to exchange views with Dr. Priestley on
the ethics of Jesus.

The diversity of Jefferson's interests is truly remarkable. Monticello
is a monument to his almost Yankee-like ingenuity. He writes to his
friend Thomas Paine to assure him that the semi-cylindrical form of roof
after the De Lorme pattern, which he proposes for his house, is entirely
practicable, for he himself had "used it at home for a dome, being 120
degrees of an oblong octagon." He was characteristically American in
his receptivity to new ideas from any source. A chance item about Eli
Whitney of New Haven arrests his attention and forthwith he writes to
Madison recommending a "Mr. Whitney at Connecticut, a mechanic of the
first order of ingenuity, who invented the cotton gin," and who has
recently invented "molds and machines for making all the pieces of his
[musket] locks so exactly equal that take one hundred locks to pieces
and mingle their parts and the hundred locks may be put together as well
by taking the first pieces which come to hand." To Robert Fulton,
then laboring to perfect his torpedoes and submarine, Jefferson wrote
encouragingly: "I have ever looked to the submarine boat as most to be
depended on for attaching them [i. e., torpedoes].... I am in hopes it
is not to be abandoned as impracticable."

It was not wholly affectation, therefore, when Jefferson wrote, "Nature
intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my
supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived,
have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself
on the boisterous ocean of political passions." One can readily picture
this Virginia farmer-philosopher ruefully closing his study door, taking
a last look over the gardens and fields of Monticello, in the golden
days of October, and mounting Wildair, his handsome thoroughbred,
setting out on the dusty road for that little political world at
Washington, where rumor so often got the better of reason and where
gossip was so likely to destroy philosophic serenity.

Jefferson had been a widower for many years; and so, since his daughters
were married and had households of their own, he was forced to preside
over his menage at Washington without the feminine touch and tact
so much needed at this American court. Perhaps it was this unhappy
circumstance quite as much as his dislike for ceremonies and formalities
that made Jefferson do away with the weekly levees of his predecessors
and appoint only two days, the First of January and the Fourth of July,
for public receptions. On such occasions he begged Mrs. Dolly Madison
to act as hostess; and a charming and gracious figure she was, casting
a certain extenuating veil over the President's gaucheries. Jefferson
held, with his many political heresies, certain theories of social
intercourse which ran rudely counter to the prevailing etiquette of
foreign courts. Among the rules which he devised for his republican
court, the precedence due to rank was conspicuously absent, because he
held that "all persons when brought together in society are perfectly
equal, whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or out of
office." One of these rules to which the Cabinet gravely subscribed read
as follows:

"To maintain the principles of equality, or of pele mele, and prevent
the growth of precedence out of courtesy, the members of the Executive
will practise at their own houses, and recommend an adherence to the
ancient usage of the country, of gentlemen in mass giving precedence
to the ladies in mass, in passing from one apartment where they are
assembled into another."

The application of this rule on one occasion gave rise to an incident
which convulsed Washington society. President Jefferson had invited to
dinner the new British Minister Merry and his wife, the Spanish Minister
Yrujo and his wife, the French Minister Pichon and his wife, and Mr. and
Mrs. Madison. When dinner was announced, Mr. Jefferson gave his hand to
Mrs. Madison and seated her on his right, leaving the rest to straggle
in as they pleased. Merry, fresh from the Court of St. James, was aghast
and affronted; and when a few days later, at a dinner given by the
Secretary of State, he saw Mrs. Merry left without an escort, while Mr.
Madison took Mrs. Gallatin to the table, he believed that a deliberate
insult was intended. To appease this indignant Briton the President was
obliged to explain officially his rule of "pole mele"; but Mrs. Merry
was not appeased and positively refused to appear at the President's New
Year's Day reception. "Since then," wrote the amused Pichon, "Washington
society is turned upside down; all the women are to the last degree
exasperated against Mrs. Merry; the Federalist newspapers have taken
up the matter, and increased the irritations by sarcasms on the
administration and by making a burlesque of the facts." Then Merry
refused an invitation to dine again at the President's, saying that he
awaited instructions from his Government; and the Marquis Yrujo, who had
reasons of his own for fomenting trouble, struck an alliance with the
Merrys and also declined the President's invitation. Jefferson was
incensed at their conduct, but put the blame upon Mrs. Merry, whom
he characterized privately as a "virago who has already disturbed our
harmony extremely."

A brilliant English essayist has observed that a government to secure
obedience must first excite reverence. Some such perception, coinciding
with native taste, had moved George Washington to assume the trappings
of royalty, in order to surround the new presidential office with
impressive dignity. Posterity has, accordingly, visualized the first
President and Father of his Country as a statuesque figure, posing at
formal levees with a long sword in a scabbard of white polished leather,
and clothed in black velvet knee-breeches, with yellow gloves and a
cocked hat. The third President of the United States harbored no such
illusions and affected no such poses. Governments were made by rational
beings--"by the consent of the governed," he had written in a memorable
document--and rested on no emotional basis. Thomas Jefferson remained
Thomas Jefferson after his election to the chief magistracy; and so
contemporaries saw him in the President's House, an unimpressive figure
clad in "a blue coat, a thick gray-colored hairy waistcoat, with a red
underwaist lapped over it, green velveteen breeches, with pearl buttons,
yarn stockings, and slippers down at the heels." Anyone might have found
him, as Senator Maclay did, sitting "in a lounging manner, on one hip
commonly, and with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other,"
a loose, shackling figure with no pretense at dignity.

In his dislike for all artificial distinctions between man and man,
Jefferson determined from the outset to dispense a true Southern
hospitality at the President's House and to welcome any one at any
hour on any day. There was therefore some point to John Quincy Adams's
witticism that Jefferson's "whole eight years was a levee." No one could
deny that he entertained handsomely. Even his political opponents rose
from his table with a comfortable feeling of satiety which made them
more kindly in their attitude toward their host. "We sat down at the
table at four," wrote Senator Plumer of New Hampshire, "rose at six,
and walked immediately into another room and drank coffee. We had a very
good dinner, with a profusion of fruits and sweetmeats. The wine was
the best I ever drank, particularly the champagne, which was indeed
delicious."

It was in the circle of his intimates that Jefferson appeared at his
best, and of all his intimate friends Madison knew best how to evoke the
true Jefferson. To outsiders Madison appeared rather taciturn, but among
his friends he was genial and even lively, amusing all by his ready
humor and flashes of wit. To his changes of mood Jefferson always
responded. Once started Jefferson would talk on and on, in a loose
and rambling fashion, with a great deal of exaggeration and with many
vagaries, yet always scattering much information on a great variety of
topics. Here we may leave him for the moment, in the exhilarating
hours following his inauguration, discoursing with Pinckney, Gallatin,
Madison, Burr, Randolph, Giles, Macon, and many another good Republican,
and evolving the policies of his Administration.



CHAPTER II. PUTTING THE SHIP ON HER REPUBLICAN TACK

President Jefferson took office in a spirit of exultation which he made
no effort to disguise in his private letters. "The tough sides of our
Argosie," he wrote to John Dickinson, "have been thoroughly tried. Her
strength has stood the waves into which she was steered with a view to
sink her. We shall put her on her Republican tack, and she will now show
by the beauty of her motion the skill of her builders." In him as in
his two intimates, Gallatin and Madison, there was a touch of that
philosophy which colored the thought of reformers on the eve of the
French Revolution, a naive confidence in the perfectability of man
and the essential worthiness of his aspirations. Strike from man
the shackles of despotism and superstition and accord to him a free
government, and he would rise to unsuspected felicity. Republican
government was the strongest government on earth, because it was founded
on free will and imposed the fewest checks on the legitimate desires of
men. Only one thing was wanting to make the American people happy and
prosperous, said the President in his Inaugural Address "a wise and
frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another,
which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of
industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the
bread it has earned." This, he believed, was the sum of good government;
and this was the government which he was determined to establish.
Whether government thus reduced to lowest terms would prove adequate in
a world rent by war, only the future could disclose.

It was only in intimate letters and in converse with Gallatin and
Madison that Jefferson revealed his real purposes. So completely did
Jefferson take these two advisers into his confidence, and so loyal
was their cooperation, that the Government for eight years has been
described as a triumvirate almost as clearly defined as any triumvirate
of Rome. Three more congenial souls certainly have never ruled a nation,
for they were drawn together not merely by agreement on a common policy
but by sympathetic understanding of the fundamental principles of
government. Gallatin and Madison often frequented the President's House,
and there one may see them in imagination and perhaps catch now and then
a fragment of their conversation:

Gallatin: We owe much to geographical position; we have been fortunate
in escaping foreign wars. If we can maintain peaceful relations with
other nations, we can keep down the cost of administration and avoid all
the ills which follow too much government.

The President: After all, we are chiefly an agricultural people and if
we shape our policy accordingly we shall be much more likely to multiply
and be happy than as if we mimicked an Amsterdam, a Hamburg, or a city
like London.

Madison (quietly): I quite agree with you. We must keep the government
simple and republican, avoiding the corruption which inevitably prevails
in crowded cities.

Gallatin (pursuing his thought): The moment you allow the national debt
to mount, you entail burdens on posterity and augment the operations of
government.

The President (bitterly): The principle of spending money to be paid
by posterity is but swindling futurity on a large scale. That was what
Hamilton--

Gallatin: Just so; and if this administration does not reduce taxes,
they will never be reduced. We must strike at the root of the evil and
avert the danger of multiplying the functions of government. I
would repeal all internal taxes. These pretended tax-preparations,
treasure-preparations, and army-preparations against contingent wars
tend only to encourage wars.

The President (nodding his head in agreement): The discharge of the debt
is vital to the destinies of our government, and for the present we
must make all objects subordinate to this. We must confine our general
government to foreign concerns only and let our affairs be disentangled
from those of all other nations, except as to commerce. And our commerce
is so valuable to other nations that they will be glad to purchase it,
when they know that all we ask is justice. Why, then, should we not
reduce our general government to a very simple organization and a very
unexpensive one--a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants?

It was precisely the matter of selecting these few servants which
worried the President during his first months in office, for the federal
offices were held by Federalists almost to a man. He hoped that he would
have to make only a few removals any other course would expose him to
the charge of inconsistency after his complacent statement that there
was no fundamental difference between Republicans and Federalists. But
his followers thought otherwise; they wanted the spoils of victory and
they meant to have them. Slowly and reluctantly Jefferson yielded to
pressure, justifying himself as he did so by the reflection that a due
participation in office was a matter of right. And how, pray, could
due participation be obtained, if there were no removals? Deaths
were regrettably few; and resignations could hardly be expected. Once
removals were decided upon, Jefferson drifted helplessly upon the tide.
For a moment, it is true, he wrote hopefully about establishing an
equilibrium and then returning "with joy to that state of things when
the only questions concerning a candidate shall be: Is he honest? Is he
capable? Is he faithful to the Constitution?" That blessed expectation
was never realized. By the end of his second term, a Federalist in
office was as rare as a Republican under Adams.

The removal of the Collector of the Port at New Haven and the
appointment of an octogenarian whose chief qualification was his
Republicanism brought to a head all the bitter animosity of Federalist
New England. The hostility to Jefferson in this region was no ordinary
political opposition, as he knew full well, for it was compounded of
many ingredients. In New England there was a greater social solidarity
than existed anywhere else in the Union. Descended from English stock,
imbued with common religious and political traditions, and bound
together by the ties of a common ecclesiastical polity, the people of
this section had, as Jefferson expressed it, "a sort of family pride."
Here all the forces of education, property, religion, and respectability
were united in the maintenance of the established order against the
assaults of democracy. New England Federalism was not so much a body
of political doctrine as a state of mind. Abhorrence of the forces
liberated by the French Revolution was the dominating emotion. To the
Federalist leaders democracy seemed an aberration of the human mind,
which was bound everywhere to produce infidelity, looseness of morals,
and political chaos. In the words of their Jeremiah, Fisher Ames,
"Democracy is a troubled spirit, fated never to rest, and whose dreams,
if it sleeps, present only visions of hell." So thinking and feeling,
they had witnessed the triumph of Jefferson with genuine alarm, for
Jefferson they held to be no better than a Jacobin, bent upon subverting
the social order and saturated with all the heterodox notions of
Voltaire and Thomas Paine.

The appointment of the aged Samuel Bishop as Collector of New Haven was
evidence enough to the Federalist mind, which fed upon suspicion, that
Jefferson intended to reward his son, Abraham Bishop, for political
services. The younger Bishop was a stench in their nostrils, for at a
recent celebration of the Republican victory he had shocked the good
people of Connecticut by characterizing Jefferson as "the illustrious
chief who, once insulted, now presides over the Union," and comparing
him with the Saviour of the world, "who, once insulted, now presides
over the universe." And this had not been his first transgression: he
was known as an active and intemperate rebel against the standing order.
No wonder that Theodore Dwight voiced the alarm of all New England
Federalists in an oration at New Haven, in which he declared that
according to the doctrines of Jacobinism "the greatest villain in the
community is the fittest person to make and execute the laws." "We have
now," said he, "reached the consummation of democratic blessedness.
We have a country governed by blockheads and knaves." Here was an
opposition which, if persisted in, might menace the integrity of the
Union.

Scarcely less vexatious was the business of appointments in New York
where three factions in the Republican party struggled for the control
of the patronage. Which should the President support? Gallatin, whose
father-in-law was prominent in the politics of the State, was inclined
to favor Burr and his followers; but the President already felt a deep
distrust of Burr and finally surrendered to the importunities of DeWitt
Clinton, who had formed an alliance with the Livingston interests to
drive Burr from the party. Despite the pettiness of the game, which
disgusted both Gallatin and Jefferson, the decision was fateful. It was
no light matter, even for the chief magistrate, to offend Aaron Burr.

From these worrisome details of administration, the President turned
with relief to the preparation of his first address to Congress. The
keynote was to be economy. But just how economies were actually to be
effected was not so clear. For months Gallatin had been toiling over
masses of statistics, trying to reconcile a policy of reduced taxation,
to satisfy the demands of the party, with the discharge of the public
debt. By laborious calculation he found that if $7,300,000 were set
aside each year, the debt--principal and interest--could be discharged
within sixteen years. But if the unpopular excise were abandoned, where
was the needed revenue to be found? New taxes were not to be thought of.
The alternative, then, was to reduce expenditures. But how and where?

Under these circumstances the President and his Cabinet adopted the
course which in the light of subsequent events seems to have been
woefully ill-timed and hazardous in the extreme. They determined to
sacrifice the army and navy. In extenuation of this decision, it may
be said that the danger of war with France, which had forced the Adams
Administration to double expenditures, had passed; and that Europe was
at this moment at peace, though only the most sanguine and shortsighted
could believe that continued peace was possible in Europe with the First
Consul in the saddle. It was agreed, then, that the expenditures for
the military and naval establishments should be kept at about
$2,500,000--somewhat below the normal appropriation before the recent
war-flurry; and that wherever possible expenses should be reduced by
careful pruning of the list of employees at the navy yards. Such was
the programme of humdrum economy which President Jefferson laid before
Congress. After the exciting campaign of 1800, when the public was
assured that the forces of Darkness and Light were locked in deadly
combat for the soul of the nation, this tame programme seemed like an
anticlimax. But those who knew Thomas Jefferson learned to discount the
vagaries to which he gave expression in conversation. As John Quincy
Adams once remarked after listening to Jefferson's brilliant table
talk, "Mr. Jefferson loves to excite wonder." Yet Thomas Jefferson,
philosopher, was a very different person from Thomas Jefferson,
practical politician. Paradoxical as it may seem, the new President,
of all men of his day, was the least likely to undertake revolutionary
policies; and it was just this acquaintance with Jefferson's mental
habits which led his inveterate enemy, Alexander Hamilton, to advise his
party associates to elect Jefferson rather than Burr.

The President broke with precedent, however, in one small particular. He
was resolved not to follow the practice of his Federalist predecessors
and address Congress in person. The President's speech to the two houses
in joint session savored too much of a speech from the throne; it was a
symptom of the Federalist leaning to monarchical forms and practices. He
sent his address, therefore, in writing, accompanied with letters to
the presiding officers of the two chambers, in which he justified this
departure from custom on the ground of convenience and economy of time.
"I have had principal regard," he wrote, "to the convenience of the
Legislature, to the economy of their time, to the relief from the
embarrassment of immediate answers on subjects not yet fully before
them, and to the benefits thence resulting to the public affairs." This
explanation deceived no one, unless it was the writer himself. It was
thoroughly characteristic of Thomas Jefferson that he often explained
his conduct by reasons which were obvious afterthoughts--an unfortunate
habit which has led his contemporaries and his unfriendly biographers to
charge him with hypocrisy. And it must be admitted that his preference
for indirect methods of achieving a purpose exposed him justly to the
reproaches of those who liked frankness and plain dealing. It is not
unfair, then, to wonder whether the President was not thinking rather
of his own convenience when he elected to address Congress by written
message, for he was not a ready nor an impressive speaker. At all
events, he established a precedent which remained unbroken until another
Democratic President, one hundred and twelve years later, returned to
the practice of Washington and Adams.

If the Federalists of New England are to be believed, hypocrisy marked
the presidential message from the very beginning to the end. It began
with a pious expression of thanks "to the beneficent Being" who had
been pleased to breathe into the warring peoples of Europe a spirit of
forgiveness and conciliation. But even the most bigoted Federalist who
could not tolerate religious views differing from his own must have
been impressed with the devout and sincere desire of the President to
preserve peace. Peace! peace! It was a sentiment which ran through the
message like the watermark in the very paper on which he wrote; it was
the condition, the absolutely indispensable condition, of every chaste
reformation which he advocated. Every reduction of public expenditure
was predicated on the supposition that the danger of war was remote
because other nations would desire to treat the United States justly.
"Salutary reductions in habitual expenditures" were urged in every
branch of the public service from the diplomatic and revenue services
to the judiciary and the naval yards. War might come, indeed, but
"sound principles would not justify our taxing the industry of our
fellow-citizens to accumulate treasure for wars to happen we know not
when, and which might not, perhaps, happen but from the temptations
offered by that treasure."

On all concrete matters the President's message cut close to the
line which Gallatin had marked out. The internal taxes should now be
dispensed with and corresponding reductions be made in "our habitual
expenditures." There had been unwise multiplication of federal offices,
many of which added nothing to the efficiency of the Government but only
to the cost. These useless offices should be lopped off, for "when we
consider that this Government is charged with the external and mutual
relations only of these States,... we may well doubt whether our
organization is not too complicated, too expensive." In this connection
Congress might well consider the Federal Judiciary, particularly the
courts newly erected, and "judge of the proportion which the institution
bears to the business it has to perform." * And finally, Congress should
consider whether the law relating to naturalization should not be
revised. "A denial of citizenship under a residence of fourteen years
is a denial to a great proportion of those who ask it"; and "shall we
refuse to the unhappy fugitives from distress that hospitality which
savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this
land?"

     * The studied moderation of the message gave no hint of
     Jefferson's resolute purpose to procure the repeal of the
     Judiciary Act of 1801. The history of this act and its
     repeal, as well as of the attack upon the judiciary, is
     recounted by Edward S. Corwin in "John Marshall and the
     Constitution" in "The Chronicles of America."


The most inveterate foe could not characterize this message as
revolutionary, however much he might dissent from the policies
advocated. It was not Jefferson's way, indeed, to announce his
intentions boldly and hew his way relentlessly to his objective. He
was far too astute as a party leader to attempt to force his will upon
Republicans in Congress. He would suggest; he would advise; he would
cautiously express an opinion; but he would never dictate. Yet few
Presidents have exercised a stronger directive influence upon Congress
than Thomas Jefferson during the greater part of his Administration. So
long as he was en rapport with Nathaniel Macon, Speaker of the House,
and with John Randolph, Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means,
he could direct the policies of his party as effectively as the most
autocratic dictator. When he had made up his mind that Justice Samuel
Chase of the Supreme Court should be impeached, he simply penned a note
to Joseph Nicholson, who was then managing the impeachment of Judge
Pickering, raising the question whether Chase's attack on the principles
of the Constitution should go unpunished. "I ask these questions for
your consideration," said the President deferentially; "for myself,
it is better that I should not interfere." And eventually impeachment
proceedings were instituted.

In this memorable first message, the President alluded to a little
incident which had occurred in the Mediterranean, "the only exception to
this state of general peace with which we have been blessed." Tripoli,
one of the Barbary States, had begun depredations upon American commerce
and the President had sent a small squadron for protection. A ship of
this squadron, the schooner Enterprise, had fallen in with a Tripolitan
man-of-war and after a fight lasting three hours had forced the corsair
to strike her colors. But since war had not been declared and the
President's orders were to act only on the defensive, the crew of
the Enterprise dismantled the captured vessel and let her go. Would
Congress, asked the President, take under consideration the advisability
of placing our forces on an equality with those of our adversaries?
Neither the President nor his Secretary of the Treasury seems to have
been aware that this single cloud on the horizon portended a storm of
long duration. Yet within a year it became necessary to delay further
reductions in the naval establishment and to impose new taxes to meet
the very contingency which the peace-loving President declared most
remote. Moreover, the very frigates which he had proposed to lay up
in the eastern branch of the Potomac were manned and dispatched to the
Mediterranean to bring the Corsairs to terms.



CHAPTER III. THE CORSAIRS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

Shortly after Jefferson's inauguration a visitor presented himself at
the Executive Mansion with disquieting news from the Mediterranean.
Captain William Bainbridge of the frigate George Washington had just
returned from a disagreeable mission. He had been commissioned to carry
to the Dey of Algiers the annual tribute which the United States had
contracted to pay. It appeared that while the frigate lay at anchor
under the shore batteries off Algiers, the Dey attempted to
requisition her to carry his ambassador and some Turkish passengers to
Constantinople. Bainbridge, who felt justly humiliated by his
mission, wrathfully refused. An American frigate do errands for this
insignificant pirate? He thought not! The Dey pointed to his batteries,
however, and remarked, "You pay me tribute, by which you become my
slaves; I have, therefore, a right to order you as I may think proper."
The logic of the situation was undeniably on the side of the master of
the shore batteries. Rather than have his ship blown to bits, Bainbridge
swallowed his wrath and submitted. On the eve of departure, he had
to submit to another indignity. The colors of Algiers must fly at
the masthead. Again Bainbridge remonstrated and again the Dey looked
casually at his guns trained on the frigate. So off the frigate sailed
with the Dey's flag fluttering from her masthead, and her captain
cursing lustily.

The voyage of fifty-nine days to Constantinople, as Bainbridge recounted
it to the President, was not without its amusing incidents. Bainbridge
regaled the President with accounts of his Mohammedan passengers, who
found much difficulty in keeping their faces to the east while the
frigate went about on a new tack. One of the faithful was delegated
finally to watch the compass so that the rest might continue their
prayers undisturbed. And at Constantinople Bainbridge had curious
experiences with the Moslems. He announced his arrival as from the
United States of America he had hauled down the Dey's flag as soon as
he was out of reach of the batteries. The port officials were greatly
puzzled. What, pray, were the United States? Bainbridge explained that
they were part of the New World which Columbus had discovered. The Grand
Seigneur then showed great interest in the stars of the American flag,
remarking that, as his own was decorated with one of the heavenly
bodies, the coincidence must be a good omen of the future friendly
intercourse of the two nations. Bainbridge did his best to turn his
unpalatable mission to good account, but he returned home in bitter
humiliation. He begged that he might never again be sent to Algiers with
tribute unless he was authorized to deliver it from the cannon's mouth.

The President listened sympathetically to Bainbridge's story, for he
was not unfamiliar with the ways of the Barbary Corsairs and he had long
been of the opinion that tribute only made these pirates bolder and more
insufferable. The Congress of the Confederation, however, had followed
the policy of the European powers and had paid tribute to secure
immunity from attack, and the new Government had simply continued the
policy of the old. In spite of his abhorrence of war, Jefferson held
that coercion in this instance was on the whole cheaper and more
efficacious. Not long after this interview with Bainbridge, President
Jefferson was warned that the Pasha of Tripoli was worrying the American
Consul with importunate demands for more tribute. This African potentate
had discovered that his brother, the Dey of Algiers, had made a better
bargain with the United States. He announced, therefore, that he must
have a new treaty with more tribute or he would declare war. Fearing
trouble from this quarter, the President dispatched a squadron of four
vessels under Commodore Richard Dale to cruise in the Mediterranean,
with orders to protect American commerce. It was the schooner Enterprise
of this squadron which overpowered the Tripolitan cruiser, as Jefferson
recounted in his message to Congress.

The former Pasha of Tripoli had been blessed with three sons, Hasan,
Hamet, and Yusuf. Between these royal brothers, however, there seems
to have been some incompatibility of temperament, for when their father
died (Blessed be Allah!) Yusuf, the youngest, had killed Hasan and had
spared Hamet only because he could not lay hands upon him. Yusuf then
proclaimed himself Pasha. It was Yusuf, the Pasha with this bloody
record, who declared war on the United States, May 10,1801, by cutting
down the flagstaff of the American consulate.

To apply the term war to the naval operations which followed is,
however, to lend specious importance to very trivial events. Commodore
Dale made the most of his little squadron, it is true, convoying
merchantmen through the straits and along the Barbary coast, holding
Tripolitan vessels laden with grain in hopeless inactivity off
Gibraltar, and blockading the port of Tripoli, now with one frigate and
now with another. When the terms of enlistment of Dale's crews expired,
another squadron was gradually assembled in the Mediterranean, under the
command of Captain Richard V. Morris, for Congress had now authorized
the use of the navy for offensive operations, and the Secretary of
the Treasury, with many misgivings, had begun to accumulate his
Mediterranean Fund to meet contingent expenses.

The blockade of Tripoli seems to have been carelessly conducted
by Morris and was finally abandoned. There were undeniably great
difficulties in the way of an effective blockade. The coast afforded few
good harbors; the heavy northerly winds made navigation both difficult
and hazardous; the Tripolitan galleys and gunboats with their shallow
draft could stand close in shore and elude the American frigates; and
the ordnance on the American craft was not heavy enough to inflict any
serious damage on the fortifications guarding the harbor. Probably these
difficulties were not appreciated by the authorities at Washington; at
all events, in the spring of 1803 Morris was suspended from his command
and subsequently lost his commission.

In the squadron of which Commodore Preble now took command was the
Philadelphia, a frigate of thirty-six guns, to which Captain Bainbridge,
eager to square accounts with the Corsairs, had been assigned. Late in
October Bainbridge sighted a Tripolitan vessel standing in shore. He
gave chase at once with perhaps more zeal than discretion, following his
quarry well in shore in the hope of disabling her before she could make
the harbor. Failing to intercept the corsair, he went about and was
heading out to sea when the frigate ran on an uncharted reef and stuck
fast. A worse predicament could scarcely be imagined. Every device known
to Yankee seamen was employed to free the unlucky vessel. "The sails
were promptly laid a-back," Bainbridge reported, "and the forward guns
run aft, in hopes of backing her off, which not producing the desired
effect, orders were given to stave the water in her hold and pump it
out, throw overboard the lumber and heavy articles of every kind, cut
away the anchors... and throw over all the guns, except a few for our
defence.... As a last resource the foremast and main-topgallant mast
were cut away, but without any beneficial effect, and the ship remained
a perfect wreck, exposed to the constant fire of the gunboats, which
could not be returned."

The officers advised Bainbridge that the situation was becoming
intolerable and justified desperate measures. They had been raked by
a galling fire for more than four hours; they had tried every means of
floating the ship; humiliating as the alternative was, they saw no
other course than to strike the colors. All agreed, therefore, that
they should flood the magazine, scuttle the ship, and surrender to the
Tripolitan small craft which hovered around the doomed frigate like so
many vultures.

For the second time off this accursed coast Bainbridge hauled down his
colors. The crews of the Tripolitan gunboats swarmed aboard and set
about plundering right and left. Swords, epaulets, watches, money,
and clothing were stripped from the officers; and if the crew in the
forecastle suffered less it was because they had less to lose. Officers
and men were then tumbled into boats and taken ashore, half-naked and
humiliated beyond words. Escorted by the exultant rabble, these three
hundred luckless Americans were marched to the castle, where the
Pasha sat in state. His Highness was in excellent humor. Three hundred
Americans! He counted them, each worth hundreds of dollars. Allah was
good!

A long, weary bondage awaited the captives. The common seamen
were treated like galley slaves, but the officers were given some
consideration through the intercession of the Danish consul. Bainbridge
was even allowed to correspond with Commodore Preble, and by means of
invisible ink he transmitted many important messages which escaped the
watchful eyes of his captors. Depressed by his misfortune--for no one
then or afterwards held him responsible for the disaster--Bainbridge had
only one thought, and that was revenge. Day and night he brooded over
plans of escape and retribution.

As though to make the captive Americans drink the dregs of humiliation,
the Philadelphia was floated off the reef in a heavy sea and towed
safely into the harbor. The scuttling of the vessel had been hastily
contrived, and the jubilant Tripolitans succeeded in stopping her seams
before she could fill. A frigate like the Philadelphia was a prize the
like of which had never been seen in the Pasha's reign. He rubbed his
hands in glee and taunted her crew.

The sight of the frigate riding peacefully at anchor in the harbor was
torture to poor Bainbridge. In feverish letters he implored Preble to
bombard the town, to sink the gunboats in the harbor, to recapture
the frigate or to burn her at her moorings--anything to take away the
bitterness of humiliation. The latter alternative, indeed, Preble had
been revolving in his own mind.

Toward midnight of February 16, 1804, Bainbridge and his companions were
aroused by the guns of the fort. They sprang to the window and witnessed
the spectacle for which the unhappy captain had prayed long and
devoutly. The Philadelphia was in flames--red, devouring flames, pouring
out of her hold, climbing the rigging, licking her topmasts, forming
fantastic columns--devastating, unconquerable flames--the frigate was
doomed, doomed! And every now and then one of her guns would explode as
though booming out her requiem. Bainbridge was avenged.

How had it all happened? The inception of this daring feat must be
credited to Commodore Preble; the execution fell to young Stephen
Decatur, lieutenant in command of the sloop Enterprise. The plan
was this: to use the Intrepid, a captured Tripolitan ketch, as
the instrument of destruction, equipping her with combustibles and
ammunition, and if possible to burn the Philadelphia and other ships
in the harbor while raking the Pasha's castle with the frigate's
eighteen-pounders. When Decatur mustered his crew on the deck of the
Enterprise and called for volunteers for this exploit, every man jack
stepped forward. Not a man but was spoiling for excitement after months
of tedious inactivity; not an American who did not covet a chance to
avenge the loss of the Philadelphia. But all could not be used, and
Decatur finally selected five officers and sixty-two men. On the night
of the 3rd of February, the Intrepid set sail from Syracuse, accompanied
by the brig Siren, which was to support the boarding party with her
boats and cover their retreat.

Two weeks later, the Intrepid, barely distinguishable in the light of
a new moon, drifted into the harbor of Tripoli. In the distance lay the
unfortunate Philadelphia. The little ketch was now within range of the
batteries, but she drifted on unmolested until within a hundred yards
of the frigate. Then a hail came across the quiet bay. The pilot replied
that he had lost his anchors and asked permission to make fast to the
frigate for the night. The Tripolitan lookout grumbled assent. Ropes
were then thrown out and the vessels were drawing together, when the cry
"Americanas!" went up from the deck of the frigate. In a trice Decatur
and his men had scrambled aboard and overpowered the crew.

It was a crucial moment. If Decatur's instructions had not been
imperative, he would have thrown prudence to the winds and have tried to
cut out the frigate and make off in her. There were those, indeed, who
believed that he might have succeeded. But the Commodore's orders were
to destroy the frigate. There was no alternative. Combustibles were
brought on board, the match applied, and in a few moments the frigate
was ablaze. Decatur and his men had barely time to regain the Intrepid
and to cut her fasts. The whole affair had not taken more than twenty
minutes, and no one was killed or even seriously wounded.

Pulling lustily at their sweeps, the crew of the Intrepid moved her
slowly out of the harbor, in the light of the burning vessel. The guns
of the fort were manned at last and were raining shot and shell wildly
over the harbor. The jack-tars on the Intrepid seemed oblivious to
danger, "commenting upon the beauty of the spray thrown up by the shot
between us and the brilliant light of the ship, rather than calculating
any danger," wrote Midshipman Morris. Then the starboard guns of the
Philadelphia, as though instinct with purpose, began to send hot shot
into the town. The crew yelled with delight and gave three cheers for
the redoubtable old frigate. It was her last action, God bless her! Her
cables soon burned, however, and she drifted ashore, there to blow up in
one last supreme effort to avenge herself. At the entrance of the harbor
the Intrepid found the boats of the Siren, and three days later both
rejoined the squadron.

Thrilling as Decatur's feat was, it brought peace no nearer. The Pasha,
infuriated by the loss of the Philadelphia, was more exorbitant
than ever in his demands. There was nothing for it but to scour the
Mediterranean for Tripolitan ships, maintain the blockade so far as
weather permitted, and await the opportunity to reduce the city of
Tripoli by bombardment. But Tripoli was a hard nut to crack. On the
ocean side it was protected by forts and batteries and the harbor was
guarded by a long line of reefs. Through the openings in this natural
breakwater, the light-draft native craft could pass in and out to harass
the blockading fleet.

It was Commodore Preble's plan to make a carefully concerted attack upon
this stronghold as soon as summer weather conditions permitted. For this
purpose he had strengthened his squadron at Syracuse by purchasing a
number of flat-bottomed gunboats with which he hoped to engage the enemy
in the shallow waters about Tripoli while his larger vessels shelled the
town and batteries. He arrived off the African coast about the middle of
July but encountered adverse weather, so that for several weeks he could
accomplish nothing of consequence. Finally, on the 3rd of August, a
memorable date in the annals of the American navy, he gave the signal
for action.

The new gunboats were deployed in two divisions, one commanded by
Decatur, and fully met expectations by capturing two enemy ships in most
sanguinary, hand-to-hand fighting. Meantime the main squadron drew close
in shore, so close, it is said, that the gunners of shore batteries
could not depress their pieces sufficiently to score hits. All these
preliminaries were watched with bated breath by the officers of the old
Philadelphia from behind their prison bars.

The Pasha had viewed the approach of the American fleet with utter
disdain. He promised the spectators who lined the terraces that they
would witness some rare sport; they should see his gunboats put the
enemy to flight. But as the American gunners began to get the range and
pour shot into the town, and the Constitution with her heavy ordnance
passed and repassed, delivering broadsides within three cables'
length of the batteries, the Pasha's nerves were shattered and he fled
precipitately to his bomb-proof shelter. No doubt the damage inflicted
by this bombardment was very considerable, but Tripoli still defied
the enemy. Four times within the next four weeks Preble repeated these
assaults, pausing after each bombardment to ascertain what terms the
Pasha had to offer; but the wily Yusuf was obdurate, knowing well enough
that, if he waited, the gods of wind and storm would come to his aid and
disperse the enemy's fleet.

It was after the fifth ineffectual assault that Preble determined on a
desperate stroke. He resolved to fit out a fireship and to send her into
the very jaws of death, hoping to destroy the Tripolitan gunboats and
at the same time to damage the castle and the town. He chose for this
perilous enterprise the old Intrepid which had served her captors so
well, and out of many volunteers he gave the command to Captain Richard
Somers and Lieutenant Henry Wadsworth. The little ketch was loaded with
a hundred barrels of gunpowder and a large quantity of combustibles and
made ready for a quick run by the batteries into the harbor. Certain
death it seemed to sail this engine of destruction past the outlying
reefs into the midst of the Tripolitan gunboats; but every precaution
was taken to provide for the escape of the crew. Two rowboats were taken
along and in these frail craft, they believed, they could embark, when
once the torch had been applied, and in the ensuing confusion return to
the squadron.

Somers selected his crew of ten men with care, and at the last moment
consented to let Lieutenant Joseph Israel join the perilous expedition.
On the night of the 4th of September, the Intrepid sailed off in the
darkness toward the mouth of the harbor. Anxious eyes followed the
little vessel, trying to pierce the blackness that soon enveloped her.
As she neared the harbor the shore batteries opened fire; and suddenly
a blinding flash and a terrific explosion told the fate which overtook
her. Fragments of wreckage rose high in the air, the fearful concussion
was felt by every boat in the squadron, and then darkness and awful
silence enfolded the dead and the dying. Two days later the bodies of
the heroic thirteen, mangled beyond recognition, were cast up by the
sea. Even Captain Bainbridge, gazing sorrowfully upon his dead comrades
could not recognize their features. Just what caused the explosion will
never be known. Preble always believed that Tripolitans had attempted
to board the Intrepid and that Somers had deliberately fired the powder
magazine rather than surrender. Be that as it may, no one doubts that
the crew were prepared to follow their commander to self-destruction if
necessary. In deep gloom, the squadron returned to Syracuse, leaving
a few vessels to maintain a fitful blockade off the hated and menacing
coast.

Far away from the sound of Commodore Preble's guns a strange, almost
farcical, intervention in the Tripolitan War was preparing. The scene
shifts to the desert on the east, where William Eaton, consul at Tunis,
becomes the center of interest. Since the very beginning of the war,
this energetic and enterprising Connecticut Yankee had taken a lively
interest in the fortunes of Hamet Karamanli, the legitimate heir to the
throne, who had been driven into exile by Yusuf the pretender. Eaton
loved intrigue as Preble gloried in war. Why not assist Hamet to recover
his throne? Why not, in frontier parlance, start a back-fire that would
make Tripoli too hot for Yusuf? He laid his plans before his superiors
at Washington, who, while not altogether convinced of his competence to
play the king-maker, were persuaded to make him navy agent, subject
to the orders of the commander of the American squadron in the
Mediterranean. Commodore Samuel Barron, who succeeded Preble, was
instructed to avail himself of the cooperation of the ex-Pasha of
Tripoli if he deemed it prudent. In the fall of 1804 Barron dispatched
Eaton in the Argus, Captain Isaac Hull commander, to Alexandria to find
Hamet and to assure him of the cooperation of the American squadron in
the reconquest of his kingdom. Eaton entered thus upon the coveted role:
twenty centuries looked down upon him as they had upon Napoleon.

A mere outline of what followed reads like the scenario of an opera
bouffe. Eaton ransacked Alexandria in search, of Hamet the unfortunate
but failed to find the truant. Then acting on a rumor that Hamet had
departed up the Nile to join the Mamelukes, who were enjoying one of
their seasonal rebellions against constituted authority, Eaton plunged
into the desert and finally brought back the astonished and somewhat
reluctant heir to the throne. With prodigious energy Eaton then
organized an expedition which was to march overland toward Derne, meet
the squadron at the Bay of Bomba, and descend vi et armis upon the
unsuspecting pretender at Tripoli. He even made a covenant with Hamet
promising with altogether unwarranted explicitness that the United
States would use "their utmost exertions" to reestablish him in his
sovereignty. Eaton was to be "general and commander-in-chief of the land
forces." This aggressive Yankee alarmed Hamet, who clearly did not want
his sovereignty badly enough to fight for it.

The international army which the American generalissimo mustered was
a motley array: twenty-five cannoneers of uncertain nationality,
thirty-eight Greeks, Hamet and his ninety followers, and a party of
Arabian horsemen and camel-drivers--all told about four hundred men. The
story of their march across the desert is a modern Anabasis. When the
Arabs were not quarreling among themselves and plundering the rest of
the caravan, they were demanding more pay. Rebuffed they would disappear
with their camels into the fastnesses of the desert, only to reappear
unexpectedly with new importunities. Between Hamet, who was in constant
terror of his life and quite ready to abandon the expedition, and these
mutinous Arabs, Eaton was in a position to appreciate the vicissitudes
of Xenophon and his Ten Thousand. No ordinary person, indeed, could have
surmounted all obstacles and brought his balky forces within sight of
Derne.

Supported by the American fleet which had rendezvoused as agreed in the
Bay of Bomba, the four hundred advanced upon the city. Again the Arab
contingent would have made off into the desert but for the promise of
more money. Hamet was torn by conflicting emotions, in which a desire
to retreat was uppermost. Eaton was, as ever, indefatigable and
indomitable. When his forces were faltering at the crucial moment, he
boldly ordered an assault and carried the defenses of the city. The guns
of the ships in the harbor completed the discomfiture of the enemy,
and the international army took possession of the citadel. Derne won,
however, had to be resolutely defended. Twice within the next four
weeks, Tripolitan forces were beaten back only with the greatest
difficulty. The day after the second assault (June 10th) the frigate
Constellation arrived off Derne with orders which rang down the curtain
on this interlude in the Tripolitan War. Derne was to be evacuated!
Peace had been concluded!

Just what considerations moved the Administration to conclude peace at
a moment when the largest and most powerful American fleet ever placed
under a single command was assembling in the Mediterranean and when the
land expedition was approaching its objective, has never been adequately
explained. Had the President's belligerent spirit oozed away as the
punitive expeditions against Tripoli lost their merely defensive
character and took on the proportions of offensive naval operations? Had
the Administration become alarmed at the drain upon the treasury? Or
did the President wish to have his hands free to deal with those
depredations upon American commerce committed by British and French
cruisers which were becoming far more frequent and serious than ever
the attacks of the Corsairs of the Mediterranean had been? Certain it is
that overtures of peace from the Pasha were welcomed by the very naval
commanders who had been most eager to wrest a victory from the Corsairs.
Perhaps they, too, were wearied by prolonged war with an elusive foe off
a treacherous coast.

How little prepared the Administration was to sustain a prolonged
expedition by land against Tripoli to put Hamet on his throne, appears
in the instructions which Commodore Barron carried to the Mediterranean.
If he could use Eaton and Hamet to make a diversion, well and good;
but he was at the same time to assist Colonel Tobias Lear, American
Consul-General at Algiers, in negotiating terms of peace, if the Pasha
showed a conciliatory spirit. The Secretary of State calculated that
the moment had arrived when peace could probably be secured "without any
price and pecuniary compensation whatever."

Such expectations proved quite unwarranted. The Pasha was ready for
peace, but he still had his price. Poor Bainbridge, writing from
captivity, assured Barron that the Pasha would never let his prisoners
go without a ransom. Nevertheless, Commodore Barron determined to meet
the overtures which the Pasha had made through the Danish consul at
Tripoli. On the 24th of May he put the frigate Essex at the disposal of
Lear, who crossed to Tripoli and opened direct negotiations.

The treaty which Lear concluded on June 4, 1805, was an inglorious
document. It purchased peace, it is true, and the release of some three
hundred sad and woe-begone American sailors. But because the Pasha held
three hundred prisoners, and the United States only a paltry hundred,
the Pasha was to receive sixty thousand dollars. Derne was to be
evacuated and no further aid was to be given to rebellious subjects.
The United States was to endeavor to persuade Hamet to withdraw from the
soil of Tripoli--no very difficult matter--while the Pasha on his part
was to restore Hamet's family to him--at some future time. Nothing was
said about tribute; but it was understood that according to ancient
custom each newly appointed consul should carry to the Pasha a present
not exceeding six thousand dollars.

The Tripolitan War did not end in a blaze of glory for the United
States. It had been waged in the spirit of "not a cent for tribute"; it
was concluded with a thinly veiled payment for peace; and, worst of all,
it did not prevent further trouble with the Barbary States. The war had
been prosecuted with vigor under Preble; it had languished under Barron;
and it ended just when the naval forces were adequate to the task. Yet,
from another point of view, Preble, Decatur, Somers, and their comrades
had not fought in vain. They had created imperishable traditions for the
American navy; they had established a morale in the service; and they
had trained a group of young officers who were to give a good account of
themselves when their foes should be not shifty Tripolitans but sturdy
Britons.



CHAPTER IV. THE SHADOW OF THE FIRST CONSUL

Bainbridge in forlorn captivity at Tripoli, Preble and Barron keeping
anxious watch off the stormy coast of Africa, Eaton marching through the
windswept desert, are picturesque figures that arrest the attention of
the historian; but they seemed like shadowy actors in a remote drama to
the American at home, absorbed in the humdrum activities of trade and
commerce. Through all these dreary years of intermittent war, other
matters engrossed the President and Congress and caught the attention of
the public. Not the rapacious Pasha of Tripoli but the First Consul of
France held the center of the stage. At the same time that news arrived
of the encounter of the Enterprise with the Corsairs came also the
confirmation of rumors current all winter in Europe. Bonaparte had
secured from Spain the retrocession of the province of Louisiana. From
every point of view, as the President remarked, the transfer of this
vast province to a new master was "an inauspicious circumstance." The
shadow of the Corsican, already a menace to the peace of Europe, fell
across the seas.

A strange chain of circumstances linked Bonaparte with the New World.
When he became master of France by the coup d'etat of the 18th Brumaire
(November 9, 1799), he fell heir to many policies which the republic had
inherited from the old regime. Frenchmen had never ceased to lament the
loss of colonial possessions in North America. From time to time the
hope of reviving the colonial empire sprang up in the hearts of the
rulers of France. It was this hope that had inspired Genet's mission to
the United States and more than one intrigue among the pioneers of
the Mississippi Valley, during Washington's second Administration. The
connecting link between the old regime and the new was the statesman
Talleyrand. He had gone into exile in America when the French Revolution
entered upon its last frantic phase and had brought back to France the
plan and purpose which gave consistency to his diplomacy in the office
of Minister of Foreign Affairs, first under the Directory, then under
the First Consul. Had Talleyrand alone nursed this plan, it would have
had little significance in history; but it was eagerly taken up by a
group of Frenchmen who believed that France, having set her house
in order and secured peace in Europe, should now strive for orderly
commercial development. The road to prosperity, they believed, lay
through the acquisition of colonial possessions. The recovery of the
province of Louisiana was an integral part of their programme.

While the Directory was still in power and Bonaparte was pursuing his
ill-fated expedition in Egypt, Talleyrand had tried to persuade the
Spanish Court to cede Louisiana and the Floridas. The only way for
Spain to put a limit to the ambitions of the Americans, he had argued
speciously, was to shut them up within their natural limits. Only so
could Spain preserve the rest of her immense domain. But since Spain
was confessedly unequal to the task, why not let France shoulder the
responsibility? "The French Republic, mistress of these two provinces,
will be a wall of brass forever impenetrable to the combined efforts
of England and America," he assured the Spaniards. But the time was not
ripe.

Such, then, was the policy which Bonaparte inherited when he became
First Consul and master of the destinies of his adopted country. A
dazzling future opened before him. Within a year he had pacified Europe,
crushing the armies of Austria by a succession of brilliant victories,
and laying prostrate the petty states of the Italian peninsula. Peace
with England was also in sight. Six weeks after his victory at Marengo,
Bonaparte sent a special courier to Spain to demand--the word is hardly
too strong--the retrocession of Louisiana.

It was an odd whim of Fate that left the destiny of half the American
continent to Don Carlos IV, whom Henry Adams calls "a kind of Spanish
George III "--virtuous, to be sure, but heavy, obtuse, inconsequential,
and incompetent. With incredible fatuousness the King gave his consent
to a bargain by which he was to yield Louisiana in return for Tuscany
or other Italian provinces which Bonaparte had just overrun with his
armies. "Congratulate me," cried Don Carlos to his Prime Minister, his
eyes sparkling, "on this brilliant beginning of Bonaparte's relations
with Spain. The Prince-presumptive of Parma, my son-in-law and nephew,
a Bourbon, is invited by France to reign, on the delightful banks of
the Arno, over a people who once spread their commerce through the known
world, and who were the controlling power of Italy,--a people mild,
civilized, full of humanity; the classical land of science and art." A
few war-ridden Italian provinces for an imperial domain that stretched
from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Superior and that extended westward no
one knew how far!

The bargain was closed by a preliminary treaty signed at San Ildefonso
on October 1, 1800. Just one year later to a day, the preliminaries of
the Peace of Amiens were signed, removing the menace of England on the
seas. The First Consul was now free to pursue his colonial policy, and
the destiny of the Mississippi Valley hung in the balance. Between the
First Consul and his goal, however, loomed up the gigantic figure of
Toussaint L'Ouverture, a full-blooded negro, who had made himself master
of Santo Domingo and had thus planted himself squarely in the searoad
to Louisiana. The story of this "gilded African," as Bonaparte
contemptuously dubbed him, cannot be told in these pages, because it
involves no less a theme than the history of the French Revolution in
this island, once the most thriving among the colonial possessions of
France in the West Indies. The great plantations of French Santo Domingo
(the western part of the island) had supplied half of Europe with sugar,
coffee, and cotton; three-fourths of the imports from French-American
colonies were shipped from Santo Domingo. As the result of class
struggles between whites and mulattoes for political power, the most
terrific slave insurrection in the Western Hemisphere had deluged
the island in blood. Political convulsions followed which wrecked the
prosperity of the island. Out of this chaos emerged the one man who
seemed able to restore a semblance of order--the Napoleon of Santo
Domingo, whose character, thinks Henry Adams, had a curious resemblance
to that of the Corsican. The negro was, however, a ferocious brute
without the redeeming qualities of the Corsican, though, as a leader
of his race, his intelligence cannot be denied. Though professing
allegiance to the French Republic, Toussaint was driven by circumstances
toward independence. While his Corsican counterpart was executing his
coup d'etat and pacifying Europe, he threw off the mask, imprisoned the
agent of the French Directory, seized the Spanish part of the island,
and proclaimed a new constitution for Santo Domingo, assuming all power
for himself for life and the right of naming his successor. The negro
defied the Corsican.

The First Consul was now prepared to accept the challenge. Santo Domingo
must be recovered and restored to its former prosperity--even if slavery
had to be reestablished--before Louisiana could be made the center of
colonial empire in the West. He summoned Leclerc, a general of excellent
reputation and husband of his beautiful sister Pauline, and gave to
him the command of an immense expedition which was already preparing
at Brest. In the latter part of November, Leclerc set sail with a large
fleet bearing an army of ten thousand men and on January 29, 1802,
arrived off the eastern cape of Santo Domingo. A legend says that
Toussaint looking down on the huge armada exclaimed, "We must perish.
All France is coming to Santo Domingo. It has been deceived; it comes
to take vengeance and enslave the blacks." The negro leader made a
formidable resistance, nevertheless, annihilating one French army
and seriously endangering the expedition. But he was betrayed by his
generals, lured within the French lines, made prisoner, and finally
sent to France. He was incarcerated in a French fortress in the Jura
Mountains and there perished miserably in 1803.

The significance of these events in the French West Indies was not lost
upon President Jefferson. The conquest of Santo Domingo was the prelude
to the occupation of Louisiana. It would be only a change of European
proprietors, of absentee landlords, to be sure; but there was a world
of difference between France, bent upon acquiring a colonial empire and
quiescent Spain, resting on her past achievements. The difference was
personified by Bonaparte and Don Carlos. The sovereignty of the lower
Mississippi country could never be a matter of indifference to those
settlers of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio who in the year 1799 sent down
the Mississippi in barges, keel-boats, and flatboats one hundred and
twenty thousand pounds of tobacco, ten thousand barrels of flour,
twenty-two thousand pounds of hemp, five hundred barrels of cider, and
as many more of whiskey, for transshipment and export. The right of
navigation of the Mississippi was a diplomatic problem bequeathed by
the Confederation. The treaty with Spain in 1795 had not solved the
question, though it had established a modus vivendi. Spain had conceded
to Americans the so-called right of deposit for three years--that is,
the right to deposit goods at New Orleans free of duty and to transship
them to ocean-going vessels; and the concession, though never definitely
renewed, was tacitly continued. No; the people of the trans-Alleghany
country could not remain silent and unprotesting witnesses to the
retrocession of Louisiana.

Nor was Jefferson's interest in the Mississippi problem of recent
origin. Ten years earlier as Secretary of State, while England and
Spain seemed about to come to blows over the Nootka Sound affair, he had
approached both France and Spain to see whether the United States might
not acquire the island of New Orleans or at least a port near the mouth
of the river "with a circum-adjacent territory, sufficient for its
support, well-defined, and extraterritorial to Spain." In case of war,
England would in all probability conquer Spanish Louisiana. How
much better for Spain to cede territory on the eastern side of the
Mississippi to a safe neighbor like the United States and thereby make
sure of her possessions on the western waters of that river. It was "not
our interest," wrote Mr. Jefferson, "to cross the Mississippi for ages!"

It was, then, a revival of an earlier idea when President Jefferson,
officially through Robert R. Livingston, Minister to France, and
unofficially through a French gentleman, Dupont de Nemours, sought to
impress upon the First Consul the unwisdom of his taking possession of
Louisiana, without ceding to the United States at least New Orleans and
the Floridas as a "palliation." Even so, France would become an object
of suspicion, a neighbor with whom Americans were bound to quarrel.

Undeterred by this naive threat, doubtless considering its source, the
First Consul pressed Don Carlos for the delivery of Louisiana. The King
procrastinated but at length gave his promise on condition that France
should pledge herself not to alienate the province. Of course, replied
the obliging Talleyrand. The King's wishes were identical with the
intentions of the French government. France would never alienate
Louisiana. The First Consul pledged his word. On October 15, 1802, Don
Carlos signed the order that delivered Louisiana to France.

While the President was anxiously awaiting the results of his diplomacy,
news came from Santo Domingo that Leclerc and his army had triumphed
over Toussaint and his faithless generals, only to succumb to a far more
insidious foe. Yellow fever had appeared in the summer of 1802 and had
swept away the second army dispatched by Bonaparte to take the place
of the first which had been consumed in the conquest of the island.
Twenty-four thousand men had been sacrificed at the very threshold of
colonial empire, and the skies of Europe were not so clear as they had
been. And then came the news of Leclerc's death (November 2, 1802).
Exhausted by incessant worry, he too had succumbed to the pestilence;
and with him, as events proved, passed Bonaparte's dream of colonial
empire in the New World.

Almost at the same time with these tidings a report reached the settlers
of Kentucky and Tennessee that the Spanish intendant at New Orleans had
suspended the right of deposit. The Mississippi was therefore closed to
western commerce. Here was the hand of the Corsican.* Now they knew what
they had to expect from France. Why not seize the opportunity and strike
before the French legions occupied the country? The Spanish garrisons
were weak; a few hundred resolute frontiersmen would speedily overpower
them.

     * It is now clear enough that Bonaparte was not directly
     responsible for this act of the Spanish intendant. See
     Channing, "History of the United States," vol. IV, p. 312,
     and Note, 326-327.


Convinced that he must resort to stiffer measures if he would not be
hurried into hostilities, President Jefferson appointed James Monroe as
Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to France and Spain.
He was to act with Robert Livingston at Paris and with Charles Pinckney,
Minister to Spain, "in enlarging and more effectually securing our
rights and interests in the river Mississippi and in the territories
eastward thereof"--whatever these vague terms might mean. The President
evidently read much into them, for he assured Monroe that on the event
of his mission depended the future destinies of the Republic.

Two months passed before Monroe sailed with his instructions. He had
ample time to study them, for he was thirty days in reaching the coast
of France. The first aim of the envoys was to procure New Orleans and
the Floridas, bidding as high as ten million dollars if necessary.
Failing in this object, they were then to secure the right of deposit
and such other desirable concessions as they could. To secure New
Orleans, they might even offer to guarantee the integrity of Spanish
possessions on the west bank of the Mississippi. Throughout the
instructions ran the assumption that the Floridas had either passed with
Louisiana into the hands of France or had since been acquired.

While the packet bearing Monroe was buffeting stormy seas, the policy of
Bonaparte underwent a transformation--an abrupt transformation it seemed
to Livingston. On the 12th of March the American Minister witnessed an
extraordinary scene in Madame Bonaparte's drawing-room. Bonaparte and
Lord Whitworth, the British Ambassador, were in conversation, when the
First Consul remarked, "I find, my Lord, your nation want war again."
"No, Sir," replied the Ambassador, "we are very desirous of peace." "I
must either have Malta or war," snapped Bonaparte. The amazed onlookers
soon spread the rumor that Europe was again to be plunged into war; but,
viewed in the light of subsequent events, this incident had even greater
significance; it marked the end of Bonaparte's colonial scheme.
Though the motives for this change of front will always be a matter
of conjecture, they are somewhat clarified by the failure of the Santo
Domingo expedition. Leclerc was dead; the negroes were again in
control; the industries of the island were ruined; Rochambeau, Leclerc's
successor, was clamoring for thirty-five thousand more men to reconquer
the island; the expense was alarming--and how meager the returns for
this colonial venture! Without Santo Domingo, Louisiana would be of
little use; and to restore prosperity to the West India island--even
granting that its immediate conquest were possible--would demand many
years and large disbursements. The path to glory did not lie in this
direction. In Europe, as Henry Adams observes, "war could be made to
support war; in Santo Domingo peace alone could but slowly repair some
part of this frightful waste."

There may well have been other reasons for Bonaparte's change of front.
If he read between the lines of a memoir which Pontalba, a wealthy and
well-informed resident of Louisiana, sent to him, he must have realized
that this province, too, while it might become an inexhaustible source
of wealth for France, might not be easy to hold. There was here, it is
true, no Toussaint L'Ouverture to lead the blacks in insurrection; but
there was a white menace from the north which was far more serious.
These Kentuckians, said Pontalba trenchantly, must be watched, cajoled,
and brought constantly under French influence through agents. There were
men among them who thought of Louisiana "as the highroad to the conquest
of Mexico." Twenty or thirty thousand of these westerners on flatboats
could come down the river and sweep everything before them. To be sure,
they were an undisciplined horde with slender Military equipment--a
striking contrast to the French legions; but, added the Frenchman, "a
great deal of skill in shooting, the habit of being in the woods and of
enduring fatigue--this is what makes up for every deficiency."

And if Bonaparte had ever read a remarkable report of the Spanish
Governor Carondelet, he must have divined that there was something
elemental and irresistible in this down-the-river-pressure of the people
of the West. "A carbine and a little maize in a sack are enough for an
American to wander about in the forests alone for a whole month. With
his carbine, he kills the wild cattle and deer for food and defends
himself from the savages. The maize dampened serves him in lieu of
bread .... The cold does not affright him. When a family tires of one
location, it moves to another, and there it settles with the same ease.
Thus in about eight years the settlement of Cumberland has been formed,
which is now about to be created into a state."

On Easter Sunday, 1803, Bonaparte revealed his purpose, which had
doubtless been slowly maturing, to two of his ministers, one of whom,
Barbs Marbois, was attached to the United States through residence, his
devotion to republican principles, and marriage to an American wife.
The First Consul proposed to cede Louisiana to the United States: he
considered the colony as entirely lost. What did they think of the
proposal? Marbois, with an eye to the needs of the Treasury of which
he was the head, favored the sale of the province; and next day he
was directed to interview Livingston at once. Before he could do so,
Talleyrand, perhaps surmising in his crafty way the drift of the First
Consul's thoughts, startled Livingston by asking what the United States
would give for the whole of Louisiana. Livingston, who was in truth
hard of hearing, could not believe his ears. For months he had talked,
written, and argued in vain for a bit of territory near the mouth of the
Mississippi, and here was an imperial domain tossed into his lap, as
it were. Livingston recovered from his surprise sufficiently to name
a trifling sum which Talleyrand declared too low. Would Mr. Livingston
think it over? He, Talleyrand, really did not speak from authority. The
idea had struck him, that was all.

Some days later in a chance conversation with Marbois, Livingston spoke
of his extraordinary interview with Talleyrand. Marbois intimated that
he was not ignorant of the affair and invited Livingston to a further
conversation. Although Monroe had already arrived in Paris and was now
apprised of this sudden turn of affairs, Livingston went alone to the
Treasury Office and there in conversation, which was prolonged until
midnight, he fenced with Marbois over a fair price for Louisiana.
The First Consul, said Marbois, demanded one hundred million francs.
Livingston demurred at this huge sum. The United States did not want
Louisiana but was willing to give ten million dollars for New Orleans
and the Floridas. What would the United States give then? asked Marbois.
Livingston replied that he would have to confer with Monroe. Finally
Marbois suggested that if they would name sixty million francs, (less
than $12,000,000) and assume claims which Americans had against the
French Treasury for twenty million more, he would take the offer under
advisement. Livingston would not commit himself, again insisting that he
must consult Monroe.

So important did this interview seem to Livingston that he returned
to his apartment and wrote a long report to Madison without waiting
to confer with Monroe. It was three o'clock in the morning when he was
done. "We shall do all we can to cheapen the purchase," he wrote, "but
my present sentiment is that we shall buy."

History does not record what Monroe said when his colleague revealed
these midnight secrets. But in the prolonged negotiations which followed
Monroe, though ill, took his part, and in the end, on April 30, 1803,
set his hand to the treaty which ceded Louisiana to the United States on
the terms set by Marbois. In two conventions bearing the same date, the
commissioners bound the United States to pay directly to France the sum
of sixty million francs ($11,250,000) and to assume debts owed by France
to American citizens, estimated at not more than twenty million francs
($3,750,000). Tradition says that after Marbois, Monroe, and Livingston
had signed their names, Livingston remarked: "We have lived long, but
this is the noblest work of our lives.... From this day the United
States take their place among the powers of the first rank."



CHAPTER V. IN PURSUIT OF THE FLORIDAS

The purchase of Louisiana was a diplomatic triumph of the first
magnitude. No American negotiators have ever acquired so much for
so little; yet, oddly enough, neither Livingston nor Monroe had the
slightest notion of the vast extent of the domain which they had
purchased. They had bought Louisiana "with the same extent that it is
now in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France possessed it,
and such as it should be after the treaties subsequently entered into
between Spain and other States," but what its actual boundaries were
they did not know. Considerably disturbed that the treaty contained
no definition of boundaries, Livingston sought information from the
enigmatical Talleyrand. "What are the eastern bounds of Louisiana?"
he asked. "I do not know," replied Talleyrand; "you must take it as we
received it." "But what did you mean to take?" urged Livingston somewhat
naively. "I do not know," was the answer. "Then you mean that we shall
construe it in our own way?" "I can give you no direction," said the
astute Frenchman. "You have made a noble bargain for yourselves, and I
suppose you will make the most of it." And with these vague assurances
Livingston had to be satisfied.

The first impressions of Jefferson were not much more definite, for,
while he believed that the acquired territory more than doubled the area
of the United States, he could only describe it as including all the
waters of the Missouri and the Mississippi. He started at once, however,
to collect information about Louisiana. He prepared a list of queries
which he sent to reputable persons living in or near New Orleans.
The task was one in which he delighted: to accumulate and diffuse
information--a truly democratic mission gave him more real pleasure than
to reign in the Executive Mansion. His interest in the trans-Mississippi
country, indeed, was not of recent birth; he had nursed for years an
insatiable curiosity about the source and course of the Missouri; and in
this very year he had commissioned his secretary, Meriwether Lewis,
to explore the great river and its tributaries, to ascertain if they
afforded a direct and practicable water communication across the
continent.

The outcome of the President's questionnaire was a report submitted
to Congress in the fall of 1803, which contained much interesting
information and some entertaining misinformation. The statistical matter
we may put to one side, as contemporary readers doubtless did; certain
impressions are worth recording. New Orleans, the first and immediate
object of negotiations, contained, it would appear, only a small part of
the population of the province, which numbered some twenty or more
rural districts. On the river above the city were the plantations of the
so-called Upper Coast, inhabited mostly by slaves whose Creole masters
lived in town; then, as one journeyed upstream appeared the first and
second German Coasts, where dwelt the descendants of those Germans who
had been brought to the province by John Law's Mississippi Bubble, an
industrious folk making their livelihood as purveyors to the city. Every
Friday night they loaded their small craft with produce and held market
next day on the river front at New Orleans, adding another touch to the
picturesque groups which frequented the levees. Above the German Coasts
were the first and second Acadian Coasts, populated by the numerous
progeny of those unhappy refugees who were expelled from Nova Scotia in
1755. Acadian settlements were scattered also along the backwaters west
of the great river: Bayou Lafourche was lined with farms which were
already producing cotton; near Bayou Teche and Bayou Vermilion--the
Attakapas country--were cattle ranges; and to the north was the richer
grazing country known as Opelousas.

Passing beyond the Iberville River, which was indeed no river at all but
only an overflow of the Mississippi, the traveler up-stream saw on
his right hand "the government of Baton Rouge" with its scattered
settlements and mixed population of French, Spanish, and
Anglo-Americans; and still farther on, the Spanish parish of West
Feliciana, accounted a part of West Florida and described by President
Jefferson as the garden of the cotton-growing region. Beyond this point
the President's description of Louisiana became less confident, as
reliable sources of information failed him. His credulity, however, led
him to make one amazing statement, which provoked the ridicule of his
political opponents, always ready to pounce upon the slips of this
philosopher-president. "One extraordinary fact relative to salt must
not be omitted," he wrote in all seriousness. "There exists, about one
thousand miles up the Missouri, and not far from that river, a salt
mountain! The existence of such a mountain might well be questioned,
were it not for the testimony of several respectable and enterprising
traders who have visited it, and who have exhibited several bushels of
the salt to the curiosity of the people of St. Louis, where some of it
still remains. A specimen of the salt has been sent to Marietta. This
mountain is said to be 180 miles long and 45 in width, composed of solid
rock salt, without any trees or even shrubs on it." One Federalist wit
insisted that this salt mountain must be Lot's wife; another sent an
epigram to the United States Gazette which ran as follows:

Herostratus of old, to eternalize his name Sat the temple of Diana all
in a flame; But Jefferson lately of Bonaparte bought, To pickle his
fame, a mountain of salt.

Jefferson was too much of a philosopher to be disturbed by such gibes;
but he did have certain constitutional doubts concerning the treaty.
How, as a strict constructionist, was he to defend the purchase of
territory outside the limits of the United States, when the Constitution
did not specifically grant such power to the Federal Government? He had
fought the good fight of the year 1800 to oust Federalist administrators
who by a liberal interpretation were making waste paper of the
Constitution. Consistency demanded either that he should abandon the
treaty or that he should ask for the powers which had been denied to
the Federal Government. He chose the latter course and submitted to his
Cabinet and to his followers in Congress a draft of an amendment to the
Constitution conferring the desired powers. To his dismay they treated
his proposal with indifference, not to say coldness. He pressed his
point, redrafted his amendment, and urged its consideration once again.
Meantime letters from Livingston and Monroe warned him that delay was
hazardous; the First Consul might change his mind, as he was wont to do
on slight provocation. Privately Jefferson was deeply chagrined, but he
dared not risk the loss of Louisiana. With what grace he could summon,
he acquiesced in the advice of his Virginia friends who urged him to let
events take their course and to drop the amendment, but he continued to
believe that such a course if persisted in would make blank paper of
the Constitution. He could only trust, as he said in a letter, "that the
good sense of the country will correct the evil of construction when it
shall produce its ill effects."

The debates on the treaty in, Congress make interesting reading for
those who delight in legal subtleties, for many nice questions of
constitutional law were involved. Even granting that territory could be
acquired, there was the further question whether the treaty-making power
was competent irrespective of the House of Representatives. And what,
pray, was meant by incorporating this new province in the Union? Was
Louisiana to be admitted into the Union as a State by President and
Senate? Or was it to be governed as a dependency? And how could the
special privileges given to Spanish and French ships in the port of New
Orleans be reconciled with that provision of the Constitution which,
expressly forbade any preference to be given, by any regulation of
commerce or revenue, to the ports of one State over those of another?
The exigencies of politics played havoc with consistency, so that
Republicans supported the ratification of the treaty with erstwhile
Federalist arguments, while Federalists used the old arguments of the
Republicans. Yet the Senate advised the ratification by a decisive vote
and with surprising promptness; and Congress passed a provisional act
authorizing the President to take over and govern the territory of
Louisiana.

The vast province which Napoleon had tossed so carelessly into the lap
of the young Western Republic was, strangely enough, not yet formally in
his possession. The expeditionary force under General Victor which
was to have occupied Louisiana had never left port. M. Pierre Clement
Laussat, however, who was to have accompanied the expedition to assume
the duties of prefect in the province, had sailed alone in January,
1803, to receive the province from the Spanish authorities. If this
lonely Frenchman on mission possessed the imagination of his race,
he must have had some emotional thrills as he reflected that he was
following the sea trail of La Salle and Iberville through the warm
waters of the Gulf of Mexico. He could not have entered the Great River
and breasted its yellow current for a hundred miles, without seeing in
his mind's eye those phantom figures of French and Spanish adventurers
who had voyaged up and down its turbid waters in quest of gold or of
distant Cathay. As his vessel dropped anchor opposite the town which
Bienville had founded, Laussat must have felt that in some degree he was
"heir of all the ages"; yet he was in fact face to face with conditions
which, whatever their historic antecedents, were neither French nor
Spanish. On the water front of New Orleans, he counted "forty-five
Anglo-American ships to ten French." Subsequent experiences deepened
this first impression: it was not Spanish nor French influence which had
made this port important but those "three hundred thousand planters who
in twenty years have swarmed over the eastern plains of the Mississippi
and have cultivated them, and who have no other outlet than this river
and no other port than New Orleans."

The outward aspect of the city, however, was certainly not American.
From the masthead of his vessel Laussat might have seen over a thousand
dwellings of varied architecture: houses of adobe, houses of brick,
houses of stucco; some with bright colors, others with the harmonious
half tones produced by sun and rain. No American artisans constructed
the picturesque balconies, the verandas, and belvederes which suggested
the semitropical existence that Nature forced upon these city dwellers
for more than half the year. No American craftsmen wrought the artistic
ironwork of balconies, gateways, and window gratings. Here was an
atmosphere which suggested the Old World rather than the New. The
streets which ran at right angles were reminiscent of the old regime:
Conde, Conti, Dauphine, St. Louis, Chartres, Bourbon, Orleans--all
these names were to be found within the earthen rampart which formed the
defense of the city.

The inhabitants were a strange mixture: Spanish, French, American,
black, quadroon, and Creole. No adequate definition has ever been
formulated for "Creole," but no one familiar with the type could fail
to distinguish this caste from those descended from the first French
settlers or from the Acadians. A keen observer like Laussat discerned
speedily that the Creole had little place in the commercial life of
the city. He was your landed proprietor, who owned some of the choicest
parts of the city and its growing suburbs, and whose plantations lined
both banks of the Mississippi within easy reach from the city. At the
opposite end of the social scale were the quadroons--the demimonde of
this little capital--and the negro slaves. Between these extremes were
the French and, in ever-growing numbers, the Americans who plied
every trade, while the Spaniards constituted the governing class.
Deliberately, in the course of time, as befitted a Spanish gentleman and
officer, the Marquis de Casa Calvo, resplendent with regalia, arrived
from Havana to act with Governor Don Juan Manuel de Salcedo in
transferring the province. A season of gayety followed in which the
Spaniards did their best to conceal any chagrin they may have felt at
the relinquishment--happily, it might not be termed the surrender--of
Louisiana. And finally on the 30th of November, Governor Salcedo
delivered the keys of the city to Laussat, in the hall of the Cabildo,
while Marquis de Casa Calvo from the balcony absolved the people in
Place d'Armes below from their allegiance to his master, the King of
Spain.

For the brief term of twenty days Louisiana was again a province of
France. Within that time Laussat bestirred himself to gallicize
the colony, so far as forms could do so. He replaced the cabildo or
hereditary council by a municipal council; he restored the civil code;
he appointed French officers to civil and military posts. And all
this he did in the full consciousness that American commissioners were
already on their way to receive from him in turn the province which his
wayward master had sold. On December 20, 1803, young William Claiborne,
Governor of the Mississippi Territory, and General James Wilkinson, with
a few companies of soldiers, entered and received from Laussat the keys
of the city and the formal surrender of Lower Louisiana. On the Place
d'Armes, promptly at noon, the tricolor was hauled down and the American
Stars and Stripes took its place. Louisiana had been transferred for the
sixth and last time. But what were the metes and bounds of this
province which had been so often bought and sold? What had Laussat been
instructed to take and give? What, in short, was Louisiana?

The elation which Livingston and Monroe felt at acquiring unexpectedly
a vast territory beyond the Mississippi soon gave way to a disquieting
reflection. They had been instructed to offer ten million dollars for
New Orleans and the Floridas: they had pledged fifteen millions for
Louisiana without the Floridas. And they knew that it was precisely West
Florida, with the eastern bank of the Mississippi and the Gulf littoral,
that was most ardently desired by their countrymen of the West. But
might not Louisiana include West Florida? Had Talleyrand not professed
ignorance of the eastern boundary? And had he not intimated that
the Americans would make the most of their bargain? Within a month
Livingston had convinced himself that the United States could rightfully
claim West Florida to the Perdido River, and he soon won over Monroe to
his way of thinking. They then reported to Madison that "on a thorough
examination of the subject" they were persuaded that they had purchased
West Florida as a part of Louisiana.

By what process of reasoning had Livingston and Monroe reached this
satisfying conclusion? Their argument proceeded from carefully chosen
premises. France, it was said, had once held Louisiana and the Floridas
together as part of her colonial empire in America; in 1763 she had
ceded New Orleans and the territory west of the Mississippi to Spain,
and at the same time she had transferred the Floridas to Great Britain;
in 1783 Great Britain had returned the Floridas to Spain which were then
reunited to Louisiana as under French rule. Ergo, when Louisiana was
retro-ceded "with the same extent that it now has in the hands of Spain,
and that it had when France possessed it," it must have included West
Florida.

That Livingston was able to convince himself by this logic, does not
speak well for his candor or intelligence. He was well aware that
Bonaparte had failed to persuade Don Carlos to include the Floridas
in the retrocession; he had tried to insert in the treaty an article
pledging the First Consul to use his good offices to obtain the Floridas
for the United States; and in his midnight dispatch to Madison, with
the prospect of acquiring Louisiana before him, he had urged the
advisability of exchanging this province for the more desirable
Floridas. Livingston therefore could not, and did not, say that Spain
intended to cede the Floridas as a part of Louisiana, but that she
had inadvertently done so and that Bonaparte might have claimed West
Florida, if he had been shrewd enough to see his opportunity. The United
States was in no way prevented from pressing this claim because the
First Consul had not done so. The fact that France had in 1763 actually
dismembered her colonial empire and that Louisiana as ceded to Spain
extended only to the Iberville, was given no weight in Livingston's
deductions.

Having the will to believe, Jefferson and Madison became converts
to Livingston's faith. Madison wrote at once that in view of these
developments no proposal to exchange Louisiana for the Floridas should
be entertained; the President declared himself satisfied that "our right
to the Perdido is substantial and can be opposed by a quibble on form
only"; and John Randolph, duly coached by the Administration, flatly
declared in the House of Representatives that "We have not only obtained
the command of the mouth of the Mississippi, but of the Mobile, with its
widely extended branches; and there is not now a single stream of note
rising within the United States and falling into the Gulf of Mexico
which is not entirely our own, the Appalachicola excepted." From this
moment to the end of his administration, the acquisition of West Florida
became a sort of obsession with Jefferson. His pursuit of this phantom
claim involved American diplomats in strange adventures and at times
deflected the whole course of domestic politics.

The first luckless minister to engage in this baffling quest was James
Monroe, who had just been appointed Minister to the Court of St. James.
He was instructed to take up the threads of diplomacy at Madrid where
they were getting badly tangled in the hands of Charles Pinckney, who
was a better politician than a diplomat. "Your inquiries may also be
directed," wrote Madison, "to the question whether any, and how much, of
what passes for West Florida be fairly included in the territory ceded
to us by France." Before leaving Paris on this mission, Monroe made
an effort to secure the good offices of the Emperor, but he found
Talleyrand cold and cynical as ever. He was given to understand that it
was all a question of money; if the United States were willing to pay
the price, the Emperor could doubtless have the negotiations transferred
to Paris and put the deal through. A loan of seventy million livres to
Spain, which would be passed over at once to France, would probably put
the United States into possession of the coveted territory. As an honest
man Monroe shrank from this sort of jobbery; besides, he could hardly
offer to buy a territory which his Government asserted it had already
bought with Louisiana. With the knowledge that he was defying Napoleon,
or at least his ministers, he started for Madrid to play a lone hand in
what he must have known was a desperate game.

The conduct of the Administration during the next few months was hardly
calculated to smooth Monroe's path. In the following February (1804)
President Jefferson put his signature to an act which was designed
to give effect to the laws of the United States in the newly acquired
territory. The fourth section of this so-called Mobile Act included
explicitly within the revenue district of Mississippi all the navigable
waters lying within the United States and emptying into the Gulf east
of the Mississippi--an extraordinary provision indeed, since unless the
Floridas were a part of the United States there were no rivers within
the limits of the United States emptying into the Gulf east of the
Mississippi. The eleventh section was even more remarkable since it gave
the President authority to erect Mobile Bay and River into a separate
revenue district and to designate a port of entry.

This cool appropriation of Spanish territory was too much for the
excitable Spanish Minister, Don Carlos Martinez Yrujo, who burst into
Madison's office one morning with a copy of the act in his hand and with
angry protests on his lips. He had been on excellent terms with Madison
and had enjoyed Jefferson's friendship and hospitality at Monticello;
but he was the accredited representative of His Catholic Majesty and
bound to defend his sovereignty. He fairly overwhelmed the timid Madison
with reproaches that could never be forgiven or forgotten; and from this
moment he was persona non grata in the Department of State.

Madison doubtless took Yrujo's reproaches more to heart just because
he felt himself in a false position. The Administration had allowed the
transfer of Louisiana to be made in the full knowledge that Laussat had
been instructed to claim Louisiana as far as the Rio Bravo on the
west but only as far as the Iberville on the east. Laussat had finally
admitted as much confidentially to the American commissioners. Yet
the Administration had not protested. And now it was acting on the
assumption that it might dispose of the Gulf littoral, the West Florida
coast, as it pleased. Madison was bound to admit in his heart of hearts
that Yrujo had reason to be angry. A few weeks later the President
relieved the tense situation, though at the price of an obvious evasion,
by issuing a proclamation which declared all the shores and waters
"lying _Within the Boundaries of The United States_" * to be a revenue
district with Fort Stoddert as the port of entry. But the mischief had
been done and no constructive interpretation of the act by the President
could efface the impression first made upon the mind of Yrujo. Congress
had meant to appropriate West Florida and the President had suffered the
bill to become law.

     * The italics are President Jefferson's.


Nor was Pinckney's conduct at Madrid likely to make Monroe's mission
easier. Two years before, in 1802, he had negotiated a convention by
which Spain agreed to pay indemnity for depredations committed by her
cruisers in the late war between France and the United States. This
convention had been ratified somewhat tardily by the Senate and
now waited on the pleasure of the Spanish Government. Pinckney was
instructed to press for the ratification by Spain, which was taken for
granted; but he was explicitly warned to leave the matter of the Florida
claims to Monroe. When he presented the demands of his Government to
Cevallos, the Foreign Minister, he was met in turn with a demand for
explanations. What, pray, did his Government mean by this act? To
Pinckney's astonishment, he was confronted with a copy of the Mobile
Act, which Yrujo had forwarded. The South Carolinian replied, in a tone
that was not calculated to soothe ruffled feelings, that he had already
been advised that West Florida was included in the Louisiana purchase
and had so reported to Cevallos. He urged that the two subjects be kept
separate and begged His Excellency to have confidence in the honor and
justice of the United States. Delays followed until Cevallos finally,
declared sharply that the treaty would be ratified only on several
conditions, one of which was that the Mobile Act should be revoked.
Pinckney then threw discretion to the winds and announced that he would
ask for his passports; but his bluster did not change Spanish policy,
and he dared not carry out his threat.

It was under these circumstances that Monroe arrived in Madrid on his
difficult mission. He was charged with the delicate task of persuading
a Government whose pride had been touched to the quick to ratify the
claims convention, to agree to a commission to adjudicate other claims
which it had refused to recognize, to yield West Florida as a part of
the Louisiana purchase, and to accept two million dollars for the rest
of Florida east of the Perdido River. In preparing these extraordinary
instructions, the Secretary of State labored under the hallucination
that Spain, on the verge of war with England, would pay handsomely for
the friendship of the United States, quite forgetting that the real
master of Spain was at Paris.

The story of Monroe's five weary months in Spain may be briefly told. He
was in the unstrategic position of one who asks for everything and can
concede nothing. Only one consideration could probably have forced the
Spanish Government to yield, and that was fear. Spain had now declared
war upon England and might reasonably be supposed to prefer a solid
accommodation with the United States, as Madison intimated, rather than
add to the number of her foes. But Cevallos exhibited no signs of fear;
on the contrary he professed an amiable willingness to discuss every
point at great length. Every effort on the part of the American to reach
a conclusion was adroitly eluded. It was a game in which the Spaniard
had no equal. At last, when indubitable assurances came to Monroe
from Paris that Napoleon would not suffer Spain to make the slightest
concession either in the matter of spoliation claims or any other
claims, and that, in the event of a break between the United States and
Spain, he would surely take the part of Spain, Monroe abandoned the game
and asked for his passports. Late in May he returned to Paris, where he
joined with General Armstrong, who had succeeded Livingston, in urging
upon the Administration the advisability of seizing Texas, leaving West
Florida alone for the present.

Months of vacillation followed the failure of Monroe's mission. The
President could not shake off his obsession, and yet he lacked the
resolution to employ force to take either Texas, which he did not want
but was entitled to, or West Florida which he ardently desired but whose
title was in dispute. It was not until November of the following year
(1805) that the Administration determined on a definite policy. In a
meeting of the Cabinet "I proposed," Jefferson recorded in a memorandum,
"we should address ourselves to France, informing her it was a last
effort at amicable settlement with Spain and offer to her, or through
her," a sum not to exceed five million dollars for the Floridas. The
chief obstacle in the way of this programme was the uncertain mood of
Congress, for a vote of credit was necessary and Congress might not take
kindly to Napoleon as intermediary. Jefferson then set to work to draft
a message which would "alarm the fears of Spain by a vigorous language,
in order to induce her to join us in appealing to the interference of
the Emperor."

The message sent to Congress alluded briefly to the negotiations with
Spain and pointed out the unsatisfactory relations which still obtained.
Spain had shown herself unwilling to adjust claims or the boundaries
of Louisiana; her depredations on American commerce had been renewed;
arbitrary duties and vexatious searches continued to obstruct American
shipping on the Mobile; inroads had been made on American territory;
Spanish officers and soldiers had seized the property of American
citizens. It was hoped that Spain would view these injuries in
their proper light; if not, then the United States "must join in the
unprofitable contest of trying which party can do the other the most
harm. Some of these injuries may perhaps admit a peaceable remedy. Where
that is competent, it is always the most desirable. But some of them are
of a nature to be met by force only, and all of them may lead to it."

Coming from the pen of a President who had declared that peace was his
passion, these belligerent words caused some bewilderment but, on the
whole, very considerable satisfaction in Republican circles, where the
possibility of rupture had been freely discussed. The people of the
Southwest took the President at his word and looked forward with
enthusiasm to a war which would surely overthrow Spanish rule in the
Floridas and yield the coveted lands along the Gulf of Mexico. The
country awaited with eagerness those further details which the President
had promised to set forth in another message. These were felt to be
historic moments full of dramatic possibilities.

Three days later, behind closed doors, Congress listened to the special
message which was to put the nation to the supreme test. Alas for those
who had expected a trumpet call to battle. Never was a state paper
better calculated to wither martial spirit. In dull fashion it recounted
the events of Monroe's unlucky mission and announced the advance of
Spanish forces in the Southwest, which, however, the President had not
repelled, conceiving that "Congress alone is constitutionally invested
with the power of changing our condition from peace to war." He had
"barely instructed" our forces "to patrol the borders actually delivered
to us." It soon dawned upon the dullest intelligence that the President
had not the slightest intention to recommend a declaration of war. On
the contrary, he was at pains to point out the path to peace. There
was reason to believe that France was now disposed to lend her aid in
effecting a settlement with Spain, and "not a moment should be lost
in availing ourselves of it." "Formal war is not necessary, it is not
probable it will follow; but the protection of our citizens, the spirit
and honor of our country, require that force should be interposed to
a certain degree. It will probably contribute to advance the object of
peace."

After the warlike tone of the first message, this sounded like a
retreat. It outraged the feelings of the war party. It was, to their
minds, an anticlimax, a pusillanimous surrender. None was angrier than
John Randolph of Virginia, hitherto the leader of the forces of the
Administration in the House. He did not hesitate to express his disgust
with "this double set of opinions and principles"; and his anger mounted
when he learned that as Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means
he was expected to propose and carry through an appropriation of two
million dollars for the purchase of Florida. Further interviews with the
President and the Secretary of State did not mollify him, for, according
to his version of these conversations, he was informed that France would
not permit Spain to adjust her differences with the United States, which
had, therefore, the alternative of paying France handsomely or of facing
a war with both France and Spain. Then Randolph broke loose from
all restraint and swore by all his gods that he would not assume
responsibility for "delivering the public purse to the first cut-throat
that demanded it."

Randolph's opposition to the Florida programme was more than an
unpleasant episode in Jefferson's administration; it proved to be the
beginning of a revolt which was fatal to the President's diplomacy, for
Randolph passed rapidly from passive to active opposition and fought
the two-million dollar bill to the bitter end. When the House finally
outvoted him and his faction, soon to be known as the "Quids," and the
Senate had concurred, precious weeks had been lost. Yet Madison must
bear some share of blame for the delay since, for some reason, never
adequately explained, he did not send instructions to Armstrong until
four weeks after the action of Congress. It was then too late to
bait the master of Europe. Just what had happened Armstrong could not
ascertain; but when Napoleon set out in October, 1806, on that fateful
campaign which crushed Prussia at Jena and Auerstadt, the chance of
acquiring Florida had passed.



CHAPTER VI. AN AMERICAN CATILINE

With the transfer of Louisiana, the United States entered upon its first
experience in governing an alien civilized people. At first view there
is something incongruous in the attempt of the young Republic, founded
upon the consent of the governed, to rule over a people whose land had
been annexed without their consent and whose preferences in the matter
of government had never been consulted. The incongruity appears the
more striking when it is recalled that the author of the Declaration of
Independence was now charged with the duty of appointing all officers,
civil and military, in the new territory. King George III had never
ruled more autocratically over any of his North American colonies than
President Jefferson over Louisiana through Governor William Claiborne
and General James Wilkinson.

The leaders among the Creoles and better class of Americans counted on
a speedy escape from this autocratic government, which was confessedly
temporary. The terms of the treaty, indeed, encouraged the hope that
Louisiana would be admitted at once as a State. The inhabitants of the
ceded territory were to be "incorporated into the Union." But Congress
gave a different interpretation to these words and dashed all hopes by
the act of 1804, which, while it conceded a legislative council, made
its members and all officers appointive, and divided the province.
A delegation of Creoles went to Washington to protest against this
inconsiderate treatment. They bore a petition which contained many
stiletto-like thrusts at the President. What about those elemental
rights of representation and election which had figured in the glorious
contest for freedom? "Do political axioms on the Atlantic become
problems when transferred to the shores of the Mississippi?" To such
arguments Congress could not remain wholly indifferent. The outcome
was a third act (March 2, 1805) which established the usual form of
territorial government, an elective legislature, a delegate in Congress,
and a Governor appointed by the President. To a people who had counted
on statehood these concessions were small pinchbeck. Their irritation
was not allayed, and it continued to focus upon Governor Claiborne, the
distrusted agent of a government which they neither liked nor respected.

Strange currents and counter-currents ran through the life of this
distant province. Casa Calvo and Morales, the former Spanish officials,
continued to reside in the city, like spiders at the center of a web of
Spanish intrigue; and the threads of their web extended to West Florida,
where Governor Folch watched every movement of Americans up and down
the Mississippi, and to Texas, where Salcedo, Captain-General of
the Internal Provinces of Mexico, waited for overt aggressions from
land-hungry American frontiersmen. All these Spanish agents knew that
Monroe had left Madrid empty-handed yet still asserting claims that were
ill-disguised threats; but none of them knew whether the impending blow
would fall upon West Florida or Texas. Then, too, right under their eyes
was the Mexican Association, formed for the avowed purpose of collecting
information about Mexico which would be useful if the United States
should become involved in war with Spain. In the city, also, were
adventurous individuals ready for any daring move upon Mexico, where,
according to credible reports, a revolution was imminent. The conquest
of Mexico was the day-dream of many an adventurer. In his memoir
advising Bonaparte to take and hold Louisiana as an impenetrable barrier
to Mexico, Pontalba had said with strong conviction: "It is the
surest means of destroying forever the bold schemes with which several
individuals in the United States never cease filling the newspapers, by
designating Louisiana as the highroad to the conquest of Mexico."

Into this web of intrigue walked the late Vice-President of the United
States, leisurely journeying through the Southwest in the summer of
1805.

Aaron Burr is one of the enigmas of American politics. Something of
the mystery and romance that shroud the evil-doings of certain Italian
despots of the age of the Renaissance envelops him. Despite the
researches of historians, the tangled web of Burr's conspiracy has never
been unraveled. It remains the most fascinating though, perhaps, the
least important episode in Jefferson's administration. Yet Burr himself
repays study, for his activities touch many sides of contemporary
society and illuminate many dark corners in American politics.

According to the principles of eugenics, Burr was well-born, and by
all the laws of this pseudo-science should have left an honorable name
behind him. His father was a Presbyterian clergyman, sound in the faith,
who presided over the infancy of the College of New Jersey; his maternal
grandfather was that massive divine, Jonathan Edwards. After graduating
at Princeton, Burr began to study law but threw aside his law books on
hearing the news of Lexington. He served with distinction under Arnold
before Quebec, under Washington in the battle of Long Island, and later
at Monmouth, and retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1779.
Before the close of the Revolution he had begun the practice of law in
New York, and had married the widow of a British army officer;
entering politics, he became in turn a member of the State Assembly,
Attorney-General, and United States Senator. But a mere enumeration
of such details does not tell the story of Burr's life and character.
Interwoven with the strands of his public career is a bewildering
succession of intrigues and adventures in which women have a conspicuous
part, for Burr was a fascinating man and disarmed distrust by avoiding
any false assumption of virtue. His marriage, however, proved happy. He
adored his wife and fairly worshiped his strikingly beautiful daughter
Theodosia.

Burr throve in the atmosphere of intrigue. New York politics afforded
his proper milieu. How he ingratiated himself with politicians of high
and low degree; how he unlocked the doors to political preferment;
how he became one of the first bosses of the city of New York; how he
combined public service with private interest; how he organized the
voters--no documents disclose. Only now and then the enveloping fog
lifts, as, for example, during the memorable election of 1800, when the
ignorant voters of the seventh ward, duly drilled and marshaled, carried
the city for the Republicans, and not even Colonel Hamilton, riding on
his white horse from precinct to precinct, could stay the rout. That
election carried New York for Jefferson and made Burr the logical
candidate of the party for Vice-President.

These political strokes betoken a brilliant if not always a steady
and reliable mind. Burr, it must be said, was not trusted even by his
political associates. It is significant that Washington, a keen judge
of men, refused to appoint Burr as Minister to France to succeed Morris
because he was not convinced of his integrity. And Jefferson shared
these misgivings, though the exigencies of politics made him dissemble
his feelings. It is significant, also, that Burr was always surrounded
by men of more than doubtful intentions--place-hunters and self-seeking
politicians, who had the gambler's instinct.

As Vice-President, Burr could not hope to exert much influence upon the
Administration, since the office in itself conferred little power and
did not even, according to custom, make him a member of the Cabinet;
but as Republican boss of New York who had done more than any one man
to secure the election of the ticket in 1800, he might reasonably expect
Jefferson and his Virginia associates to treat him with consideration in
the distribution of patronage. To his intense chagrin, he was ignored;
not only ignored but discredited, for Jefferson deliberately allied
himself with the Clintons and the Livingstons, the rival factions in New
York which were bent upon driving Burr from the party. This treatment
filled Burr's heart with malice; but he nursed his wounds in secret and
bided his time.

Realizing that he was politically bankrupt, Burr made a hazard of new
fortunes in 1804 by offering himself as candidate for Governor of New
York, an office then held by George Clinton. Early in the year he had a
remarkable interview with Jefferson in which he observed that it was
for the interest of the party for him to retire, but that his retirement
under existing circumstances would be thought discreditable. He asked
"some mark of favor from me," Jefferson wrote in his journal, "which
would declare to the world that he retired with my confidence"--an
executive appointment, in short. This was tantamount to an offer of
peace or war. Jefferson declined to gratify him, and Burr then began an
intrigue with the Federalist leaders of New England.

The rise of a Republican party of challenging strength in New England
cast Federalist leaders into the deepest gloom. Already troubled by the
annexation of Louisiana, which seemed to them to imperil the ascendancy
of New England in the Union, they now saw their own ascendancy in New
England imperiled. Under the depression of impending disaster, men
like Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts and Roger Griswold of
Connecticut broached to their New England friends the possibility of a
withdrawal from the Union and the formation of a Northern Confederacy.
As the confederacy shaped itself in Pickering's imagination, it would
of necessity include New York; and the chaotic conditions in New York
politics at this time invited intrigue. When, therefore, a group of
Burr's friends in the Legislature named him as their candidate for
Governor, Pickering and Griswold seized the moment to approach him with
their treasonable plans. They gave him to understand that as Governor of
New York he would naturally hold a strategic position and could, if he
would, take the lead in the secession of the Northern States. Federalist
support could be given to him in the approaching election. They would
be glad to know his views. But the shifty Burr would not commit himself
further than to promise a satisfactory administration. Though the
Federalist intriguers would have been glad of more explicit assurances
they counted on his vengeful temper and hatred of the Virginia
domination at Washington to make him a pliable tool. They were willing
to commit the party openly to Burr and trust to events to bind him to
their cause.

Against this mad intrigue one clear-headed individual resolutely set
himself--not wholly from disinterested motives. Alexander Hamilton had
good reason to know Burr. He declared in private conversation, and the
remark speedily became public property, that he looked upon Burr as a
dangerous man who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government.
He pleaded with New York Federalists not to commit the fatal blunder of
endorsing Burr in caucus, and he finally won his point; but he could not
prevent his partisans from supporting Burr at the polls.

The defeat of Burr dashed the hopes of the Federalists of New England;
the bubble of a Northern Confederacy vanished. It dashed also Burr's
personal ambitions: he could no longer hope for political rehabilitation
in New York. And the man who a second time had crossed his path and
thwarted his purposes was his old rival, Alexander Hamilton. It is said
that Burr was not naturally vindictive: perhaps no man is naturally
vindictive. Certain it is that bitter disappointment had now made Burr
what Hamilton had called him--"a dangerous man." He took the common
course of men of honor at this time; he demanded prompt and unqualified
acknowledgment or denial of the expression. Well aware of what lay
behind this demand, Hamilton replied deliberately with half-conciliatory
words, but he ended with the usual words of those prepared to accept
a challenge, "I can only regret the circumstance, and must abide the
consequences." A challenge followed. We are told that Hamilton accepted
to save his political leadership and influence--strange illusion in one
so gifted! Yet public opinion had not yet condemned dueling, and men
must be judged against the background of their times.

On a summer morning (July 11, 1804) Burr and Hamilton crossed the Hudson
to Weehawken and there faced each other for the last time. Hamilton
withheld his fire; Burr aimed with murderous intent, and Hamilton fell
mortally wounded. The shot from Burr's pistol long reverberated. It woke
public conscience to the horror and uselessness of dueling, and left
Burr an outlaw from respectable society, stunned by the recoil, and
under indictment for murder. Only in the South and West did men treat
the incident lightly as an affair of honor.

The political career of Burr was now closed. When he again met the
Senate face to face, he had been dropped by his own party in favor of
George Clinton, to whom he surrendered the Vice-Presidency on March 5,
1805. His farewell address is described as one of the most affecting
ever spoken in the Senate. Describing the scene to his daughter, Burr
said that tears flowed abundantly, but Burr must have described what he
wished to see. American politicians are not Homeric heroes, who weep
on slight provocation; and any inclination to pity Burr must have been
inhibited by the knowledge that he had made himself the rallying-point
of every dubious intrigue at the capital.

The list of Burr's intimates included Jonathan Dayton, whose term as
Senator had just ended, and who, like Burr, sought means of promoting
his fortunes, John Smith, Senator from Ohio, the notorious Swartwouts
of New York who were attached to Burr as gangsters to their chief, and
General James Wilkinson, governor of the northern territory carved out
of Louisiana and commander of the western army with headquarters at St.
Louis.

Wilkinson had a long record of duplicity, which was suspected but never
proved by his contemporaries. There was hardly a dubious episode from
the Revolution to this date with which he had not been connected. He was
implicated in the Conway cabal against Washington; he was active in the
separatist movement in Kentucky during the Confederation; he entered
into an irregular commercial agreement with the Spanish authorities
at New Orleans; he was suspected--and rightly, as documents recently
unearthed in Spain prove--of having taken an oath of allegiance to Spain
and of being in the pay of Spain; he was also suspected--and justly--of
using his influence to bring about a separation of the Western States
from the Union; yet in 1791 he was given a lieutenant-colonel's
commission in the regular army and served under St. Clair in the
Northwest, and again as a brigadier-general under Wayne. Even here the
atmosphere of intrigue enveloped him, and he was accused of inciting
discontent among the Kentucky troops and of trying to supplant
Wayne. When commissioners were trying to run the Southern boundary
in accordance with the treaty of 1795 with Spain, Wilkinson--still a
pensioner of Spain, as documents prove--attempted to delay the survey.
In the light of these revelations, Wilkinson appears as an unscrupulous
adventurer whose thirst for lucre made him willing to betray either
master--the Spaniard who pensioned him or the American who gave him his
command.

In the spring of 1805 Burr made a leisurely journey across the
mountains, by way of Pittsburgh, to New Orleans, where he had friends
and personal followers. The secretary of the territory was one of his
henchmen; a justice of the superior court was his stepson; the Creole
petitionists who had come to Washington to secure self-government had
been cordially received by Burr and had a lively sense of gratitude. On
his way down the Ohio, Burr landed at Blennerhassett's Island, where an
eccentric Irishman of that name owned an estate. Harman Blennerhassett
was to rue the day that he entertained this fascinating guest. At
Cincinnati he was the guest of Senator Smith, and there he also met
Dayton. At Nashville he visited General Andrew Jackson, who was thrilled
with the prospect of war with Spain; at Fort Massac he spent four
days in close conference with General Wilkinson; and at New Orleans he
consorted with Daniel Clark, a rich merchant and the most uncompromising
opponent of Governor Claiborne, and with members of the Mexican
Association and every would-be adventurer and filibuster. In November,
Burr was again in Washington. What was the purpose of this journey and
what did it accomplish?

It is far easier to tell what Burr did after this mysterious western
expedition than what he planned to do. There is danger of reading too
great consistency into his designs. At one moment, if we may believe
Anthony Merry, the British Minister, who lent an ear to Burr's
proposals, he was plotting a revolution which should separate the
Western States from the Union. To accomplish this design he needed
British funds and a British naval force. Jonathan Dayton revealed to
Yrujo much the same plot--which he thought was worth thirty or forty
thousand dollars to the Spanish Government. To such urgent necessity for
funds were the conspirators driven. But Dayton added further details
to the story which may have been intended only to intimidate Yrujo. The
revolution effected by British aid, said Dayton gravely, an expedition
would be undertaken against Mexico. Subsequently Dayton unfolded a still
more remarkable tale. Burr had been disappointed in the expectation of
British aid, and he was now bent upon "an almost insane plan," which was
nothing less than the seizure of the Government at Washington. With the
government funds thus obtained, and with the necessary frigates, the
conspirators would sail for New Orleans and proclaim the independence of
Louisiana and the Western States.

The kernel of truth in these accounts is not easily separated from the
chaff. The supposition that Burr seriously contemplated a separation of
the Western States from the Union may be dismissed from consideration.
The loyalty of the Mississippi Valley at this time is beyond question;
and Burr was too keen an observer not to recognize the temper of the
people with whom he sojourned. But there is reason to believe that he
and his confederates may have planned an enterprise against Mexico, for
such a project was quite to the taste of Westerners who hated Spain as
ardently as they loved the Union. Circumstances favored a filibustering
expedition. The President's bellicose message of December had prepared
the people of the Mississippi Valley for war; the Spanish plotters had
been expelled from Louisiana; Spanish forces had crossed the Sabine;
American troops had been sent to repel them if need be; the South
American revolutionist Miranda had sailed, with vessels fitted out
in New York, to start a revolt against Spanish rule in Caracas; every
revolutionist in New Orleans was on the qui vive. What better time could
there be to launch a filibustering expedition against Mexico? If it
succeeded and a republic were established, the American Government might
be expected to recognize a fait accompli.

The success of Burr's plans, whatever they may have been, depended on
his procuring funds; and it was doubtless the hope of extracting aid
from Blennerhassett that drew him to the island in midsummer of 1806.
Burr was accompanied by his daughter Theodosia and her husband, Joseph
Alston, a wealthy South Carolina planter, who was either the dupe or the
accomplice of Burr. Together they persuaded the credulous Irishman to
purchase a tract of land on the Washita River in the heart of Louisiana,
which would ultimately net him a profit of a million dollars when
Louisiana became an independent state with Burr as ruler and England
as protector. They even assured Blennerhassett that he should go as
minister to England. He was so dazzled at the prospect that he not only
made the initial payment for the lands, but advanced all his property
for Burr's use on receiving a guaranty from Alston. Having landed his
fish, Burr set off down the river to visit General Jackson at Nashville
and to procure boats and supplies for his expedition.

Meanwhile, Theodosia--the brilliant, fascinating Theodosia--and her
husband played the game at Blennerhassett's Island. Blennerhassett's
head was completely turned. He babbled most indiscreetly about the
approaching coup d'etat. Colonel Burr would be king of Mexico, he told
his gardener, and Mrs. Alston would be queen when Colonel Burr died. Who
could resist the charms of this young princess? Blennerhassett and his
wife were impatient to exchange their little isle for marble halls in
far away Mexico.

But all was not going well with the future Emperor of Mexico. Ugly
rumors were afloat. The active preparations at Blennerhassett's Island,
the building of boats at various points along the river, the enlistment
of recruits, coupled with hints of secession, disturbed such loyal
citizens as the District-Attorney at Frankfort, Kentucky. He took it
upon himself to warn the President, and then, in open court, charged
Burr with violating the laws of the United States by setting on foot
a military expedition against Mexico and with inciting citizens to
rebellion in the Western States. But at the meeting of the grand jury
Burr appeared surrounded by his friends and with young Henry Clay for
counsel. The grand jury refused to indict him and he left the court in
triumph. Some weeks later the District-Attorney renewed his motion;
but again Burr was discharged by the grand jury, amid popular applause.
Enthusiastic admirers in Frankfort even gave a ball in his honor.

Notwithstanding these warnings of conspiracy, President Jefferson
exhibited a singular indifference and composure. To all alarmists he
made the same reply. The people of the West were loyal and could be
trusted. It was not until disquieting and ambiguous messages from
Wilkinson reached Washington-disquieting because ambiguous--that the
President was persuaded to act. On the 27th of November, he issued
a proclamation warning all good citizens that sundry persons were
conspiring against Spain and enjoining all Federal officers to apprehend
those engaged in the unlawful enterprise. The appearance of this
proclamation at Nashville should have led to Burr's arrest, for he was
still detained there; but mysterious influences seemed to paralyze the
arm of the Government. On the 22d of December, Burr set off, with two
boats which Jackson had built and some supplies, down the Cumberland.
At the mouth of the river, he joined forces with Blennerhassett, who had
left his island in haste just as the Ohio militia was about to descend
upon him. The combined strength of the flotilla was nine bateaux
carrying less than sixty men. There was still time to intercept the
expedition at Fort Massac, but again delays that have never been
explained prevented the President's proclamation from arriving in time;
and Burr's little fleet floated peacefully by down stream.

The scene now shifts to the lower Mississippi, and the heavy villain
of the melodrama appears on the stage in the uniform of a United States
military officer--General James Wilkinson. He had been under orders
since May 6, 1806, to repair to the Territory of Orleans with as little
delay as possible and to repel any invasion east of the River Sabine;
but it was now September and he had only just reached Natchitoches,
where the American volunteers and militiamen from Louisiana and
Mississippi were concentrating. Much water had flowed under the bridge
since Aaron Burr visited New Orleans.

After President Jefferson's bellicose message of the previous December,
war with Spain seemed inevitable. And when Spanish troops crossed
the Sabine in July and took up their post only seventeen miles
from Natchitoches, Western Americans awaited only the word to begin
hostilities. The Orleans Gazette declared that the time to repel Spanish
aggression had come. The enemy must be driven beyond the Sabine. "The
route from Natchitoches to Mexico is clear, plain, and open." The
occasion was at hand "for conferring on our oppressed Spanish brethren
in Mexico those inestimable blessings of freedom which we ourselves
enjoy." "Gallant Louisianians! Now is the time to distinguish yourselves
.... Should the generous efforts of our Government to establish a free,
independent Republican Empire in Mexico be successful, how fortunate,
how enviable would be the situation in New Orleans!" The editor who
sounded this clarion call was a coadjutor of Burr. On the flood tide
of a popular war against Spain, they proposed to float their own
expedition. Much depended on General Wilkinson; but he had already
written privately of subverting the Spanish Government in Mexico, and
carrying "our conquests to California and the Isthmus of Darien."

With much swagger and braggadocio, Wilkinson advanced to the center of
the stage. He would drive the Spaniards over the Sabine, though they
outnumbered him three to one. "I believe, my friend," he wrote, "I shall
be obliged to fight and to flog them." Magnificent stage thunder. But
to Wilkinson's chagrin the Spaniards withdrew of their own accord. Not
a Spaniard remained to contest his advance to the border. Yet, oddly
enough, he remained idle in camp. Why?

Some two weeks later, an emissary appeared at Natchitoches with a letter
from Burr dated the 29th of July, in cipher. What this letter may have
originally contained will probably never be known, for only Wilkinson's
version survives, and that underwent frequent revision.* It is quite
as remarkable for its omissions as for anything that it contains. In
it there is no mention of a western uprising nor of a revolution in
New Orleans; but only the intimation that an attack is to be made upon
Spanish possessions, presumably Mexico, with possibly Baton Rouge as the
immediate objective. Whether or no this letter changed Wilkinson's plan,
we can only conjecture. Certain it is, however, that about this time
Wilkinson determined to denounce Burr and his associates and to play a
double game, posing on the one hand as the savior of his country and on
the other as a secret friend to Spain. After some hesitation he wrote
to President Jefferson warning him in general terms of an expedition
preparing against Vera Cruz but omitting all mention of Burr.
Subsequently he wrote a confidential letter about this "deep, dark, and
widespread conspiracy" which enmeshed all classes and conditions in New
Orleans and might bring seven thousand men from the Ohio. The contents
of Burr's mysterious letter were to be communicated orally to the
President by the messenger who bore this precious warning. It was on
the strength of these communications that the President issued his
proclamation of the 27th of November.

     * What is usually accepted as the correct version is printed
     by McCaleb in his "Aaron Burr Conspiracy," pp. 74 and 75,
     and by Henry Adams in his "History of the United States,"
     vol. III, pp. 253-4.


While Wilkinson was inditing these misleading missives to the President,
he was preparing the way for his entry at New Orleans. To the perplexed
and alarmed Governor he wrote: "You are surrounded by dangers of
which you dream not, and the destruction of the American Government is
seriously menaced. The storm will probably burst in New Orleans, where
I shall meet it, and triumph or perish!" Just five days later he wrote
a letter to the Viceroy of Mexico which proves him beyond doubt the
most contemptible rascal who ever wore an American uniform. "A storm, a
revolutionary tempest, an infernal plot threatens the destruction of the
empire," he wrote; the first object of attack would be New Orleans,
then Vera Cruz, then Mexico City; scenes of violence and pillage
would follow; let His Excellency be on his guard. To ward off these
calamities, "I will hurl myself like a Leonidas into the breach." But
let His Excellency remember what risks the writer of this letter incurs,
"by offering without orders this communication to a foreign power," and
let him reimburse the bearer of this letter to the amount of 121,000
pesos which will be spent to shatter the plans of these bandits from the
Ohio.

The arrival of Wilkinson in New Orleans was awaited by friends and foes,
with bated breath. The conspirators had as yet no intimation of his
intentions: Governor Claiborne was torn by suspicion of this would-be
savior, for at the very time he was reading Wilkinson's gasconade
he received a cryptic letter from Andrew Jackson which ran, "keep a
watchful eye on our General and beware of an attack as well from your
own country as Spain!" If Claiborne could not trust "our General," whom
could he trust!

The stage was now set for the last act in the drama. Wilkinson arrived
in the city, deliberately set Claiborne aside, and established a species
of martial law, not without opposition. To justify his course Wilkinson
swore to an affidavit based on Burr's letter of the 29th of July and
proceeded with his arbitrary arrests. One by one Burr's confederates
were taken into custody. The city was kept in a state of alarm; Burr's
armed thousands were said to be on the way; the negroes were to be
incited to revolt. Only the actual appearance of Burr's expedition or
some extraordinary happening could maintain this high pitch of popular
excitement and save Wilkinson from becoming the ridiculous victim of his
own folly.

On the 10th of January (1807), after an uneventful voyage down the
Mississippi, Burr's flotilla reached the mouth of Bayou Pierre, some
thirty miles above Natchez. Here at length was the huge armada which was
to shatter the Union--nine boats and sixty men! Tension began to give
way. People began to recover their sense of humor. Wilkinson was never
in greater danger in his life, for he was about to appear ridiculous.
It was at Bayou Pierre that Burr going ashore learned that Wilkinson had
betrayed him. His first instinct was to flee, for if he should proceed
to New Orleans he would fall into Wilkinson's hands and doubtless be
court-martialed and shot; but if he tarried, he would be arrested
and sent to Washington. Indecision and despair seized him; and while
Blennerhassett and other devoted followers waited for their emperor to
declare his intention, he found himself facing the acting-governor of
the Mississippi Territory with a warrant for his arrest. To the
chagrin of his fellow conspirators, Burr surrendered tamely, even
pusillanimously.

The end of the drama was near at hand. Burr was brought before a grand
jury, and though he once more escaped indictment, he was put under
bonds, quite illegally he thought, to appear when summoned. On the 1st
of February he abandoned his followers to the tender mercies of the law
and fled in disguise into the wilderness. A month later he was arrested
near the Spanish border above Mobile by Lieutenant Gaines, in command
at Fort Stoddert, and taken to Richmond. The trial that followed did not
prove Burr's guilt, but it did prove Thomas Jefferson's credulity and
cast grave doubts on James Wilkinson's loyalty.* Burr was acquitted
of the charge of treason in court, but he remained under popular
indictment, and his memory has never been wholly cleared of the
suspicion of treason.

     * An account of the trial of Burr will be found in "John
     Marshall and the Constitution" by Edward S. Corwin, in "The
     Chronicles of America".



CHAPTER VII. AN ABUSE OF HOSPITALITY

While Captain Bainbridge was eating his heart out in the Pasha's prison
at Tripoli, his thoughts reverting constantly to his lost frigate, he
reminded Commodore Preble, with whom he was allowed to correspond,
that "the greater part of our crew consists of English subjects not
naturalized in America." This incidental remark comes with all the
force of a revelation to those who have fondly imagined that the sturdy
jack-tars who manned the first frigates were genuine American sea-dogs.
Still more disconcerting is the information contained in a letter from
the Secretary of the Treasury to President Jefferson, some years later,
to the effect that after 1803 American tonnage increased at the rate of
seventy thousand a year, but that of the four thousand seamen required
to man this growing mercantile marine, fully one-half were British
subjects, presumably deserters. How are these uncomfortable facts to
be explained? Let a third piece of information be added. In a report of
Admiral Nelson, dated 1803, in which he broaches a plan for manning
the British navy, it is soberly stated that forty-two thousand British
seamen deserted "in the late war." Whenever a large convoy assembled at
Portsmouth, added the Admiral, not less than a thousand seamen usually
deserted from the navy.

The slightest acquaintance with the British navy when Nelson was winning
immortal glory by his victory at Trafalgar must convince the most
sceptical that his seamen for the most part were little better than
galley slaves. Life on board these frigates was well-nigh unbearable.
The average life of a seaman, Nelson reckoned, was forty-five years. In
this age before processes of refrigeration had been invented, food could
not be kept edible on long voyages, even in merchantmen. Still worse
was the fare on men-of-war. The health of a crew was left to Providence.
Little or no forethought was exercised to prevent disease; the commonest
matters of personal hygiene were neglected; and when disease came
the remedies applied were scarcely to be preferred to the disease.
Discipline, always brutal, was symbolized by the cat-o'-nine-tails.
Small wonder that the navy was avoided like the plague by every man and
seaman.

Yet a navy had to be maintained: it was the cornerstone of the Empire.
And in all the history of that Empire the need of a navy was never
stronger than in these opening years of the nineteenth century. The
practice of impressing able men for the royal navy was as old as the
reign of Elizabeth. The press gang was an odious institution of
long standing--a terror not only to rogue and vagabond but to every
able-bodied seafaring man and waterman on rivers, who was not exempted
by some special act. It ransacked the prisons, and carried to the navy
not only its victims but the germs of fever which infested public places
of detention. But the press gang harvested its greatest crop of seamen
on the seas. Merchantmen were stopped at sea, robbed of their able
sailors, and left to limp short-handed into port. A British East
Indiaman homeward bound in 1802 was stripped of so many of her crew in
the Bay of Biscay that she was unable to offer resistance to a French
privateer and fell a rich victim into the hands of the enemy. The
necessity of the royal navy knew no law and often defeated its own
purpose.

Death or desertion offered the only way of escape to the victim of the
press gang. And the commander of a British frigate dreaded making port
almost as much as an epidemic of typhus. The deserter always found
American merchantmen ready to harbor him. Fair wages, relatively
comfortable quarters, and decent treatment made him quite ready to take
any measures to forswear his allegiance to Britannia. Naturalization
papers were easily procured by a few months' residence in any State
of the Union; and in default of legitimate papers, certificates of
citizenship could be bought for a song in any American seaport, where
shysters drove a thrifty traffic in bogus documents. Provided the
English navy took the precaution to have the description in his
certificate tally with his personal appearance, and did not let his
tongue betray him, he was reasonably safe from capture.

Facing the palpable fact that British seamen were deserting just when
they were most needed and were making American merchantmen and frigates
their asylum, the British naval commanders, with no very nice regard for
legal distinctions, extended their search for deserters to the decks of
American vessels, whether in British waters or on the high seas. If in
time of war, they reasoned, they could stop a neutral ship on the high
seas, search her for contraband of war, and condemn ship and cargo in a
prize court if carrying contraband, why might they not by the same token
search a vessel for British deserters and impress them into service
again? Two considerations seem to justify this reasoning: the trickiness
of the smart Yankees who forged citizenship papers, and the indelible
character of British allegiance. Once an Englishman always an
Englishman, by Jove! Your hound of a sea-dog might try to talk through
his nose like a Yankee, you know, and he might shove a dirty bit of
paper at you, but he couldn't shake off his British citizenship if he
wanted to! This was good English law, and if it wasn't recognized by
other nations so much the worse for them. As one of these redoubtable
British captains put it, years later: "'Might makes right' is the
guiding, practical maxim among nations and ever will be, so long as
powder and shot exist, with money to back them, and energy to wield
them." Of course, there were hair-splitting fellows, plenty of them, in
England and the States, who told you that it was one thing to seize a
vessel carrying contraband and have her condemned by judicial process in
a court of admiralty, and quite another thing to carry British subjects
off the decks of a merchantman flying a neutral flag; but if you knew
the blasted rascals were deserters what difference did it make? Besides,
what would become of the British navy, if you listened to all the
fine-spun arguments of landsmen? And if these stalwart blue-water
Britishers could have read what Thomas Jefferson was writing at this
very time, they would have classed him with the armchair critics who
had no proper conception of a sailor's duty. "I hold the right of
expatriation," wrote the President, "to be inherent in every man by the
laws of nature, and incapable of being rightfully taken away from him
even by the united will of every other person in the nation."

In the year 1805, while President Jefferson was still the victim of
his overmastering passion, and disposed to cultivate the good will of
England, if thereby he might obtain the Floridas, unforeseen commercial
complications arose which not only blocked the way to a better
understanding in Spanish affairs but strained diplomatic relations
to the breaking point. News reached Atlantic seaports that American
merchantmen, which had hitherto engaged with impunity in the carrying
trade between Europe and the West Indies, had been seized and condemned
in British admiralty courts. Every American shipmaster and owner at once
lifted up his voice in indignant protest; and all the latent hostility
to their old enemy revived. Here were new orders-in-council, said they:
the leopard cannot change his spots. England is still England--the
implacable enemy of neutral shipping. "Never will neutrals be perfectly
safe till free goods make free ships or till England loses two or three
great naval battles," declared the Salem Register.

The recent seizures were not made by orders-in-council, however, but in
accordance with a decision recently handed down by the court of appeals
in the case of the ship Essex. Following a practice which had become
common in recent years, the Essex had sailed with a cargo from Barcelona
to Salem and thence to Havana. On the high seas she had been captured,
and then taken to a British port, where ship and cargo were condemned
because the voyage from Spain to her colony had been virtually
continuous, and by the so-called Rule of 1756, direct trade between a
European state and its colony was forbidden to neutrals in time of war
when such trade had not been permitted in time of peace. Hitherto, the
British courts had inclined to the view that when goods had been landed
in a neutral country and duties paid, the voyage had been broken.
Tacitly a trade that was virtually direct had been countenanced, because
the payment of duties seemed evidence enough that the cargo became a
part of the stock of the neutral country and, if reshipped, was then a
bona fide neutral cargo. Suddenly English merchants and shippers woke
to the fact that they were often victims of deception. Cargoes would
be landed in the United States, duties ostensibly paid, and the goods
ostensibly imported, only to be reshipped in the same bottoms, with the
connivance of port officials, either without paying any real duties
or with drawbacks. In the case of the Essex the court of appeals cut
directly athwart these practices by going behind the prima facie payment
and inquiring into the intent of the voyage. The mere touching at a
port without actually importing the cargo into the common stock of the
country did not alter the nature of the voyage. The crucial point
was the intent, which the court was now and hereafter determined to
ascertain by examination of facts. The court reached the indubitable
conclusion that the cargo of the Essex had never been intended for
American markets. The open-minded historian must admit that this was
a fair application of the Rule of 1756, but he may still challenge the
validity of the rule, as all neutral countries did, and the wisdom of
the monopolistic impulse which moved the commercial classes and the
courts of England to this decision.*

     * Professor William E. Lingelbach in a notable article on
     "England and Neutral Trade" in "The Military Historian and
     Economist" (April, 1917) has pointed out the error committed
     by almost every historian from Henry Adams down, that the
     Essex decision reversed previous rulings of the court and
     was not in accord with British law.


Had the impressment of seamen and the spoliation of neutral commerce
occurred only on the high seas, public resentment would have mounted to
a high pitch in the United States; but when British cruisers ran into
American waters to capture or burn French vessels, and when British
men-of-war blockaded ports, detaining and searching--and at times
capturing--American vessels, indignation rose to fever heat. The
blockade of New York Harbor by two British frigates, the Cambrian and
the Leander, exasperated merchants beyond measure. On board the Leander
was a young midshipman, Basil Hall, who in after years described the
activities of this execrated frigate.

"Every morning at daybreak, we set about arresting the progress of all
the vessels we saw, firing of guns to the right and left to make every
ship that was running in heave to, or wait until we had leisure to send
a boat on board 'to see,¹ in our lingo, 'what she was made of.' I have
frequently known a dozen, and sometimes a couple of dozen, ships lying
a league or two off the port, losing their fair wind, their tide, and
worse than all their market, for many hours, sometimes the whole day,
before our search was completed."*

     * "Fragments of Voyages and Travels," quoted by Henry Adams,
     in "History of the United States", vol. III, p. 92.


One day in April, 1806, the Leander, trying to halt a merchantman that
she meant to search, fired a shot which killed the helmsman of a passing
sloop. The boat sailed on to New York with the mangled body; and the
captain, brother of the murdered man, lashed the populace into a rage
by his mad words. Supplies for the frigates were intercepted, personal
violence was threatened to any British officers caught on shore, the
captain of the Leander was indicted for murder, and the funeral of the
murdered sailor was turned into a public demonstration. Yet nothing came
of this incident, beyond a proclamation by the President closing the
ports of the United States to the offending frigates and ordering the
arrest of the captain of the Leander wherever found. After all, the
death of a common seaman did not fire the hearts of farmers peacefully
tilling their fields far beyond hearing of the Leander's guns.

A year full of troublesome happenings passed; scores of American vessels
were condemned in British admiralty courts, and American seamen were
impressed with increasing frequency, until in the early summer of 1807
these manifold grievances culminated in an outrage that shook even
Jefferson out of his composure and evoked a passionate outcry for war
from all parts of the country.

While a number of British war vessels were lying in Hampton Roads
watching for certain French frigates which had taken refuge up
Chesapeake Bay, they lost a number of seamen by desertion under
peculiarly annoying circumstances. In one instance a whole boat's crew
made off under cover of night to Norfolk and there publicly defied
their commander. Three deserters from the British frigate Melampus had
enlisted on the American frigate Chesapeake, which had just been fitted
out for service in the Mediterranean; but on inquiry these three were
proven to be native Americans who had been impressed into British
service. Unfortunately inquiry did disclose one British deserter who
had enlisted on the Chesapeake, a loud-mouthed tar by the name of Jenkin
Ratford. These irritating facts stirred Admiral Berkeley at Halifax
to highhanded measures. Without waiting for instructions, he issued an
order to all commanders in the North Atlantic Squadron to search the
Chesapeake for deserters, if she should be encountered on the high seas.
This order of the 1st of June should be shown to the captain of the
Chesapeake as sufficient authority for searching her.

On June 22, 1807, the Chesapeake passed unsuspecting between the capes
on her way to the Mediterranean. She was a stanch frigate carrying
forty guns and a crew of 375 men and boys; but she was at this time in
a distressing state of unreadiness, owing to the dilatoriness and
incompetence of the naval authorities at Washington. The gundeck was
littered with lumber and odds and ends of rigging; the guns, though
loaded, were not all fitted to their carriages; and the crew was
untrained. As the guns had to be fired by slow matches or by loggerheads
heated red-hot, and the ammunition was stored in the magazine, the
frigate was totally unprepared for action. Commodore Barron, who
commanded the Chesapeake, counted on putting her into fighting trim on
the long voyage across the Atlantic.

Just ahead of the Chesapeake as she passed out to sea, was the Leopard,
a British frigate of fifty-two guns, which was apparently on the lookout
for suspicious merchantmen. It was not until both vessels were eight
miles or more southeast of Cape Henry that the movements of the Leopard
began to attract attention. At about half-past three in the afternoon
she came within hailing distance and hove to, announcing that she had
dispatches for the commander. The Chesapeake also hove to and answered
the hail, a risky move considering that she was unprepared for action
and that the Leopard lay to the windward. But why should the commander
of the American frigate have entertained suspicions?

A boat put out from the Leopard, bearing a petty officer, who delivered
a note enclosing Admiral Berkeley's order and expressing the hope that
"every circumstance... may be adjusted in a manner that the harmony
subsisting between the two countries may remain undisturbed." Commodore
Barron replied that he knew of no British deserters on his vessel and
declined in courteous terms to permit his crew to be mustered by any
other officers but their own. The messenger departed, and then, for the
first time entertaining serious misgivings, Commodore Barron ordered his
decks cleared for action. But before the crew could bestir themselves,
the Leopard drew near, her men at quarters. The British commander
shouted a warning, but Barron, now thoroughly alarmed, replied, "I don't
hear what you say." The warning was repeated, but again Barron to gain
time shouted that he could not hear. The Leopard then fired two shots
across the bow of the Chesapeake, and almost immediately without
parleying further--she was now within two hundred feet of her
victim--poured a broadside into the American vessel.

Confusion reigned on the Chesapeake. The crew for the most part showed
courage, but they were helpless, for they could not fire a gun for
want of slow matches or loggerheads. They crowded about the magazine
clamoring in vain for a chance to defend the vessel; they yelled with
rage at their predicament. Only one gun was discharged and that was by
means of a live coal brought up from the galley after the Chesapeake had
received a third broadside and Commodore Barron had ordered the flag to
be hauled down to spare further slaughter. Three of his crew had already
been killed and eighteen wounded, himself among the number. The whole
action lasted only fifteen minutes.

Boarding crews now approached and several British officers climbed
to the deck of the Chesapeake and mustered her crew. Among the ship's
company they found the alleged deserters and, hiding in the coal-hole,
the notorious Jenkin Ratford. These four men they took with them,
and the Leopard, having fulfilled her instructions, now suffered the
Chesapeake to limp back to Hampton Roads. "For the first time in their
history," writes Henry Adams, * "the people of the United States learned,
in June, 1807, the feeling of a true national emotion. Hitherto every
public passion had been more or less partial and one-sided;... but the
outrage committed on the Chesapeake stung through hidebound prejudices,
and made democrat and aristocrat writhe alike."

     * History of the United States, vol. IV, p. 27.


Had President Jefferson chosen to go to war at this moment, he would
have had a united people behind him, and he was well aware that he
possessed the power of choice. "The affair of the Chesapeake put war
into my hand," he wrote some years later. "I had only to open it and
let havoc loose." But Thomas Jefferson was not a martial character. The
State Governors, to be sure, were requested to have their militia
in readiness, and the Governor of Virginia was desired to call such
companies into service as were needed for the defense of Norfolk.
The President referred in indignant terms to the abuse of the laws of
hospitality and the "outrage" committed by the British commander; but
his proclamation only ordered all British armed vessels out of American
waters and forbade all intercourse with them if they remained. The
tone of the proclamation was so moderate as to seem pusillanimous. John
Randolph called it an apology. Thomas Jefferson did not mean to have
war. With that extraordinary confidence in his own powers, which in
smaller men would be called smug conceit, he believed that he could
secure disavowal and honorable reparation for the wrong committed; but
he chose a frail intermediary when he committed this delicate mission to
James Monroe.



CHAPTER VIII. THE PACIFISTS OF 1807

It is one of the strange paradoxes of our time that the author of the
Declaration of Independence, to whose principle of self-determination
the world seems again to be turning, should now be regarded as a
self-confessed pacifist, with all the derogatory implications that lurk
in that epithet. The circumstances which made him a revolutionist
in 1776 and a passionate advocate of peace in 1807 deserve some
consideration. The charge made by contemporaries of Jefferson that his
aversion to war sprang from personal cowardice may be dismissed at once,
as it was by him, with contempt. Nor was his hatred of war merely an
instinctive abhorrence of bloodshed. He had not hesitated to wage naval
war on the Barbary Corsairs. It is true that he was temperamentally
averse to the use of force under ordinary circumstances. He did not
belong to that type of full-blooded men who find self-expression in
adventurous activity. Mere physical effort without conscious purpose
never appealed to him. He was at the opposite pole of life from a man
like Aaron Burr. He never, so far as history records, had an affair
of honor; he never fought a duel; he never performed active military
service; he never took human life. Yet he was not a non-resistant. "My
hope of preserving peace for our country," he wrote on one occasion, "is
not founded in the Quaker principle of nonresistance under every wrong."

The true sources of Jefferson's pacifism must be sought in his
rationalistic philosophy, which accorded the widest scope to the
principle of self-direction and self determination, whether on the part
of the individual or of groups of individuals. To impose one's will upon
another was to enslave, according to his notion; to coerce by war was
to enslave a community; and to enslave a community was to provoke
revolution. Jefferson's thought gravitated inevitably to the center of
his rational universe--to the principle of enlightened self-interest.
Men and women are not to be permanently moved by force but by appeals
to their interests. He completed his thought as follows in the letter
already quoted: "But [my hope of preserving peace is founded] in the
belief that a just and friendly conduct on our part will procure
justice and friendship from others. In the existing contest, each of the
combatants will find an interest in our friendship."

It was a chaotic world in which this philosopher-statesman was called
upon to act--a world in which international law and neutral rights had
been well-nigh submerged in twelve years of almost continuous war. Yet
with amazing self-assurance President Jefferson believed that he held in
his hand a master-key which would unlock all doors that had been shut
to the commerce of neutrals. He called this master-key "peaceable
coercion," and he explained its magic potency in this wise:

"Our commerce is so valuable to them [the European belligerents] that
they will be glad to purchase it when the only price we ask is to do
us justice. I believe that we have in our hands the means of peaceable
coercion; and that the moment they see our government so united as that
they can make use of it, they will for their own interest be disposed to
do us justice."

The idea of using commercial restrictions as a weapon to secure
recognition of rights was of course not original with Jefferson, but
it was now to be given a trial without parallel in the history of
the nation. Non-importation agreements had proved efficacious in
the struggle of the colonies with the mother country; it seemed not
unreasonable to suppose that a well-sustained refusal to traffic in
English goods would meet the emergency of 1807, when the ruling of
British admiralty courts threatened to cut off the lucrative commerce
between Europe and the West Indies. With this theory in view, the
President and his Secretary of State advocated the NonImportation Bill
of April 18, 1806, which forbade the entry of certain specified goods of
British manufacture. The opposition found a leader in Randolph, who now
broke once and for all with the Administration. "Never in the course of
my life," he exclaimed, "have I witnessed such a scene of indignity and
inefficiency as this measure holds forth to the world. What is it? A
milk-and-water bill! A dose of chicken-broth to be taken nine months
hence!... It is too contemptible to be the object of consideration,
or to excite the feelings of the pettiest state in Europe." The
Administration carried the bill through Congress, but Randolph had
the satisfaction of seeing his characterisation of the measure amply
justified by the course of events.

With the Non-Importation Act as a weapon, the President was confident
that Monroe, who had once more returned to his post in London, could
force a settlement of all outstanding differences with Great Britain. To
his annoyance, and to Monroe's chagrin, however, he was obliged to send
a special envoy to act with Monroe. Factious opposition in the Senate
forced the President to placate the Federalists by appointing William
Pinkney of Maryland. The American commissioners were instructed
to insist upon three concessions in the treaty which they were to
negotiate: restoration of trade with enemies' colonies, indemnity for
captures made since the Essex decision, and express repudiation of the
right of impressment. In return for these concessions, they might hold
out the possible repeal of the Non-Importation Act! Only confirmed
optimists could believe that the mistress of the seas, flushed with the
victory of Trafalgar, would consent to yield these points for so slight
a compensation. The mission was, indeed, doomed from the outset, and
nothing more need be said of it than that in the end, to secure any
treaty at all, Monroe and Pinkney broke their instructions and set aside
the three ultimata. What they obtained in return seemed so insignificant
and doubtful, and what they paid for even these slender compensations
seemed so exorbitant, that the President would not even submit the
treaty to the Senate. The first application of the theory of peaceable
coercion thus ended in humiliating failure. Jefferson thought it best
"to let the negotiation take a friendly nap"; but Madison, who felt
that his political future depended on a diplomatic triumph over England,
drafted new instructions for the two commissioners, hoping that the
treaty might yet be put into acceptable form. It was while these new
instructions were crossing the ocean that the Chesapeake struck her
colors.

James Monroe is one of the most unlucky diplomats in American history.
From those early days when he had received the fraternal embraces of the
Jacobins in Paris and had been recalled by President Washington, to the
ill-fated Spanish mission, circumstances seem to have conspired against
him. The honor of negotiating the purchase of Louisiana should have been
his alone, but he arrived just a day too late and was obliged to
divide the glory with Livingston. On this mission to England he was not
permitted to conduct negotiations alone but was associated with William
Pinkney, a Federalist. No wonder he suspected Madison, or at least
Madison's friends, of wishing to discredit him. And now another
impossible task was laid upon him. He was instructed to demand not
only disavowal and reparation for the attack on the Chesapeake and the
restoration of the American seamen, but also as "an indispensable part
of the satisfaction" "an entire abolition of impressments." If the
Secretary of State had deliberately contrived to deliver Monroe into
the hands of George Canning, he could not have been more successful, for
Monroe had already protested against the Chesapeake outrage as an act of
aggression which should be promptly disavowed without reference to the
larger question of impressment. He was now obliged to eat his own
words and inject into the discussion, as Canning put it, the irrelevant
matters which they had agreed to separate from the present controversy.
Canning was quick to see his opportunity. Mr. Monroe must be aware, said
he, that on several recent occasions His Majesty had firmly declined to
waive "the ancient and prescriptive usages of Great Britain, founded on
the soundest principles of natural law," simply because they might come
in contact with the interests or the feelings of the American people. If
Mr. Monroe's instructions left him powerless to adjust this regrettable
incident of the Leopard and the Chesapeake, without raising the other
question of the right of search and impressment, then His Majesty
could only send a special envoy to the United States to terminate the
controversy in a manner satisfactory to both countries. "But," added
Canning with sarcasm which was not lost on Monroe, "in order to avoid
the inconvenience which has arisen from the mixed nature of your
instructions, that minister will not be empowered to entertain... any
proposition respecting the search of merchant vessels."

One more humiliating experience was reserved for Monroe before his
diplomatic career closed. Following Madison's new set of instructions,
he and Pinkney attempted to reopen negotiations for the revision of the
discredited treaty of the preceding year. But Canning had reasons of his
own for wishing to be rid of a treaty which had been drawn by the late
Whig Ministry. He informed the American commissioners arrogantly that
"the proposal of the President of the United States for proceeding to
negotiate anew upon the basis of a treaty already solemnly concluded and
signed, is a proposal wholly inadmissible." His Majesty could therefore
only acquiesce in the refusal of the President to ratify the treaty. One
week later, James Monroe departed from London, never again to set foot
on British soil, leaving Pinkney to assume the duties of Minister at
the Court of St. James. For the second time Monroe returned to his own
country discredited by the President who had appointed him. In both
instances he felt himself the victim of injustice. In spite of his
friendship for Jefferson, he was embittered against the Administration
and in this mood lent himself all too readily to the schemes of John
Randolph, who had already picked him as the one candidate who could beat
Madison in the next presidential election.

From the point of view of George Canning and the Tory squirearchy whose
mouthpiece he was, the Chesapeake affair was but an incident--an unhappy
incident, to be sure, but still only an incident--in the world-wide
struggle with Napoleon. What was at stake was nothing less than
the commercial supremacy of Great Britain. The astounding growth of
Napoleon's empire was a standing menace to British trade. The overthrow
of Prussia in the fall of 1806 left the Corsican in control of Central
Europe and in a position to deal his long premeditated blow. A fortnight
after the battle of Jena, he entered Berlin and there issued the famous
decree which was his answer to the British blockade of the French
channel ports. Since England does not recognize the system of
international law universally observed by all civilized nations--so the
preamble read--but by a monstrous abuse of the right of blockade has
determined to destroy neutral trade and to raise her commerce and
industry upon the ruins of that of the continent, and since "whoever
deals on the continent in English goods thereby favors and renders
himself an accomplice of her designs," therefore the British Isles are
declared to be in a state of blockade. Henceforth all English goods were
to be lawful prize in any territory held by the troops of France or
her allies; and all vessels which had come from English ports or from
English colonies were to be confiscated, together with their cargoes.
This challenge was too much for the moral equilibrium of the squires,
the shipowners, and the merchants who dominated Parliament. It dulled
their sense of justice and made them impatient under the pinpricks which
came from the United States. "A few short months of war," declared the
Morning Post truculently, "would convince these desperate [American]
politicians of the folly of measuring the strength of a rising, but
still infant and puny, nation with the colossal power of the British
Empire." "Right," said the Times, another organ of the Tory Government,
"is power sanctioned by usage." Concession to Americans at this crisis
was not to be entertained for a moment, for after all, said the Times,
they "possess all the vices of their Indian neighbors without their
virtues."

In this temper the British Government was prepared to ignore the United
States and deal Napoleon blow for blow. An order-in-council of January
7, 1807, asserted the right of retaliation and declared that "no vessel
shall be permitted to trade from one port to another, both which ports
shall belong to, or be in possession of France or her allies." The
peculiar hardship of this order for American shipowners is revealed
by the papers of Stephen Girard of Philadelphia, whose shrewdness and
enterprise were making him one of the merchant princes of his time. One
of his ships, the Liberty, of some 250 tons, was sent to Lisbon with a
cargo of 2052 barrels and 220 half-barrels of flour which cost the
owner $10.68 a barrel. Her captain, on entering port, learned that flour
commanded a better price at Cadiz. To Cadiz, accordingly, he set sail
and sold his cargo for $22.50 a barrel, winning for the owner a goodly
profit of $25,000, less commission. It was such trading ventures as this
that the British order-in-council doomed.

What American shipmasters had now to fear from both belligerents was
made startlingly clear by the fate of the ship Horizon, which had sailed
from Charleston, South Carolina, with a cargo for Zanzibar. On the way
she touched at various South American ports and disposed of most of
her cargo. Then changing her destination, and taking on a cargo for the
English market, she set sail for London. On the way she was forced to
put in at Lisbon to refit. As she left to resume her voyage she
was seized by an English frigate and brought in as a fair prize,
since--according to the Rule of 1756--she had been apprehended in an
illegal traffic between an enemy country and its colony. The British
prize court condemned the cargo but released the ship. The unlucky
Horizon then loaded with an English cargo and sailed again to Lisbon,
but misfortune overtook her and she was wrecked off the French coast.
Her cargo was salvaged, however, and what was not of English origin was
restored to her owners by decree of a French prize court; the rest of
her cargo was confiscated under the terms of the Berlin decree. When the
American Minister protested at this decision, he was told that "since
America suffers her ships to be searched, she adopts the principle
that the flag does not cover the goods. Since she recognizes the absurd
blockades laid by England, consents to having her vessels incessantly
stopped, sent to England, and so turned aside from their course, why
should the Americans not suffer the blockade laid by France? Certainly
France recognizes that these measures are unjust, illegal, and
subversive of national sovereignty; but it is the duty of nations to
resort to force, and to declare themselves against things which dishonor
them and disgrace their independence." * But an invitation to enter the
European maelstrom and battle for neutral rights made no impression upon
the mild-tempered President.

     * Henry Adams, History of the United States, IV, p. 110.


It is as clear as day that the British Government was now determined,
under pretense of retaliating upon France, to promote British trade with
the continent by every means and at the expense of neutrals. Another
order-in-council, November 17, 1807, closed to neutrals all European
ports under French control, "as if the same were actually blockaded,"
but permitted vessels which first entered a British port and obtained a
British license to sail to any continental port. It was an order which,
as Henry Adams has said, could have but one purpose--to make American
commerce English. This was precisely the contemporary opinion of the
historian's grandfather, who declared that the "orders-in-council, if
submitted to, would have degraded us to the condition of colonists."

Only one more blow was needed, it would seem, to complete the ruin of
American commerce. It fell a month later, when Napoleon, having overrun
the Spanish peninsula and occupied Portugal, issued his Milan decree of
December 17, 1807. Henceforth any vessel which submitted to search
by English cruisers, or paid any tonnage duty or tax to the English
Government, or sailed to or from any English port, would be captured and
condemned as lawful prize. Such was to be the maritime code of France
"until England should return to the principles of international law
which are also those of justice and honor."

Never was a commercial nation less prepared to defend itself against
depredations than the United States of America in this year 1807. For
this unpreparedness many must bear the blame, but President Jefferson
has become the scapegoat. This Virginia farmer and landsman was not
only ignorant and distrustful of all the implements of war, but utterly
unfamiliar with the ways of the sea and with the first principles of
sea-power. The Tripolitan War seems to have inspired him with a single
fixed idea--that for defensive purposes gunboats were superior to
frigates and less costly. He set forth this idea in a special message
to Congress (February 10, 1807), claiming to have the support of
"professional men," among whom he mentioned Generals Wilkinson and
Gates! He proposed the construction of two hundred of these gunboats,
which would be distributed among the various exposed harbors, where
in time of peace they would be hauled up on shore under sheds, for
protection against sun and storm. As emergency arose these floating
batteries were to be manned by the seamen and militia of the port.
What appealed particularly to the President in this programme was the
immunity it offered from "an excitement to engage in offensive maritime
war." Gallatin would have modified even this plan for economy's sake.
He would have constructed only one-half of the proposed fleet since the
large seaports could probably build thirty gunboats in as many days, if
an emergency arose. In extenuation of Gallatin's shortsightedness, it
should be remembered that he was a native of Switzerland, whose navy
has never ploughed many seas. It is less easy to excuse the rest of the
President's advisers and the Congress which was beguiled into accepting
this naive project. Nor did the Chesapeake outrage teach either Congress
or the Administration a salutary lesson. On the contrary, when in
October the news of the bombardment of Copenhagen had shattered the
nerves of statesmen in all neutral countries, and while the differences
with England were still unsettled, Jefferson and his colleagues decided
to hold four of the best frigates in port and use them "as receptacles
for enlisting seamen to fill the gunboats occasionally." Whom the gods
would punish they first make mad!

The 17th of December was a memorable day in the annals of this
Administration. Favorable tradewinds had brought into American ports a
number of packets with news from Europe. The Revenge had arrived in
New York with Armstrong's dispatches announcing Napoleon's purpose to
enforce the Berlin decree; the Edward had reached Boston with British
newspapers forecasting the order-in-council of the 11th of November.
This news burst like a bomb in Washington where the genial President
was observing with scientific detachment the operation of his policy of
commercial coercion. The Non-Importation Act had just gone into effect.
Jefferson immediately called his Cabinet together. All were of one mind.
The impending order-in-council, it was agreed, left but one alternative.
Commerce must be totally suspended until the full scope of these new
aggressions could be ascertained. The President took a loose sheet of
paper and drafted hastily a message to Congress, recommending an embargo
in anticipation of the offensive British order. But the prudent Madison
urged that it was better not to refer explicitly to the order and
proposed a substitute which simply recommended "an immediate inhibition
of the departure of our vessels from the ports of the United States,"
on the ground that shipping was likely to be exposed to greater dangers.
Only Gallatin demurred: he would have preferred an embargo for a
limited time. "I prefer war to a permanent embargo," he wrote next
day. "Government prohibitions," he added significantly, "do always more
mischief than had been calculated." But Gallatin was overruled and the
message, in Madison's form, was sent to Congress on the following day.
The Senate immediately passed the desired bill through three readings
in a single day; the House confirmed this action after only two days
of debate; and on the 22d of December, the President signed the Embargo
Act.

What was this measure which was passed by Congress almost without
discussion? Ostensibly it was an act for the protection of American
ships, merchandise, and seamen. It forbade the departure of all ships
for foreign ports, except vessels under the immediate direction of the
President and vessels in ballast or already loaded with goods. Foreign
armed vessels were exempted also as a matter of course. Coasting ships
were to give bonds double the value of vessel and cargo to reland their
freight in some port of the United States. Historians have discovered
a degree of duplicity in the alleged motives for this act. How, it is
asked, could protection of ships and seamen be the motive when all of
Jefferson's private letters disclose his determination to put his theory
of peaceable coercion to a practical test by this measure? The criticism
is not altogether fair, for, as Jefferson would himself have
replied, peaceable coercion was designed to force the withdrawal of
orders-in-council and decrees that menaced the safety of ships and
cargoes. The policy might entail some incidental hardships, to be sure,
but the end in view was protection of American lives and property.
Madison was not quite candid, nevertheless, when he assured the British
Minister that the embargo was a precautionary measure only and not
conceived with hostile intent.

Chimerical this policy seemed to many contemporaries; chimerical it has
seemed to historians, and to us who have passed through the World
War. Yet in the World War it was the possession of food stuffs and raw
materials by the United States which gave her a dominating position in
the councils of the Allies. Had her commerce in 1807 been as necessary
to England and France as it was "at the very peak" of the World War,
Thomas Jefferson might have proved that peaceable coercion is an
effective alternative to war; but he overestimated the magnitude and
importance of the carrying trade of the United States, and erred still
more grievously in assuming that a public conscience existed which would
prove superior to the temptation to evade the law. Jefferson dreaded war
quite as much because of its concomitants as because of its inevitable
brutality, quite as much because it tended to exalt government and to
produce corruption as because it maimed bodies and sacrificed human
lives. Yet he never took fully into account the possible accompaniments
of his alternative to war. That the embargo would debauch public morals
and make government arbitrary, he was to learn only by bitter experience
and personal humiliation.

Just after the passage of this momentous act, Canning's special envoy,
George Rose, arrived in the United States. A British diplomat of the
better sort, with much dignity of manner and suave courtesy, he was
received with more than ordinary consideration by the Administration.
He was commissioned, every one supposed, to offer reparation for
the Chesapeake affair. Even after he had notified Madison that his
instructions bade him insist, as an indispensable preliminary, on the
recall of the President's Chesapeake proclamation, he was treated with
deference and assured that the President was prepared to comply, if he
could do so without incurring the charge of inconsistency and disregard
of national honor. Madison proposed to put a proclamation of recall in
Rose's hands, duly signed by the President and dated so as to correspond
with the day on which all differences should be adjusted. Rose consented
to this course and the proclamation was delivered into his hands. He
then divulged little by little his further instructions, which were such
as no self-respecting administration could listen to with composure.
Canning demanded a formal disavowal of Commodore Barron's conduct in
encouraging deserters from His Majesty's service and harboring them on
board his ship. "You will state," read Rose's instructions, "that
such disavowals, solemnly expressed, would afford to His Majesty a
satisfactory pledge on the part of the American Government that the
recurrence of similar causes will not on any occasion impose on His
Majesty the necessity of authorizing those means of force to which
Admiral Berkeley has resorted without authority, but which the continued
repetition of such provocations as unfortunately led to the attack upon
the Chesapeake might render necessary, as a just reprisal on the part
of His Majesty." No doubt Rose did his best to soften the tone of these
instructions, but he could not fail to make them clear; and Madison, who
had conducted these informal interviews, slowly awoke to the real nature
of what he was asked to do. He closed further negotiations with the
comment that the United States could not be expected "to make, as it
were, an expiatory sacrifice to obtain redress, or beg for reparation."
The Administration determined to let the disavowal of Berkeley suffice
for the present and to allow the matter of reparation to await further
developments. The coercive policy on which the Administration had
now launched would, it was confidently believed, bring His Majesty's
Government to terms.

The very suggestion of an embargo had an unexpected effect upon American
shipmasters. To avoid being shut up in port, fleets of ships put out to
sea half-manned, half-laden, and often without clearance papers. With
freight rates soaring to unheard-of altitudes, ship-owners were willing
to assume all the risks of the sea--British frigates included. So little
did they appreciate the protection offered by a benevolent gover

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