The Life of Albert Gallatin

Meanwhile, the American commissioners, ignorant of all this secret correspondence and consultation, were busy in framing their projet, and in disputing among themselves in regard to the extension they should give to the principle of the status quo ante bellum as applied to other than territorial questions, and especially to the fisheries and the Mississippi.

The task of preparing articles on impressment, blockade, and indemnities was assigned to Mr. Adams; but as these articles were at once declared inadmissible by the British, and were abandoned in consequence, the whole stress of negotiation fell upon those respecting boundaries and the fisheries, which Mr. Gallatin undertook to prepare. On this point local jealousies were involved, which not only troubled the harmony of the mission, but left seeds that afterwards developed into a ferocious controversy between some of its members. This was owing to the fact that the treaty of 1783 had to a certain extent coupled the American right to fish in British waters with a British right to navigate the Mississippi. The British now proposed to put an abrupt end to the American fisheries, but seemed disposed to retain the navigation of the Mississippi. To settle the question, Mr. Gallatin drew up an article by which the two articles of the treaty of 1783 on these points were recognized and confirmed.146 To this Mr. Clay energetically objected, and a prolonged discussion took place. The question what the fisheries were worth was a question of fact, which was susceptible of answer, but no human being could say what the navigation of the Mississippi was worth, and for this very reason there could be no agreement. Whatever the right of navigation might amount to in national interest, it was very likely to equal the whole value of Mr. Clay’s personal popularity; and whatever the fisheries might be worth to New England, their loss was certain to bankrupt Mr. Adams’s political fortunes. Mr. Gallatin acted here not merely the part of a peacemaker, but that of an economist. He took upon himself the burden of saving the fisheries, and not only drafted the article which offered to renew the treaty stipulations of 1783, and thus set off the fisheries against the Mississippi, but assumed the brunt of the argument against Mr. Clay, who would listen to no suggestion of a return in this respect to the old status. On the 5th November the commissioners came to a vote on Mr. Gallatin’s proposed article; Mr. Clay and Mr. Russell opposed it; Mr. Gallatin, Mr. Adams, and Mr. Bayard approved it, and it was voted that the article should be inserted in the American projet. Mr. Clay declared that he would not put his name to the note, though he should not go so far as to refuse his signature to the treaty.

The next day, however, a compromise was made. Mr. Clay proposed that Mr. Gallatin’s article should be laid aside, and that, instead of a provision expressly inserted in the projet, a paragraph should be inserted in the note which was to accompany the projet. The idea suggested in this paragraph was that the commissioners were not authorized to bring the fisheries into discussion, because the treaty of 1783 was by its peculiar nature a permanent arrangement, and the United States could not concede its abrogation. True, the right to the Mississippi was thus made permanent, as well as the right to the fisheries, but Mr. Clay conceived that this right could be valid only so far as it was independent of the acquisition of Louisiana.

The reasoning seemed somewhat casuistic; Mr. Gallatin hesitated; he much doubted whether the provisions of 1783 about the fisheries and the Mississippi were in their nature permanent; on this point he believed the British to have the best of the argument; but the advantages of unanimity and of obedience to instructions outweighed his doubts. Mr. Clay’s compromise was accordingly adopted, but at the same time Mr. Adams, with the strong support of Mr. Gallatin, succeeded in adding the declaration that the commissioners were ready to sign a treaty which should apply the principle of the status quo ante bellum to all the subjects of difference. Mr. Clay resisted as long as he could, but at last signed with his colleagues, and the projet sent in on November 10 accordingly contained no allusion to the fisheries or the Mississippi.

This note and projet of November 10 found the British commissioners still in a belligerent temper, for the effect of Mr. Vansittart’s remonstrances and of the Duke of Wellington’s advice had not yet made itself felt. Mr. Goulburn wrote on the same day to Lord Bathurst that the greater part of the American projet was by far too extravagant to leave any doubt in his mind and that of his colleagues as to the mode in which it could be combated.147 An entire fortnight passed before his government startled him with the announcement that he must again give way, and it was only then, on November 25, that the fishery question was seriously taken up on the British side.

In Lord Castlereagh’s original instructions of July 28,148 the British commissioners had been told that the provisions of the treaty of 1783 in respect to the in-shore fisheries on the coast of Newfoundland had been productive of so much inconvenience as to determine the government not to renew them in their present form or to concede any accommodation to the Americans in this respect except on the principle of an equivalent in frontier or otherwise. Supplementary instructions, dated August 14,149 had also declared that the free navigation of the Mississippi must be provided for. Lord Bathurst had now to settle his policy on these points, and he seems to have instructed Mr. Goulburn, in letters dated the 21st and 22d November, that the treaty might be concluded without noticing the fishery question, since the crown lawyers were of the opinion, although he himself thought otherwise, that the American rights, unless expressly renewed, would necessarily terminate. These letters of Lord Bathurst, however, have not been printed, and their tenor can only be inferred from Mr. Goulburn’s reply on the 25th November, from which it appears that the British were almost as much in doubt as the Americans in regard to the fishery rights: “Had we never mentioned the subject of the fisheries at all,” said Mr. Goulburn, “I think that we might have argued the exclusion of the Americans from them on the general principle stated by Sir W. Scott and Sir C. Robinson; but having once brought forward the subject, having thus implied that we had (what Lord Castlereagh seemed really to have) a doubt of this principle; having received from the American plenipotentiaries a declaration of what they consider to be their right in this particular, and having left that declaration without an answer, I entirely concur in your opinion that we do practically admit the Americans to the fisheries as they enjoyed them before the war, and shall not, without a new war, be able to exclude them. I ought to add, however, that Dr. Adams and Lord Gambier do not agree in this opinion. You do us but justice in supposing that, without positive instructions, we shall not admit any article in favor of the American fishery even if any such should be brought forward by them; indeed, we did not at all understand your letter, either public or private, as implying any such concession.”

The British counter-projet, sent in on November 26, contained accordingly no allusion to the fisheries and took no notice of Mr. Clay’s paragraph in regard to the treaty of 1783, but, on the other hand, contained a clause stipulating for the free navigation of the Mississippi. When this counter-projet came up for discussion in the American commission on the 28th November, another hot dispute arose. Mr. Gallatin proposed to accept the British clause in regard to the Mississippi, and to add another clause to continue the liberty of taking, drying, and curing fish, “as secured by the former treaty of peace.” To this proposition Mr. Clay offered a stout resistance; he maintained that the fisheries were of little or no value, while the Mississippi was of immense importance, and he could see no sort of reason in treating them as equivalent. Mr. Adams maintained just the opposite view, and after the dispute had lasted the better part of two days, “Mr. Gallatin brought us all to unison again by a joke. He said he perceived that Mr. Adams cared nothing at all about the navigation of the Mississippi and thought of nothing but the fisheries. Mr. Clay cared nothing at all about the fisheries and thought of nothing but the Mississippi. The East was perfectly willing to sacrifice the West, and the West equally ready to sacrifice the East. Now he was a Western man, and would give the navigation of the river for the fisheries. Mr. Russell was an Eastern man, and was ready to do the same.”

The proposition was accordingly made, and met with a prompt refusal from the British government, which proposed to adopt a new article by which both subjects should be referred to a future negotiation. This offer gave rise among the commissioners to a fresh contest, waged hotly about the point whether or not the United States should concede that a right fixed by the treaty of 1783 was open to negotiation. Here Mr. Gallatin parted company with Mr. Adams. He was unwilling to pledge the government to the doctrine that liberties granted by the treaty of 1783 could not be discussed, and he carried all his colleagues with him, Mr. Adams only excepted, in favor of a qualified acceptance of the British proposition, provided the engagement to negotiate applied to all the subjects of difference not yet adjusted, and provided it involved no abandonment of any right in the fisheries claimed by the United States.

Mr. Goulburn had flattered himself upon having at length gained a point. On the 10th December he had written to Lord Bathurst: “I confess my own opinion to be that the question of the fisheries stood as well upon the result of the last conference as it can do upon any reply which they may make to our proposition of this day. The arguments which they used at the time will certainly be to be learnt only from the ex parte statements of the negotiators; but the fact of their having attempted to purchase the fisheries is recorded, and is an evidence (to say the least of it) that they doubt their right to enjoy them without a stipulation. If they receive our proposition, all will be well; but if they reject it, they may derive from that rejection an argument against what we wish to deduce from the protocol.”150

Even the poor consolation which Mr. Goulburn thus hugged was disappointed, for Mr. Gallatin’s note neither accepted nor rejected the British offer to negotiate, but expressed a willingness to agree to do so only with the most emphatic reservation of all rights claimed by the United States. Mr. Goulburn was obliged to contemplate the abandonment of his last stronghold; he mildly wrote to Lord Bathurst, suggesting that all stipulations respecting the Mississippi and the fisheries should be omitted.151

After Mr. Gallatin had, with no little difficulty, succeeded in carrying his point, and after the usual delay consequent on the inevitable reference to London, an answer was returned on the 22d December. Somewhat to the discomfiture of both Mr. Clay and Mr. Adams, the Eastern and Western belligerents, this reply suddenly drew their war-chariots from under them. The British government was now more eager for peace than the American commissioners; it declared that it cared nothing about its proposed article by which the fisheries and the Mississippi were to be referred to negotiation, and would withdraw it with pleasure, so that the treaty might be silent on the subject. The practical result was that Mr. Adams’s view of the treaty of 1783 inevitably became the doctrine of his government, and that Mr. Clay was overset. Mr. Clay saw this, and was nettled by it; but Mr. Gallatin’s very delicate management, and the now clearly avowed desire of the British government to make peace, had clinched the settlement; further discussion or delay was out of the question, and three days later, on Christmas-Day, the treaty was signed.

Far more than contemporaries ever supposed or than is now imagined, the treaty of Ghent was the special work and the peculiar triumph of Mr. Gallatin. From what a fearful collapse it rescued the government, every reader knows. How bitterly it irritated the war-party in England, and what clamors were raised against it by the powerful interests that were bent on “punishing” the United States, can be seen in the old leaders of the London Times. What Lord Castlereagh at Vienna thought of it may be read in his letter of January 2, 1815, to Lord Liverpool: “The courier from Ghent with the news of the peace arrived yesterday morning. It has produced the greatest possible sensation here, and will, I have no doubt, enter largely into the calculations of our opponents. It is a most auspicious and seasonable event. I wish you joy of being released from the millstone of an American war.”152 The peace was due primarily to the good sense of Lord Castlereagh, Lord Liverpool, and the Duke of Wellington; but there is fair room to doubt whether that good sense would have been kept steady to its purpose, and whether the American negotiators could have been held together in theirs, without the controlling influence of Mr. Gallatin’s resource, tact, and authority; whether, indeed, any negotiation at all could have been brought about except through Mr. Gallatin’s personal efforts, from the time he supported the mission in the Cabinet to the time when he took the responsibility of going to England. Sooner or later peace must have come, but there may be fair reason to think that, without Mr. Gallatin, the United States must have fought another campaign, and, Mr. Clay to the contrary notwithstanding, the position of New England and of the finances made peace vitally necessary. On that subject Mr. Gallatin’s knowledge of New England and of finance made him a wiser counsellor than Mr. Clay. Yet if Mr. Clay really had thought as he talked, he would not have crossed the ocean to assist in doing precisely what Mr. Gallatin’s policy dictated; he well knew that the United States could possibly win in the field no advantages to compensate for the inevitable mischief that another year of war must have caused to the government.

1815.

Be this as it may, the task done was done in the true spirit of Mr. Gallatin’s political philosophy and in the fullest sympathy with his old convictions. Stress of circumstances had wrested control from his hands, had blocked his path as Secretary of the Treasury, and had plunged the country headlong into difficulties it was not yet competent to manage. Gallatin had abandoned place and power, had thrown himself with all his energy upon the only point where he could make his strength effective, and had actually succeeded, by skill and persistence, in guiding the country back to safe and solid ground. He was not a man to boast of his exploits, and he never claimed peculiar credit in any of these transactions, but as he signed the treaty of Ghent he could fairly say that no one had done more than himself to serve his country, and no one had acted a more unselfish part.

After a furious parting quarrel between Mr. Clay and Mr. Adams, in which Mr. Gallatin again exercised all his tact to soothe the angry feelings of the two combatants, while he quietly threw his weight on Mr. Adams’s side, the commissioners separated, and he found himself free to follow his own fancy. As might be expected, his first act was to revisit his family and his birthplace; he took the road to Geneva.

Of this visit very little can be said. His letters to his wife during all the period of this stay in Europe have been lost, and their place cannot be supplied. No man, however, can go through the experience of returning to the associations of his youth, after more than thirty years of struggle like his, without sensations such as he would not care to express in words. He left only one allusion to the subject: he said that, as he approached Geneva, calm as his nature was, his calmness deserted him.

The citizens of his native town received him with the most cordial welcome; they were proud of him, and he was greeted with all the distinction he could have expected or wished. He passed a short time in renewing his relations with the surviving members of his family and with his old friends; then, departing again for Paris, he arrived there in season to witness the return of Napoleon from Elba, and to receive the information of his own appointment as minister to France in place of Mr. Crawford, who had decided to return home. In April he crossed the channel to England. He had not yet determined to accept the French mission, and in any case his family and his private affairs made a return to America necessary; meanwhile, he and his colleagues lingered, hoping to effect still further negotiation under their powers for a commercial treaty.

The following letter is a memento of his stay in Paris.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT TO GALLATIN

Je n’ai pas été assez heureux pour vous trouver ce matin, mon illustre ami. J’aurais bien désiré cependant vous parler de mon attachement constant et tendre, de mon vif intérêt pour la paix que vous avez eu la gloire de conclure dans des circonstances difficiles. J’aurais aussi voulu vous féliciter sur cette belle et noble défense de la Nouvelle-Orléans qui fera respecter les armées de la Liberté, comme les flottes qui voguent sous votre pavillon se sont couvertes de gloire depuis longtemps. Que dans ces temps malheureux mes yeux se fixent avec attendrissement sur ces contrées qui seront bientôt le centre de la civilisation humaine! Je ferai d’autres tentatives pour vous trouver et vous recommander de nouveau Mr. Warden, mon ami et celui de Messrs. Berthollet, Thenard, Gay Lussac, et de tout ce qui aime les sciences. Je ne puis croire qu’un homme aussi instruit, aussi doux, aussi honnête, aussi attaché aux États-Unis, à M. Jefferson et aux doctrines vertueuses puisse être rejetté par votre gouvernement. Je supplie Madame Gallatin d’agréer l’hommage de mon respectueux dévouement. Quel contraste entre cette époque et celle où vous me vîtes à Londres ennuyé des “magnanimous Soverains” et de la croisade des héros!

Humboldt.

Quai Malaquais, No. 3.

Jeudi.

Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Clay arrived in London early in April and began negotiations with Lord Castlereagh. Mr. Adams, now appointed minister to England, joined his colleagues in the following month, but Mr. Bayard remained in Paris or on shipboard. The President had appointed him minister to Russia, but he was not in a condition to accept the post even if he had cared to take it; broken down by illness, he was destined to reach home only to die. The negotiation with Lord Castlereagh was carried on almost entirely by Mr. Gallatin, and was the first of a long series of similar negotiations mainly conducted by him during the next fifteen years.

So far as England was concerned, excepting the questions of the fisheries, impressment, and boundary, the only source of serious difficulty arose in her colonial policy and the complications necessarily springing from it. These complications were numerous, but became threatening only when England was engaged in maritime war; at other times they were merely annoying, and kept our government incessantly employed in efforts to obtain the relaxation or abandonment of vexatious commercial restrictions. To obtain this result, however, the United States had left herself no inducements to offer. Most of the maritime powers in Europe had colonies, which they regarded as mere farms of the State; private property with regard to other nations; industrial speculations with which foreigners had no more to do than with their arsenals and dock-yards; places where they were admitted only on tolerance, and where they dealt not with the colonist, but with the imperial government. England especially had created a great system of this kind, and, to protect it, she had enacted a long series of navigation laws whose object was to secure all her own colonial trade to her own ships, and as much of her neighbors’ trade as she could gather into her ubiquitous hands. Between European nations there was a sort of colonial compact; they bargained one colonial trade against another, and admitted one another’s ships into their colonial ports provided their own ships were admitted in return; but when the United States claimed the same privilege, the European governments, with the spirit and in the language of so many small hucksters, asked what equivalent the United States could offer; where were the American colonies whose trade could be exchanged for that of the European? Mr. Gallatin pointed out where the American colonies lay, a long uninterrupted succession stretching from Lake Erie and Lake Superior to Mobile and New Orleans, – colonies whose growth surpassed that of the most prosperous European settlement as absolutely as the American continent surpassed in size and wealth the largest and richest island of either Indies. To this there was but one reply. The United States had already thrown the trade of her colonies open to the world; she could not now bargain for an equivalent. Even retaliation was precluded, for her own constitution would neither permit her to close any of her ports without closing all, nor to lay a duty on exports.

The English colonial system was the most difficult to deal with, since it was not only the most extensive, the most valuable, and the English colonies among the nearest to the United States, but its complications and inconsistencies were the most elaborate and perplexing, while to the British nation there was no absurdity in the whole mass that was not twisted deeply about some strong moneyed interest and that was not sanctified by age and English blood. To the United States there were three groups of questions involved in commercial relations with the British colonies. The first group included Canada and the whole trade with the provinces on our northern frontier, and was further complicated by our claim to the right of navigating the St. Lawrence. The second group included the British West India islands and their indirect trade with the United States through Nova Scotia. The third group consisted of the East Indies, and involved the trade between Calcutta, Europe, and the United States. These were the subjects which Mr. Gallatin attempted to settle by a commercial convention in the summer of 1815, and which detained him, much against his will, in England at a time when he was extremely anxious to be again at home.

Lord Castlereagh was friendly, and did what he could to smooth negotiation. Mr. Goulburn and Dr. Adams were continued in the British commission; but, in place of Lord Gambier, the American commissioners had a man to deal with whose qualifications and temper were of a very different kind. This was Frederic Robinson, afterwards Lord Goderich and Earl Ripon, who played a distinguished part in reforming the worst faults of the English commercial system. He was now vice-president of the Board of Trade, and treated the American ministers with courtesy and kindness, although able to do little more. Mr. Gallatin succeeded in disposing of none of the more difficult points in dispute. Not only did the British government politely decline to open the questions of impressment, blockade, and the trade with enemies’ colonies in time of war, but it withdrew the whole subject of the West India trade from discussion, and refused to listen to the American proposition for regulating the traffic with Canada and opening the river St. Lawrence. There remained only the East Indies, and a convention was ultimately signed which secured the Americans for four years in the enjoyment of this branch of commerce. In discussing with the Secretary of State the merits of this commercial convention of 1815, Mr. Gallatin afterwards declared that the only portion of it which appeared to him truly valuable was that which abolished discriminating duties, “a policy which, removing some grounds of irritation, and preventing in that respect a species of commercial warfare, may have a tendency to lay the foundation of a better understanding between the two nations on other points.”153 This result of three months’ labor was small enough, but Mr. Gallatin might derive some encouragement from the fact that the British government looked upon itself as having done a very generous act, since, in the words of its last note, “it considers itself as granting to the United States a privilege in regard to the East Indies for which it is entitled to require an equivalent.”