Thirty Years' View (Vol. II of 2)

This is dry detail, but essential to the scope of this work, more occupied with telling how things were done than what was done: and in pursuing this view it is amazing to see by what arts and contrivances – by what trifles and accidents – the great affairs of nations, as well as the small ones of individuals, are often decided. The finale in this case was truly ridiculous: for, after all this disturbance and commotion – two great nations standing to their arms, exhausting diplomacy, and inflaming the people to the war point – after the formal assumption of McLeod's offence, and war threatened for his release, it turned out that he was not there! and was acquitted by an American jury on ample evidence. He had slept that night in Chippewa, and only heard of the act the next morning at the breakfast table – when he wished he had been there. Which wish afterwards ripened into an assertion that he was there! and, further, had himself killed one of the damned Yankees – by no means the first instance of a man boasting of performing exploits in a fight which he did not see. But what a lesson it teaches to nations! Two great countries brought to angry feelings, to criminative diplomacy, to armed preparation, to war threats – their governments and people in commotion – their authorities all in council, and taxing their skill and courage to the uttermost: and all to settle a national quarrel as despicable in its origin as the causes of tavern brawls; and exceedingly similar to the origin of such brawls. McLeod's false and idle boast was the cause of all this serious difficulty between two great Powers.

Mr. Fox had delivered his formal demand and threat on the 12th day of March: the administration immediately undertook McLeod's release. The assumption of his imputed act had occasioned some warm words in the British House of Commons, where it was known to be gratuitous: its communication created no warmth in our cabinet, but a cold chill rather, where every spring was immediately put in action to release McLeod. Being in the hands of a State court, no order could be given for his liberation; but all the authorities in New York were immediately applied to – governor, legislature, supreme court, local court – all in vain: and then the United States assumed his defence, and sent the Attorney-General, Mr. Crittenden, to manage his defence, and General Scott, of the United States army, to protect him from popular violence; and hastened to lay all their steps before the British minister as fast as they were taken.

The acquittal of McLeod was honorable to the jury that gave it; and his trial was honorable to the judge, who, while asserting the right to try the man, yet took care that the trial should be fair. The judges of the Supreme Court (Bronson, Nelson, and Cowan) refused the habeas corpus which would take him out of the State: the Circuit judge gave him a fair trial. It was satisfactory to the British; and put an end to their complaint against us: unhappily it seemed to put an end to our complaint against them. All was postponed for a future general treaty – the invasion of territory, the killing of citizens, the arson of the boat, the impressment and abduction of a supposed British subject – all, all were postponed to the day of general settlement: and when that day came all were given up.

The conduct of the administration in the settlement of the affair became a subject of discussion in both Houses of Congress, and was severely censured by the democracy, and zealously defended by the whigs. Mr. Charles Jared Ingersoll, after a full statement of the extraordinary and successful efforts of the administration of Mr. Van Buren to prevent any aid to the insurgents from the American side, proceeded to say:

"Notwithstanding, however, every exertion that could be and was made, it was impossible altogether to prevent some outbreaks, and among the rest a parcel of some seventy or eighty Canadians, as I have understood, with a very few Americans, took possession of a place near the Canadian shore, called Navy Island, and fortified themselves in defiance of British power. If I have not been misinformed there were not more than eight or ten Americans among them. An American steamboat supplied them with a cannon and perhaps other munitions of war: for I have no disposition to diminish whatever was the full extent of American illegality, but, in this statement of the premises, desire to present the argument with the most unreserved concessions. I am discussing nothing as the member of a party. I consider the Secretary of State as the representative of his government and country. I desire to be understood as not intending to say one word against that gentleman as an individual; as meaning to avoid every thing like personality, and addressing myself to the position he has assumed for the country, without reference to whether he is connected with one administration or another; viewing this as a controversy between the United States and a foreign government, in which all Americans should be of one party, acknowledging no distinction between the acts of Mr. Forsyth and Mr. Webster, but considering the whole affair, under both the successive administrations, as one and indivisible; and on many points, I believe this country is altogether of one and the same sentiment concerning this controversy. It seems to be universally agreed that British pirates as they were, as I will show according to the strictest legal definition of the term, in the dead of night, burglariously invaded our country, murdered at least one of our unoffending fellow-citizens, were guilty of the further crime of arson by burning what was at least the temporary dwelling of a number of persons asleep in a steamboat moored to the wharf, and finally cutting her loose, carried her into the middle of the stream, where, by romantic atrocity, unexampled in the annals of crime, they sent her over the Falls of Niagara, with how many persons in her, God only will ever know.

"Now Mr. Speaker, this, in its national aspect, was precisely the same as if perpetrated in your house or mine, and should be resented and punished accordingly. Some time afterwards one of the perpetrators, named McLeod, in a fit of that sort of infatuation with which Providence mostly betrays the guilty, strayed over from Canada to the American shore, like a fool, as he was, and there was soon arrested and imprisoned by that popular police, which is always on the alert to administer justice upon malefactors. First proceeded against, as it appears, for civil redress for the loss of the vessel, he was soon after indicted by the appropriate grand jury, and has remained ever since in custody, awaiting the regular administration of justice. Guilty or innocent, however, there he was, under the ægis of the law of the sovereign State of New York, with the full protection of every branch of the government of that State, when the present administration superseded the last, and the first moment after the late President's inauguration was ungenerously seized by the British minister to present the new Secretary of State with a letter containing the insolent, threatening, and insufferable language which I am about to read from it:

"'The undersigned is instructed to demand from the government of the United States, formally, in the name of the British government, the immediate release of Mr. Alexander McLeod. The transaction in question may have been, as her Majesty's government are of opinion that it was, a justifiable employment of force for the purpose of defending the British territory from the unprovoked attack of a band of British rebels and American pirates, who, having been permitted to arm and organize themselves within the territory of the United States, had actually invaded and occupied a portion of the territory of her Majesty; or it may have been, as alleged by Mr. Forsyth, in his note to the undersigned of the 26th of December, a most unjustifiable invasion in time of peace, of the territory of the United States.'"

"Finally, after a tissue of well elaborated diplomatic contumely, the very absurdity of part of which, in the application of the term pirates to the interfering Americans, is demonstrated by Mr. Webster – the British minister reiterates, towards the conclusion of his artfully insulting note – that 'be that as it may, her Majesty's government formally demands, upon the grounds already stated, the immediate release of Mr. McLeod; and her Majesty's government entreats the President of the United States – I pray the House to mark the sarcasm of this offensive entreaty – to take into his deliberate consideration the serious nature of the consequences which must ensue from a rejection of this demand.'

"Taken in connection with all the actual circumstances of the case – the tone of the British press, both in England and Canada, the language of members in both Houses of Parliament, and the palpable terms of Mr. Fox's letter itself, it is impossible, I think, not to see we cannot wink so hard as not to perceive that Mr. Fox's is a threatening letter. It surprises me that this should have been a subject of controversy in another part of this building, while I cannot doubt that Mr. Webster was perfectly satisfied of the menacing aspect of the first letter he received from the British minister. Anxious – perhaps laudably anxious – to avoid a quarrel so very unpromising at the very outset of a new administration, he seems to have shut his eyes to what must flash in every American face. And here was his first mistake; for his course was perfectly plain. He had nothing to do but, by an answer in the blandest terms of diplomatic courtesy, to send back the questionable phrases to Mr. Fox, with a respectful suggestion that they looked to him as if conveying a threat; that he hoped not, he believed not; he trusted for the harmony of their personal relations, and the peace of their respective nations, that he was laboring under a mistake; but he could not divest his mind of the impression, that there were in this note of Mr. Fox, certain phrases which, in all controversies among gentlemen as well as nations, inevitably put an end to further negotiation. Mr. Fox must have answered negatively or affirmatively, and the odious indignity which now rankles in the breast of at least a large proportion of the country, interpreting it as the meaning of the British communication, would have been avoided. Mr. Webster had Mr. Fox absolutely in the hollow of his hand. He had an opportunity of enlisting the manly feeling of all his countrymen, the good will of right-minded Englishmen themselves, to a firm and inoffensive stand like this, on the threshold of the correspondence. Why he did not, is not for me to imagine. With no feeling of personal disparagement to that gentleman, I charge this as an obvious, a capital, and a deplorable lapse from the position he should have assumed, in his very first attitude towards the British minister.

"The British argument addressed to him was, that 'the transaction in question was a justifiable employment of public force, with the sanction, or by order of the constituted authorities of a State, engaging individuals in military or naval enterprises in their country's cause, when it would be contrary to the universal practice of civilized nations to fix individual responsibility upon the persons engaged.' This, as I do not hesitate to pronounce it, false assumption of law, is, at once, conceded by Mr. Webster, in the remarkable terms, that the 'government of the United States,' by which he must mean himself, entertains no doubt of the asserted British principle. Mr. Webster had just before said, that 'the President is not certain that he understands precisely the meaning intended to be conveyed by her Majesty's government,' 'which doubt,' he adds, 'has occasioned with the President some hesitation.' Thus while the President entertained a doubt, the government entertained no doubt at all; which I cannot understand, otherwise, than that while the President hesitated to concede, the Secretary of State had no hesitation whatever to concede at once the whole British assumption, and surrender at discretion the whole American case. For where is the use of Mr. Webster's posterior, elaborated argument, when told by the British minister that this transaction was justifiable, and informed by the public prints that at a very early day, one of the British Secretaries, Lord John Russell, declared in open Parliament that the British government justified what is called the transaction of McLeod. The matter was ended before Mr. Webster set his powerful mind to produce an argument on the subject. The British crown had taken its position. Mr. Webster knew it had; and he may write the most elegant and pathetic letters till doomsday, with no other effect than to display the purity of his English to admiring fellow-citizens, and the infirmity of his argument to Great Britain and the world. By asserting the legal position which they assume, and justifying the transaction, together with Mr. Webster's concession of their legal position, the transaction is settled. Nothing remains to be done. Mr. Webster may write about it if he will, but Mr. Fox and the British minister hold the written acknowledgment of the American Secretary of State, that the affair is at an end. I call this, sir, a terrible mistake, a fatal blunder, irrecoverable, desperate, leaving us nothing but Mr. Webster's dreadful alternative of cold-blooded, endless, causeless war.

"Our position is false, extremely and lamentably false. The aggrieved party, as we are, and bound to insist upon redress, to require the punishment of McLeod, Drew, and McNab, and the other pirates who destroyed the Caroline, we have been brought to such a reverse of the true state of things, as to be menaced with the wrong-doer's indignation, unless we yield every thing. I care not whose fault it is, whether of this administration or that. In such an affair I consider both the present and the past, as presenting one and the same front to one and the same assailant. I cannot refrain, however, from saying, that whatever may have been our position, it has been greatly deteriorated by Mr. Webster's unfortunate concession.

"Never did man lose a greater occasion than Mr. Webster cast away, for placing himself and his country together, upon a pinnacle of just renown. Great Britain had humbled France, conquered Egypt, subdued vast tracts of India, and invaded the distant empire of China – there was nothing left but our degradation, to fill the measure of her glory, if it consists in such achievements; and she got it by merely demanding, without expecting it. And why have we yielded? Was there any occasion for it? Did she intend to realize her threat? Were the consequences which Mr. Webster was entreated to take into his consideration, the immediate and exterminating warfare, servile war and all, which belligerent newspapers, peers, and other such heralds of hostilities have proclaimed? No such thing. We may rely, I think, with confidence, upon the common good sense of the English nation, not to rush at once upon such extremities, and for such a cause. Mr. Fox took Mr. Webster in the melting mood, and conquered by a threat; that is to say, conquered for the moment; because the results, at some distant day, unless his steps are retraced, will and must be estrangement between kindred nations, and cold-blooded hostilities. I have often thought, Mr. Speaker, that this affair of McLeod is what military men call a demonstration, a feint, a false attack, to divert us from the British design on the State of Maine; of which I trust not one inch will ever be given up. And truly, when we had the best cause in the world, and were the most clearly in the right, it has been contrived, some how or other, to put us in false position, upon the defensive, instead of the offensive, and to perplex the plainest case with vexatious complication and concession."

The latter part of this speech was prophetic – that which related to the designs on the State of Maine. Successful in this experiment of the most efficacious means for the release of McLeod, the British ministry lost no time in making another trial of the same experiment, on the territory of that State – and again successfully: but of this in its proper place. Mr. John Quincy Adams, and Mr. Caleb Cushing, were the prominent defenders of the administration policy in the House of Representatives – resting on the point that the destruction of the Caroline was an act of war. Mr. Adams said:

"I take it that the late affair of the Caroline was in hostile array against the British government, and that the parties concerned in it were employed in acts of war against it: and I do not subscribe to the very learned opinion of the chief justice of the State of New York (not, I hear, the chief justice, but a judge of the Supreme Court of that State), that there was no act of war committed. Nor do I subscribe to it that every nation goes to war only on issuing a declaration or proclamation of war. This is not the fact. Nations often wage war for years, without issuing any declaration of war. The question is not here upon a declaration of war, but acts of war. And I say that in the judgment of all impartial men of other nations, we shall be held as a nation responsible; that the Caroline, there, was in a state of war against Great Britain; for purposes of war, and the worst kind of war – to sustain an insurrection; I will not say rebellion, because rebellion is a crime, and because I heard them talked of as patriots."

Mr. Cushing said:

"It is strange enough that the friends of Mr. Van Buren should deny that the attack on the Caroline was an act of war. I reply to them not only by exhibiting the reason and the principle of the thing, but by citing the authority of their own President. I hold in my hand a copy of the despatch addressed by Mr. Stevenson to Lord Palmerston, under the direction of Mr. Van Buren, making demand of reparation for the destruction of the Caroline, and in that despatch, which has been published, Mr. Stevenson pursues the only course he could pursue; he proceeds to prove the hostile nature of the act by a full exhibition of facts, and concludes and winds up the whole with declaring in these words: 'The case then is one of open, undisguised, and unwarrantable hostility.' After this, let no one complain of Mr. Webster for having put the case of the Caroline on the same precise ground which Mr. Van Buren had assumed for it, and which, indeed, is the only ground upon which the United States could undertake to hold the British government responsible. And when the gentleman from Pennsylvania is considering the first great negotiation of Mr. Webster, how does he happen to forget the famous, or rather infamous, first great negotiation undertaken by Mr. Van Buren? And is it not an act of mere madness on the part of the friends of Mr. Van Buren, to compel us to compare the two? Here is a despatch before us, addressed in a controversy between the United States and Great Britain, containing one of the ablest vindications of the honor and integrity of the United States that ever was written. Mr. Van Buren began, also, with the discussion of the question between us and Great Britain. And in what spirit? – that of a patriot, a man of honor, and an American? Is not that despatch, on the contrary, a monument of ignominy in the history of the United States? Instead of maintaining the interests of this country, did not Mr. Van Buren, on that occasion, utterly sacrifice them? Did he not dictate in that despatch, a disposition of the great question of the colony trade between the United States and Great Britain, which, from that time to this, has proved most disastrous in its effects on the commercial and navigating interests of the United States? And pernicious as was the object of the despatch, was not the spirit of it infinitely worse? in which, for the first time, party quarrels of the people of the United States were carried into our foreign affairs – in which a preceding administration was impliedly reproached for the zeal with which it had defended our interests – in which it was proclaimed that the new administration started in the world with a set purpose of concession toward Great Britain – in which the honor of the United States was laid prostrate at the foot of the British throne, and the proud name of America, to sustain which our fathers had carried on a first and a second war, as we may have to do a third – that glory which the arms of our enemy could not reach, was, in this truckling despatch, laid low for the first, and, I trust in God, the last time, before the lion of England."

The ground taken by Mr. Adams and Mr. Cushing for the defence of Mr. Webster (for they seemed to consider him, and no doubt truly, as the whole administration in this case) was only shifting the defence from one bad ground to another. The war ground they assumed could only apply between Great Britain and the insurgents: she had no war with the United States: the attack on the Caroline was an invasion of the territory of a neutral power – at peace with the invader. That is a liberty not allowed by the laws of nations – not allowed by the concern which any nation, even the most inconsiderable, feels for its own safety, and its own self-respect. A belligerent party cannot enter the territory of a neutral, even in fresh pursuit of an enemy. No power allows it. That we have seen in our own day, in the case of the Poles, in their last insurrection, driven across the Austrian frontier by the Russians; and the pursuers stopped at the line, and the fugitive Poles protected the instant they had crossed it: and in the case of the late Hungarian revolt, in which the fugitive Hungarians driven across the Turkish frontier, were protected from pursuit. The Turks protected them, Mahometans as they were; and would not give up fugitive Christians to a Christian power; and afterwards assisted the fugitives to escape to Great Britain and the United States. The British then had no right to invade the United States even in fresh pursuit of fugitive belligerents: but the Caroline and crew were not belligerents. She was an American ferry-boat carrying men and supplies to the insurgents, but she was not a combatant. And if she had been – had been a war-vessel belonging to the insurgents, and fighting for them, she could not be attacked in a neutral port. The men on board of her were not Canadian insurgents, but American citizens, amenable to their own country for any infraction of her neutrality laws: and if they had been Canadian insurgents they could not have been seized on American soil; nor even demanded under the extradition clause in the treaty of 1796, even if in force. It did not extend to political offences, either of treason or war. It only applied to the common law offences of murder and forgery. How contradictory and absurd then to claim a right to come and take by violence, what could not be demanded under any treaty or the law of nations. No power gives up a political fugitive. Strong powers protect them openly, while they demean themselves orderly: weak powers get them to go away when not able to protect them. None give them up – not even the weakest. All the countries of Europe – the smallest kingdom, the most petty principality, the feeblest republic, even San Marino – scorn to give up a political fugitive, and though unable to chastise, never fail to resent any violation of its territory to seize them. We alone, and in the case of the Caroline, acknowledge the right of Great Britain to invade our territory, seize and kill American citizens sleeping under the flag of their country, to cut out an American vessel moored in our port, and send her in flames over the Falls of Niagara. We alone do that! but we have done it but once! and history places upon it the stigma of opprobrium.

Mr. William O. Butler of Kentucky, replied to Mr. Cushing, especially to his rehash of the stale imputations, worn out at the time of Mr. Van Buren's senatorial rejection as minister to Great Britain, and said:

"He expected from the gentleman a discussion on national law; but how much was he astonished the next day, on reading his speech in the Intelligencer, and finding him making a most virulent attack on the conduct and reputation of Mr. Van Buren. The gentleman referred to the letter of instructions of Mr. Van Buren to our Minister at the Court of St. James, and compared it with the instructions of Mr. Webster to the Attorney-general; speaking of the latter as breathing the statesman and patriot throughout, while he characterizes the former as infamous. Mr. B. said he would not repeat the harsh and offensive terms in which the gentleman had spoken of Mr. Van Buren's letter; he would read what the gentleman said from his printed speech, in order that the House might see the length to which his invectives were carried. [Here Mr. B. read extracts from Mr. Cushing's speech.] The gentleman spoke of comparing the two letters together. But did he think of comparing the thing we complain of with the thing he complains of? No: that would be next to madness. The gentleman shrinks from that comparison, and goes on to compare not the thing we complain of with the letter of Mr. Van Buren, but the beautiful composition of Mr. Webster, written forty days after complying with the British minister's insulting demands, and intended to cover over the instructions to Mr. Crittenden, after which he characterizes Mr. Van Buren's letter as a monument of ignominy. Now Mr. B. said he would make the same reply that a dignified farmer of Kentucky did to a lawyer. The lawyer prosecuted the farmer for a slander, and in the course of the trial took occasion to heap on him all the abuse and invective of which the Billingsgate vocabulary is capable. Yet the jury, without leaving their box, pronounced a verdict of acquittal. The verdict of an honest and intelligent jury, said the farmer, is a sufficient answer to all your abuse. Just so it was with Mr. Van Buren. His letter had made a great noise in the country; had been extensively circulated and read, and had been assailed with the utmost virulence by the opposite party. Yet the highest jury on earth, the American people, had pronounced the acquittal of Mr. Van Buren by electing him to the Chief Magistracy. The gentleman complained that the patriotism of Mr. Webster not only had been assailed, but that the gentleman from Pennsylvania had had the temerity to attack that most beautiful of letters which the patriotic Secretary wrote to Mr. Fox. Now he (Mr. B.) would admit that it was a beautiful piece of composition, and he knew of but one that would compare with it, and that was the proclamation of General Hull, just before surrendering the Northwestern army to the British."