Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812. Volume 1

To declare war because of the Orders in Council was a simple, straightforward, and wholly justifiable course; but the flying months made more and more evident, to the Government and its agents abroad, that it was vain to expect revocation on the ground of Napoleon's recall of his edicts, for they were not recalled. Having entered upon this course, however, it seemed impossible to recede, or to acknowledge a mistake, the pinch of which was nevertheless felt. Writing to Russell, whose service in Paris, from October, 1810, to October, 1811, and transfer thence to London, made him unusually familiar, on both sides of the Channel, with the controversy over Champagny's letter of August 5, 1810, Madison speaks "of the delicacy of our situation, having in view, on the one hand, the importance of obtaining from the French Government confirmation of the repeal of the Decrees, and on the other that of not weakening the ground on which the British repeal was urged."362 That is, it would be awkward to have the British ministry find out that we were pressing France for a confirmation of that very revocation which we were confidently asserting to them to be indisputable, and to require in good faith the withdrawal of their Orders. Respecting action taken under the so-called repeal, Russell had written on March 15, 1811, over three months after it was said to take effect, "By forbearing to condemn, or to acquit, distinctly and loyally, [the vessels seized since November 1], this Government encourages us to persevere in our non-importation against England, and England to persist in her orders against us. This state of things appears calculated to produce mutual complaint and irritation, and cannot probably be long continued without leading to a more serious contest, … which is perhaps an essential object of this country's policy."363 July 15, he expressed regret to the Duke of Bassano, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, that the proceedings concerning captured American vessels "had been so partial, and confined to cases which from their peculiar circumstances proved nothing conclusively in relation to the revocation of the French Edicts."364

Russell might have found some light as to the causes of these delays, could he have seen a note addressed by the Emperor to the Administration of Commerce, April 29. In this, renewing the reasoning of the Bayonne Decree, he argued that every American vessel which touched at an English port was liable to confiscation in the United States; consequently, could be seized by an American cruiser on the open sea; therefore, was equally open to seizure there by a French cruiser—the demand advanced by Canning365 which gave such just offence; and if by a French cruiser at sea, likewise in a French port by the French Government. She was in fact no longer American, not even a denationalized American, but an English vessel. Under this supposition, Napoleon luminously inferred, "It could be said: The Decrees of Berlin and Milan are recalled as to the United States, but, as every ship which has stopped in England, or is destined thither, is a ship unacknowledged (sans aveu), which American laws punish and confiscate, she may be confiscated in France." The Emperor concluded that should this theory not be capable of substantiation, the matter might for the present be left obscure.366 On September 13 the ships in question had not been liberated.

Coincidently with his note to Bassano, Russell wrote to Monroe, "It is my conviction that the great object of their policy is to entangle us in a war with England. They therefore abstain from doing any act which would furnish clear and unequivocal testimony of the revocation of their decrees, lest it should induce the extinction of the British Orders, and thereby appease our irritation against their enemy. Hence, of all the captured vessels since November 1, the three which were liberated were precisely those which had not violated the Decrees."367 Yet, such were the exigencies of the debate with England, those three cases were transmitted by him at the same time to the American chargé in London as evidence of the revocation.368 To the French Minister he wrote again, August 8, "After the declarations of M. de Champagny and yourself, I cannot permit myself to doubt the revocation; … but I may be allowed to lament that no fact has yet come to my knowledge of a character unequivocally and incontrovertibly to confirm that revocation." "That none of the captured vessels have been condemned, instead of proving the extinction of the edicts, appears rather to be evidence, at best, of a commutation of the penalty from prompt confiscation to perpetual detention."369 The matter was further complicated by an announcement of Napoleon to the Chamber of Commerce, in April of the same year, that the Berlin and Milan Decrees were the fundamental law of the Empire concerning neutral commerce, and that American ships would be repelled from French ports, unless the United States conformed to those decrees, by excluding British ships and merchandise.370 Under such conditions, argument with a sceptical British ministry was attended with difficulties. The position to which the Government had become reduced, by endeavoring to play off France and Great Britain against each other, in order to avoid a war with either, was as perplexing as humiliating. "Great anxiety,"371 to which little sympathy can be extended, was felt in Washington as to the evidence for the actuality of the repeals.

The situation was finally cleared up by a clever move of the British Cabinet, forcing Napoleon's hand at a moment when the Orders in Council could with difficulty be maintained longer against popular discontent. On March 10, 1812, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a report to the Senate, reiterated the demands of the Decrees, and asserted again that, until those demands were conceded by England, the Decrees must be enforced against Powers which permitted their flags to be denationalized. The position thus reaffirmed was emphasized by a requirement for a large increase of the army for this object. "It is necessary that all the disposable forces of France be available for sending everywhere where the English flag, and other flags, denationalized or convoyed by English ships of war, may seek to enter."372 No exceptions in favor of the United States being stated, the British ministry construed the omission as conclusive proof of the unqualified continuance of the Decrees;373 and the occasion was taken to issue an Order in Council, defining the Government's position, both in the past and for the future. Quoting the French minister's Report, as removing all doubts of Napoleon's persistence in the maintenance of a system, "as inconsistent with neutral rights and independence as it was hostile to the maritime rights and commercial interests of Great Britain," the Prince Regent declared that, "if at any time thereafter the Berlin and Milan Decrees should be absolutely and unconditionally repealed, by some authentic act of the French Government, publicly promulgated, then the Orders in Council of January, 1807, and April, 1809, shall without any further order be, and the same are hereby declared from thenceforth to be, wholly and absolutely revoked."374 No exception could be taken to the phrasing or form of this Order. The wording was precise and explicit; the time fixed was definite,—the date of the French Repeal; the manner of revocation was the same as that of promulgation, an Order in Council observant of all usual formalities.

In substance, this well-timed State Paper challenged Champagny's letter of August 5, 1810, and the American Non-Importation Act based upon it. Both these asserted the revocation of the French Decrees. The British Cabinet, seizing a happy opportunity, asked of the world the production of the revocation, or else the justification of its own course. The demand went far to silence the growing discontents at home, and to embarrass the American Government in the grounds upon which it had chosen to base its action. It was well calculated also to disconcert the Emperor, for, unless he did something more definite, dissension would increase in the United States, where, as Barlow wrote, "It is well known to the world, for our public documents are full of it, that great doubts exist, even among our best informed merchants, and in the halls of Congress itself, whether the Berlin and Milan Decrees are to this day repealed, or even modified, in regard to the United States." The sentence is taken from a letter375 which he addressed to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, May 1, 1812, when he had received the recent British Order. He pointed out how astutely this step was calculated to undo the effect of Champagny's letter, and to weaken the American Administration at the critical moment when it was known to be preparing for war. He urged that the French Government should now make and publish an authentic Act, declaring the Berlin and Milan Decrees, as relative to the United States, to have ceased in November, 1810. "Such an act is absolutely necessary to the American Government; and, though solicited as an accommodation, it may be demanded as a right. If it was the duty of France to cease to apply those Decrees to the United States, it is equally her duty to promulgate it to the world in as formal a manner as we have promulgated our law for the exclusion of British merchandise. She ought to declare and publish the non-application of these Decrees in the same forms in which she enacted the Decrees. The President has instructed me to propose and press this object."

At last the demand was made which should have been enforced eighteen months before. After sending the letter, Barlow had "a pretty sharp conversation" with Bassano, in which he perceived a singular reluctance to answer his letter. At last the Duke placed before him a Decree, drawn up in due and customary form, dated a year before,—April 28, 1811,—declaring that "the Decrees of Berlin and Milan are definitively, and to date from the first day of November last, [1810], considered as not having existed in regard to American vessels."376 This Decree, Bassano said, had been communicated to Russell, and also sent to Serrurier, the French minister at Washington, with orders to convey it to the American Government. Both Russell and Serrurier denied ever having received the paper.377

Barlow made no comment upon the strange manner in which this document was produced to him, and confined himself to inquiring if it had been published. The reply could only be, No; a singular admission with regard to a formal paper a year old, and of such importance to all concerned. He then asked that a copy might be sent him. Upon receipt, he at once hastened it to Russell in London, by the sloop of war "Wasp," then lying in a French port. He wrote, "You will doubtless render an essential service to both Great Britain and the United States by communicating it without loss of time to the Foreign Secretary. If by this the cause of war should be removed, there is an obvious reason for keeping the secret, if possible, so long as that the "Wasp" may not bring the news to this country in any other manner but in your despatch. This Government, as you must long have perceived, wishes not to see that effect produced; and I should not probably have obtained the letter and documents from the Minister, if the Prince Regent's Declaration had not convinced this Government that the war was now become inevitable."378

Russell transmitted the Decree to the British Foreign Secretary May 20, 1812. The Government was at the moment in confusion, through the assassination, May 11, of Mr. Perceval, the Prime Minister; who, though not esteemed of the first order of statesmanship by his contemporaries and colleagues, had been found in recent negotiations the only available man about whom a cabinet could unite. A period of suspense followed, in which the difficulty of forming a new government, owing to personal antagonisms, was complicated by radical differences as to public policy, especially in the cardinal point of pursuing or relinquishing the war in the peninsula. Not till near the middle of June was an arrangement reached. The same ministry, substantially, remained in power, with Lord Liverpool as premier; Castlereagh continuing as Foreign Secretary. This retained in office the party identified with the Orders in Council, and favoring armed support to the Spanish revolt.

The delay in settling the government afforded an excuse for postponing action upon the newly discovered French Decree. It permitted also time for reflection. Just before Perceval's death, Russell had noted a firm determination to maintain the Orders in Council, conditioned only by the late Declaration of April 21; but at the same time there was evident apprehension of the consequences of war with the United States.379 This, he carefully explained, was due to no apprehension of American military power. Even Lord Grenville, one of the chief leaders of the Opposition, was satisfied that the United States could not conquer Canada. "We are, indeed, most miserably underrated in Europe." "It is not believed here, notwithstanding the spirited report of the Committee on Foreign Relations, that we shall resort to any definitive measures. We have indeed a reputation in Europe for saying so much and doing so little that we shall not be believed in earnest until we act in a manner not to be mistaken." "I am persuaded this Government has presumed much on our weakness and divisions, and that it continues to believe that we have not energy and union enough to make effective war. Nor is this confined to the ministry, but extends to the leaders of the Opposition." "Mr. Perceval is well known to calculate with confidence that even in case of war we shall be obliged to resort to a license trade for a supply of British manufactures." "He considers us incapable even of bearing the privations of a state of hostility with England, and much more incapable of becoming a formidable enemy." On March 3 Perceval in a debate in the House had indicated the most positive intentions of maintaining the Orders, and asserted that, in consequence of Napoleon's Decrees, Great Britain was no longer restrained by the law of nations in the extent or form of retaliation to which she may resort upon the enemy. "I cannot perceive the slightest indication of apprehension of a rupture with the United States, or any measure of preparation to meet such an event. Such is the conviction of our total inability to make war that the five or six thousand troops now in Canada are considered to be amply sufficient to protect that province against our mightiest efforts."380 A revolution of sentiment was to be noted even in the minds of former advocates. Castlereagh, at a levee on March 12, said to Russell that the movements in the United States appeared to him to be nothing but party evolutions.

There was, however, another side to the question which occasioned more concern to the British ministry. "It is the increasing want of our intercourse," wrote Russell May 9, "rather than the apprehension of our arms which leads to a conciliatory spirit" which he had recently noticed. "They will endeavor to avoid the calamity of war with the United States by every means which can save their pride and their consistency. The scarcity of bread in this country, the distress of the manufacturing towns, and the absolute dependency of the allied troops in the Peninsula on our supplies, form a check on their conduct which they can scarcely have the hardihood to disregard."381 Two days after these words were written, the murder of Perceval added political anarchy to the embarrassments of the Government. The crisis then impending was indeed momentous. War between France and Russia was certain. Upon its outcome depended the fall of the Continental System, or its prevalence over all Europe in an extent and with a rigor never yet reached. "Some of the Powers of Europe," said the Emperor, "have not fulfilled their promise with respect to the Continental System. I must force them to it." In carrying this message to the Senate, the Minister of Foreign Affairs said: "In whatever port of Europe a British ship can enter there must be a French garrison to prevent it;"382 an interesting commentary upon the neutral regulations to which the United States professed that neither she nor Great Britain had any claim to object, because municipal. Great Britain had already touched ruin too nearly to think lightly of the conditions. By her Orders in Council she had so retorted Napoleon's Decrees as to induce him, in order still further to enforce them, into the Peninsular War, and now into that with Russia. To uphold the latter, her busy negotiators, profiting by his high-handedness, had obtained for the Czar peace with Sweden and Turkey. More completely to sustain him, it was essential to support in fullest effect the powerful diversion which retained three hundred thousand French troops in Spain. To do this, the assistance of American food supplies was imperative.

If peace with the United States could be maintained, the triumph of British diplomacy would be unqualified. The announcement of the alleged Decree of April 28, 1811, came therefore most opportunely to save their pride and self-consistency. On June 23 Castlereagh transmitted to Russell an Order in Council published that day, revoking as to the United States the celebrated Orders of January 7, 1807, and April 26, 1809. "I am to request you," ran his letter, "that you will acquaint your Government that the Prince Regent's ministers have taken the earliest opportunity, after the resumption of the Government, to advise his Royal Highness to the adoption of a measure grounded upon the document communicated by you to this office on the 20th ultimo;"383 that is upon the Decree of April 28. No one affected to believe that this had been framed at the date it bore. "There was something so very much like fraud on the face of it," wrote Russell, "that in several conversations which I have since had with Lord Castlereagh, particularly at a dinner at the Lord Mayor's, when I was placed next his lordship, I have taken care not to commit the honor of my Government by attempting its vindication. When his lordship called it a strange proceeding, a new specimen of French diplomacy, a trick unworthy of a civilized government, I have merely replied that the motives or good faith of the Government which issued it, or the real time when it was issued, were of little importance as to the effect which it ought to have here; that it was sufficient that it contained a most precise and formal declaration that the Berlin and Milan Decrees were revoked, in relation to America, from November 1, 1810."384

This was true; but the contention of the British Government had been that the system of the Decrees was one whole; that its effect upon America could not be dissociated from that upon continental neutral states, where it was enforced under the guise of municipal regulations; and that it must be revoked as a whole, in order to impose the repeal of the Orders in Council. This position had been reaffirmed in the recent Order of April 21. Opinion will therefore differ as to the ministry's success in escaping, under the cover of the new Decree, from the dilemma in which they were placed by the irresistible agitation against the Orders in Council spreading through the nation, and the necessity of avoiding war with the United States, if possible, because of the affairs of the Peninsula. They made the best of it by alleging, as it were, the spirit of the Order of April 21; the disposition "to take such measures as may tend to re-establish the intercourse between neutral and belligerent nations upon its accustomed principles." For this reason, while avowing explicitly that the tenor of the Decree did not meet the requirements of the late Order, the Orders in Council were revoked from August 1 next following; and vessels captured after May 20, the date of Russell's communicating the Decree, would be released. The ministry thus receded gracefully under compulsion; and for their own people at least saved their face.

Superficially the British diplomatic triumph for the moment seemed complete. They had withdrawn their head from the noose just as it began to tighten; and they had done so not on any ground of stringent requirement, but with expressions of desire to go even farther than their just claims, in order to promote conciliation. Russell naturally felt a moment of bitter discomfiture. "In yielding, the ministers appear to have been extremely perplexed in seeking for a subterfuge for their credit. All their feelings and all their prejudices revolted at the idea of publicly bending to the Opposition, or truckling to the United States, and they were compelled to seize on the French Decree of April 28, 1811, as the only means of saving themselves from the degradation of acknowledging that they were vanquished. Without this decree they would have been obliged to yield, and I almost regret that it existed to furnish a salvo, miserable as it is, for their pride. Our victory, however, is still complete, and I trust that those who have refused to support our Government in the contest will at least be willing to allow it the honors of a triumph."385

Russell wrote under the mistaken impression that the repeal of the Orders had come in time to save war; in which event the yielding of the British ministry, identified as it was with the Orders in Council, might be construed as a triumph for the system of peaceable coercion, by commercial restrictions, which formed the whole policy of Jefferson and Madison. The triumph claimed by him must be qualified, however, by the reflection that it was obtained at the expense of becoming the dupe of a French deception, on its face so obvious as to deprive mistake of the excuse of plausibility. The eagerness of the Government, and of its representatives abroad, for a diplomatic triumph, had precipitated them into a step for which, on the grounds taken, no justification existed; and they had since then been dragged at the wheels of Napoleon's chariot, in a constant dust of mystification, until he had finally achieved the end of his scheming and landed them in a war for which they were utterly unprepared, and which it had been the chief object of commercial reprisals to avoid. Thus considered, the triumph was barren.

On June 1, 1812, President Madison sent to Congress a message,386 reciting the long list of international wrongs endured at the hands of Great Britain, and recommending to the deliberations of Congress the question of peace or war. On June 4 the House of Representatives, by a vote of seventy-nine yeas to forty-nine nays, declared that a state of war existed between the United States and Great Britain. The bill then went to the Senate, where it was discussed, amended, and passed on June 17, by nineteen yeas to thirteen nays. The next day the House concurred in the Senate's amendments, and the bill thus passed received the President's signature immediately. The war thus began, formally, on June 18, 1812, five days before the repeal of the British Orders in Council.

While the Declaration of War was still under debate, the Secretary of War, Eustis, on June 8 reported to the Senate that of the ten thousand men authorized as a peace establishment, there were in service six thousand seven hundred and forty-four. He was unable to state what number had been enlisted of the twenty-five thousand regulars provided by the legislation of the current session; a singular exhibition of the efficiency of the Department. He had no hesitation, however, in expressing an unofficial opinion that there were five thousand of these recruits. It is scarce necessary to surmise what the condition of the army was likely to be, with James Wilkinson as the senior general officer of consecutive service, and with Dearborn, a man of sixty, and in civil life ever since the War of Independence, as the first major-general appointed under the new legislation. The navy had a noble and competent body of officers, in the prime of life, a large proportion of whom had seen instructive service in the Barbary conflict; but, as has been seen, Congress had no faith in a navy, and refused it any increase. In this distrust the Administration shared.

Mr. Monroe, indeed, probably through his residence abroad, had attained a juster view of the influence of a navy on foreign relations. He has already been quoted in this connection,387 but in a letter to a friend, two years before 1812, he developed his opinions with some precision. "I gave my opinion that our naval force ought to be increased. In advising this, I urged that the naval force of the United States ought not to be regulated by reference to the navies of the Great Powers, but to the strength of the squadrons which they usually stationed in time of war on our coasts, at the mouths of great rivers, and in our harbors. I thought that such a force, incorporated permanently with our system, would give weight at all times to our negotiations, and by means thereof prevent wars and save money."388 Monroe at this time was not in the Administration. Such a policy was diametrically opposed to that of Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin; and when war came, ships had not been provided. Under the circumstances the disposition of the Government was to put the ships they had under a glass case.