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

British merchants and ship-owners knew also that the colonial carriers were not ardent adherents of the Navigation Act, but conducted their operations in conformity with it only when compelled.52 They traded with the foreigner as readily as with the British subject; and, what was quite unpardonable in the ideas of that time, after selling a cargo in a West Indian port, instead of reloading there, they would take the hard cash of the island to a French neighbor, buying of him molasses to be made into rum at home. In this commercial shrewdness the danger was not so much in the local loss, or in the single transaction, for in the commercial supremacy of England the money was pretty sure to find its way back to the old country. The sting was that the sharp commercial instinct, roving from port to port, with a keen scent for freight and for bargains, maintained a close rivalry for the carrying trade, which was doubly severe from the natural advantages of the shipping and the natural aptitudes of the ship-owners. Already the economical attention of the New Englanders to the details of their shipping business had been noted, and had earned for them the name of the Dutchmen of North America; an epithet than which there was then none more ominous to British ears, and especially where with the carrying trade was associated the twin idea of a nursery of seamen for the British Navy.

A fair appreciation of the facts and relations, summarized in the preceding pages from an infinitude of details, is necessary to a correct view of the origin and course of the misunderstandings and disagreements which finally led to the War of 1812. In 1783, the restoration of peace and the acknowledgment of the independence of the former colonies removed from commerce the restrictions incident to hostilities, and replaced in full action, essentially unchanged, the natural conditions which had guided the course of trade in colonial days. The old country, retaining all the prepossessions associated with the now venerable and venerated Navigation Act, saw herself confronted with the revival of a commercial system, a commercial independence, of which she had before been jealous, and which could no longer be controlled by political dependence. It was to be feared that supplying the British West Indies would increase American shipping, and that British seamen would more and more escape into it, with consequent loss to British navigation, both in tonnage and men, and discouragement to British maritime industries. Hence, by the ideas of the time, was to be apprehended weakness for war, unless some effective check could be devised.

What would have been the issue of these anxieties, and of the measures to which they gave rise, had not the French Revolution intervened to aggravate the distresses of Great Britain, and to constrain her to violent methods, is bootless to discuss. It remains true that, both before and during the conflict with the French Republic and Empire, the general character of her actions, to which the United States took exception, was determined by the conditions and ideas that have been stated, and can be understood only through reference to them. No sooner had peace been signed, in 1783, than disagreements sprang up again from the old roots of colonial systems and ideals. To these essentially was due the detailed sequence of events which, influenced by such traditions of opinion and policy as have been indicated, brought on the War of 1812, which has not inaptly been styled the second War of Independence. Madison, who was contemporary with the entire controversy, and officially connected with it from 1801 to the end of the war, first as Secretary of State, and later as President, justly summed up his experience of the whole in these words: "To have shrunk from resistance, under such circumstances, would have acknowledged that, on the element which forms three-fourths of the globe which we inhabit, and where all independent nations have equal and common rights, the American People were not an independent people, but colonists and vassals. With such an alternative war was chosen."53 The second war was closely related to the first in fact, though separated by a generation in time.

CHAPTER II

FROM INDEPENDENCE TO JAY'S TREATY, 1794

The colonial connection between Great Britain and the thirteen communities which became the original States of the American Union was brought to a formal conclusion in 1776, by their Declaration of Independence. Substantially, however, it had already terminated in 1774. This year was marked by the passage of the Boston Port Bill, with its accessory measures, by the British Parliament, and likewise by the renewal, in the several colonies, of the retaliatory non-importation agreements of 1765. The fundamental theory of the eighteenth century concerning the relations between a mother country and her colonies, that of reciprocal exclusive benefit, had thus in practice yielded to one of mutual injury; to coercion and deprivation on the one side, and to passive resistance on the other. On September 5 the representatives of twelve colonies assembled in Philadelphia; Georgia alone sending no delegates, but pledging herself in anticipation to accept the decisions taken by the others. One of the first acts of this Congress of the Continental Colonies was to indorse the resolutions by which Massachusetts had placed herself in an attitude of contingent rebellion against the Crown, and to pledge their support to her in case of a resort to arms. These several steps were decisive and irrevocable, except by an unqualified abandonment, by one party or the other, of the principles which underlay and dictated them. The die was cast. To use words attributed to George the Third, "the colonies must now either submit or triumph."

The period which here began, viewed in the aggregate of the national life of the United States, was one of wavering transition and uncertain issue in matters political and commercial. Its ending, in these two particulars, is marked by two conspicuous events: the adoption of the Constitution and the Commercial Treaty with Great Britain. The formation of the Federal Government, 1788-90, gave to the Union a political stability it had hitherto lacked, removing elements of weakness and dissensions, and of consequent impotence in foreign relations; the manifestation of which since the acknowledgment of independence had justified alike the hopes of enemies and the forebodings of friends. Settled conditions being thus established at home, with institutions competent to regulate a national commerce, internal and external, as well as to bring the people as a whole into fixed relations with foreign communities, there was laid the foundations of a swelling prosperity to which the several parts of the country jointly contributed. The effects of these changes were soon shown in a growing readiness on the part of other nations to enter into formal compacts with us. Of this, the treaty negotiated by John Jay with Great Britain, in 1794, is the most noteworthy instance; partly because it terminated one long series of bickerings with our most dangerous neighbor, chiefly because the commercial power of the state with which it was contracted had reached a greater eminence, and exercised wider international effect, than any the modern world had then seen.

Whatever the merits of the treaty otherwise, therefore, the willingness of Great Britain to enter into it at all gave it an epochal significance. Since independence, commercial intercourse between the two peoples had rested on the strong compelling force of natural conditions and reciprocal convenience, the true foundation, doubtless, of all useful relations; but its regulation had been by municipal ordinance of either state, changeable at will, not by mutual agreement binding on both for a prescribed period. Since the separation, this condition had seemed preferable to Great Britain, which, as late as 1790, had evaded overtures towards a commercial arrangement.54 Her consenting now to modify her position was an implicit admission that in trade, as in political existence, the former mother country recognized at last the independence of her offspring. The latter, however, was again to learn that independence, to be actual, must rest on something stronger than words, and surer than the acquiescence of others. This was to be the lesson of the years between 1794 and 1815, administered to us not only by the preponderant navy of Great Britain, but by the petty piratical fleets of the Barbary powers.

From the Boston Port Bill to Jay's Treaty was therefore a period of transition from entire colonial dependence, under complete regulation of all commercial intercourse by the mother country, to that of national commercial power, self-regulative and efficient, through the adoption of the Constitution. Upon this followed international influence, the growing importance of which Great Britain finally recognized by formal concessions, hitherto refused or evaded. During these years the policy of her government was undergoing a process of adjustment, conditioned on the one hand by the still vigorous traditional prejudices associated with the administration of dependencies, and on the other by the radical change in political relations between her remaining colonies in America and the new states which had broken from the colonial bond. This change was the more embarrassing, because the natural connection of specific mutual usefulness remained, although the tie of a common allegiance had been loosed. The old order was yielding to the new, but the process was signalized by the usual slowness of men to accept events in their full significance. Hitherto, all the western hemisphere had been under a colonial system of complete monopoly by mother countries, and had been generally excluded from direct communication with Europe, except the respective parent states. In the comprehensive provisions of the British Navigation Act, America was associated with Asia and Africa. Now had arisen there an independent state, in political standing identical with those of Europe, yet having towards colonial America geographical and commercial relations very different from theirs. Consequently there was novelty and difficulty in the question, What intercourse with the remaining British dominions, and especially with the American colonies, should be permitted to the new nation? Notwithstanding the breach lately made, it continued a controlling aim with the British people, and of the government as determined by popular pressure, to restore the supremacy of British trade, by the subjection of America, independent as well as colonial, to the welfare of British commerce. Notably this was to be so as regards the one dominant interest called Navigation, under which term was comprised everything relating to shipping,—ship-building, seafaring men, and the carrying trade. Independence had deprived Great Britain of the right she formerly had to manipulate the course of the export and import trade of the now United States. It remained to try whether there did not exist, nevertheless, the ability effectually to control it to the advantage of British navigation, as above defined. "Our remaining colonies on the Continent, and the West India Islands," it was argued, "with the favorable state of English manufactures, may still give us almost exclusively the trade of America;" provided these circumstances were suitably utilized, and their advantages rigorously enforced, where power to do so still remained, as it did in the West Indies.

Although by far the stronger and more flourishing part of her colonial dominions had been wrested from Great Britain, there yet remained to her upon the continent, in Canada and the adjacent provinces, a domain great in area, and in the West India Islands another of great productiveness. Whatever wisdom had been learned as regards the political treatment of colonies, the views as to the nature of their economical utility to the mother country, and their consequent commercial regulation, had undergone no enlargement, but rather had been intensified in narrowness and rigor by the loss of so valuable a part of the whole. No counteractive effect to this prepossession was to be found in contemporary opinion in Europe. The French Revolution itself, subversive as it was of received views in many respects, was at the first characterized rather by an exaggeration of the traditional exclusive policy of the eighteenth century relating to colonies, shipping, and commerce. In America, the unsettled commercial and financial conditions which succeeded the peace, the divergence of interests between the several new states, the feebleness of the confederate government, its incompetency to deal assuredly with external questions, and lack of all power to regulate commerce, inspired a conviction in Great Britain that the continent could not offer strong, continued resistance to commercial aggression, carried on under the peaceful form of municipal regulation. It was generally thought that the new states could never unite, but instead would drift farther apart.

The belief was perfectly reasonable; a gift of prophecy only could have foretold the happy result, of which many of the most prominent Americans for some time despaired. "It will not be an easy matter," wrote Lord Sheffield,55 "to bring the American States to act as a nation; they are not to be feared as such by us. It must be a long time before they can engage, or will concur, in any material expense.... We might as reasonably dread the effects of combinations among the German as among the American states, and deprecate the resolves of the Diet, as those of Congress." "No treaty can be made that will be binding on the whole of them." "A decided cast has been given to public opinion here," wrote John Adams from London, in November, 1785, "by two presumptions. One is, that the American states are not, and cannot, be united."56 Two years later Washington wrote: "The situation of the General Government, if it can be called a government, is shaken to its foundation, and liable to be overturned at every blast. In a word, it is at an end.... The primary cause of all our disorders lies in the different state governments, and in the tenacity of that power which underlies the whole of their systems. Independent sovereignty is so ardently contended for." "At present, under our existing form of confederation, it would be idle to think of making commercial regulations on our part. One state passes a prohibitory law respecting one article; another state opens wide the avenue for its admission. One assembly makes a system, another assembly unmakes it."57

Under such conditions it was natural that a majority of Englishmen should see power and profit for Great Britain in availing herself of the weakness of her late colonists, to enforce upon them a commercial dependence as useful as the political dependence which had passed away. Were this realized, she would enjoy the emoluments of the land without the expense of its protection. This gospel was preached at once to willing ears, and found acceptance; not by the strength of its arguments, for these, though plausible, were clearly inferior in weight to the facts copiously adduced by those familiar with conditions, but through the prejudices which the then generation had received from the three or four preceding it. The policy being adopted, the instrument at hand for enforcing it was the relation of colonies to mother countries, as then universally maintained by the governments of the day. The United States, like other independent nations, was to be excluded wholly from carrying trade with the British colonies, and as far as possible from sending them supplies. It was urged that Canada, and the adjacent British dominions, encouraged by this reservation of the West India market for their produce, would prove adequate to furnishing the provisions and lumber previously derived from the old continental colonies. The prosperity once enjoyed by the latter would be transferred, and there would be reconstituted the system of commercial intercourse, interior to the empire, which previously had commanded general admiration. The new states, acting commercially as separated communities, could oppose no successful rivalry to this combination, and would revert to isolated commercial dependence; tributary to the financial supremacy of Great Britain, as they recently had been to her political power. In debt to her for money, and drawing from her manufactures, returns for both would compel their exports to her ports chiefly, whence distribution would be, as of old, in the hands of British middlemen and navigators. Just escaped from the fetters of the carrying trade and entrepôt regulations, the twin monopolies in which consisted the value of a colonial empire, it was proposed to reduce them again under bondage by means for which the West India Islands furnished the leverage; for "the trade carried on by Great Britain with the countries now become the United States was, and still is, so connected with the trade carried on to the remaining British colonies in America, and the British islands in the West Indies, that it is impossible to form a true judgment of the past and present of the first, without taking a comprehensive view of all, as they are connected with, and influence, each other."58

Before the peace of 1783, the writings of Adam Smith had gravely shaken belief in the mercantile system of extraordinary trade regulation and protection as conducive to national prosperity. Though undermined, however, it had not been overthrown; and even to doubters there remained the exception, which Smith himself admitted, of the necessity to protect navigation as a nursery for the navy, and consequently as a fundamental means of national defence. Existence takes precedence of prosperity; the life is more than the meat. Commercial regulation, though unfitted to increase wealth, could be justified as a means to promote ship-building; to retain ship-builders in the country; to husband the raw materials of their work; to force the transport of merchandise in British-built ships and by British seamen; and thus to induce capital to invest, and men to embark their lives, in maritime trade, to the multiplication of ships and seamen, the chief dependence of the nation in war. "Keeping ships for freight," said Sheffield, "is not the most profitable branch of trade. It is necessary, for the sake of our marine, to force or encourage it by exclusive advantages." "Comparatively with the number of our people and the extent of our country, we are doomed almost always to wage unequal war; and as a means of raising seamen it cannot be too often repeated that it is not possible to be too jealous on the head of navigation." He proceeds then at once to draw the distinction between the protection of navigation and that of commerce generally. "This jealousy should not be confounded with that towards neighboring countries as to trade and manufactures; nor is the latter jealousy in many instances reasonable or well founded. Competition is useful, forcing our manufacturers to act fairly, and to work reasonably." Sheffield was the most conspicuous, and probably the most influential, of the controversialists on this side of the question at this period; the interest of the public is shown by his pamphlet passing through six editions in a twelvemonth. He was, however, far from singular in this view. Chalmers, a writer of much research, said likewise: "In these considerations of nautical force and public safety we discover the fundamental principle of Acts of Navigation, which, though established in opposition to domestic and foreign clamors, have produced so great an augmentation of our native shipping and sailors, and which therefore should not be sacrificed to any projects of private gain,"—that is, of commercial advantage. "There are intelligent persons who suggest that the imposing of alien duties on alien ships, rather than on alien merchandise, would augment our naval strength."59

Colonies therefore were esteemed desirable to this end chiefly. To use the expression of a French officer,60 they were the fruitful nursery of seamen. French writers of that day considered their West India islands the chief nautical support of the state. But in order to secure this, it was necessary to exercise complete control of their trade inward and outward; of the supplies they needed as well as of the products they raised, and especially to confine the carriage of both to national shipping. "The only use and advantage of the (remaining) American colonies61 or West India islands to Great Britain," says Sheffield, "are the monopoly of their consumption and the carriage of their produce. It is the advantage to our navigation which in any degree countervails the enormous expense of protecting our islands. Rather than give up their carrying trade it would be better to give up themselves." The entrepôt system herein found additional justification, for not only did it foster navigation by the homeward voyage, confined to British ships, and extort toll in transit, but the re-exportation made a double voyage which was more than doubly fruitful in seamen; for from the nearness of the British Islands to the European continent, which held the great body of consumers, this second carriage could be done, and actually was done, by numerous small vessels, able to bear a short voyage but not to brave an Atlantic passage. Economically, trade by many small vessels is more expensive than by a few large, because for a given aggregate tonnage it requires many more men; but this economical loss was thought to be more than compensated by the political gain in multiplying seamen. It was estimated in 1795 that there was a difference of from thirty-five to forty men in carrying the same quantity of goods in one large or ten small vessels. This illustrates aptly the theory of the Navigation Act, which sought wealth indeed, but, as then understood, subordinated that consideration distinctly to the superior need of increasing the resources of the country in ships and seamen. Moreover, the men engaged in these short voyages were more immediately at hand for impressment in war, owing to the narrow range of their expeditions and their frequent returns to home ports.

In 1783, therefore, the Navigation Act had become in general acceptance a measure not merely commercial, but military. It was defended chiefly as essential to the naval power of Great Britain, which rested upon the sure foundation of maritime resources thus laid. Nor need this view excite derision to-day, for it compelled then the adhesion of an American who of all in his time was most adverse to the general commercial policy of Great Britain. In a report on the subject made to Congress in 1793, by Jefferson, as Secretary of State, he said: "Our navigation involves still higher considerations than our commerce. As a branch of industry it is valuable, but as a resource of defence essential. It will admit neither neglect nor forbearance. The position and circumstances of the United States leave them nothing to fear on their land-board; … but on their seaboard they are open to injury, and they have there too a commerce (coasting) which must be protected. This can only be done by possessing a respectable body of citizen-seamen, and of artists and establishments in readiness for ship-building."62 The limitations of Jefferson's views appear here clearly, in the implicit relegation of defence, not to a regular and trained navy, but to the occasional unskilled efforts of a distinctly civil force; but no stronger recognition of the necessities of Great Britain could be desired, for her nearness to the great military states of the world deprived her land-board of the security which the remoteness of the United States assured. With such stress laid upon the vital importance of merchant seamen to national safety, it is but a step in thought to perceive how inevitable was the jealousy and indignation felt in Great Britain, when she found her fleets, both commercial and naval, starving for want of seamen, who had sought refuge from war in the American merchant service, and over whom the American Government, actually weak and but yesterday vassal, sought to extend its protection from impressment.

Up to the War of American Independence, the singular geographical situation of Great Britain, inducing her to maritime enterprise and exempting her from territorial warfare, with the financial and commercial pre-eminence she had then maintained for three-fourths of a century, gave her peculiar advantages for enforcing a policy which until that time had thriven conspicuously, if somewhat illusively, in its commercial results, and had substantially attained its especial object of maritime preponderance. Other peoples had to submit to the compulsion exerted by her overweening superiority. The obligation upon foreign shipping to be three-fourths manned by their own citizens, for instance, rested only upon a British law, and applied only in a British port; but the accumulations of British capital, with the consequent facility for mercantile operations and ability to extend credits, the development of British manufactures, the extent of the British carrying trade, the enforced storage of colonial products in British territory, with the correlative obligation that foreign goods for her numerous and increasing colonists must first be brought to her shores and thence transshipped,—all these circumstances made the British islands a centre for export and import, towards which foreign shipping was unavoidably drawn and so brought under the operation of the law. The nation had so far out-distanced competition that her supremacy was unassailable, and remained unimpaired for a century longer. To it had contributed powerfully the economical distribution of her empire, greatly diversified in particulars, yet symmetrical in the capacity of one part to supply what the other lacked. There was in the whole a certain self-sufficingness, resembling that claimed in this age for the United States, with its compact territory but wide extremes of boundary, climates, and activities.