Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Though he was a scion of the Virginian slave-owning aristocracy, Jefferson managed to reinvent himself, in the eyes of the American people, as an icon of neoclassical republican simplicity and modesty. He would later maintain that the Republican electoral victory in 1800 was “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of [17]76 was in its form.” It was an argument that dated back to the First Congress, when Vice President Adams had proposed that President Washington should be addressed as “His Highness the President of the United States and protector of their liberties.” Jefferson had remarked to Madison that the ostentatious title was “the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of,” and Madison had agreed that it threatened to inflict “a deep wound to our infant government.” The proposal was defeated, but throughout the decade of the 1790s, during the Washington and Adams administrations, Republican journalists had ridiculed practices that seemed to ape the ceremonies and fashions of a European court. They objected to official celebrations of the president’s birthday, to presidential “levees” (weekly receptions, denounced by critics as too similar to an Old World court ritual), to the use of the terms “Lady Washington” and “Lady Adams,” and to placing presidential portraits on the national currency. With the benefit of hindsight, many of these criticisms seem tinged with paranoia; but to contemporaries who imagined a threat to America’s fledging democratic institutions, it seemed essential to purge the nation’s highest office of quasi-royalist pomp.

  As president, Jefferson asked the local militias not to fire salutes on his birthday. With the exception of his two inaugural ceremonies, he refused to appear in person before Congress. At White House dinners, all distinctions based on rank were eliminated, and guests were admitted on the basis that “all are perfectly equal, whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or out of office.” Upon taking office, Jefferson told Congressman Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, “Levees are done away.” The president would host just two public receptions each year: one on the Fourth of July and one on New Year’s Day. Shortly after Jefferson took the oath of office (according to an account related by his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph), a “crowd of ladies and gentlemen, fashionably dressed for the occasion” arrived unexpectedly at the White House. They had apparently not learned of the cancelation of the weekly levee. Finding the president not at home, they decided to wait. Some time later, Jefferson returned from his daily ride. Though he was dirty and tired, his manners did not fail him—still wearing his boots, still carrying his riding crop, he “greeted them with all the ease and courtesy of expected guests that he had been prepared to receive, exhibiting not the slightest indication of annoyance. They never again tried the experiment.”

  In response to Federalist criticism of the new protocols, Jefferson arranged to have a defense published in the pro-administration Aurora General Advertiser. It was printed without a byline, as if it had been written by the editor. Behind this safe veil of anonymity, Jefferson used unusually sharp language. Referring to the day he had taken office, March 4, 1801, he wrote:

  That day buried levees, birthdays, royal parades, and the arrogation of precedence in society by certain self-styled friends of order, but truly styled friends of privileged orders…. In social circles all are equal, whether in or out of office, foreign or domestic, & the same equality exists among ladies as among gentlemen. No precedence therefore, of any one over another, exists either in right or practice at dinners, assemblies, or any other occasions. “Pell-mell” and “next the door” form the basis of etiquette in the societies of this country.

  Jefferson’s predilection for informality was never more apparent than when he was working in his study on the first floor of the White House, where he surrounded himself with books, maps, architectural drawings, musical instruments, mechanical inventions, scientific devices, roses and geraniums, and a mockingbird in a cage suspended from the ceiling. Even when the press of official business was heavy, the president pursued his interests in music, languages, agriculture, law, philosophy, theology, architecture, archeology, horticulture, and paleontology. In his letters during his two terms in office, one finds occasional references to politics and policy amid dissertations on (to pick a few subjects at random) gas lighting, Native American arts and crafts, geology, tooth-extracting instruments, steam engines, sculpture, the calculation of longitude, ventriloquism, heat conduction, mathematics, nailmaking, French wines, and the use of gypsum as a soil dressing.

  The president was willing to receive unscheduled visitors during the morning and midday hours, just as he would receive a neighbor at Monticello, but he assumed no obligation to dress for the occasion. Senator Plumer, when accompanied by Congressman Joseph Varnum to meet Jefferson for the first time in 1802, recalled that “a few moments after our arrival, a tall, high-boned man came into the room. He was dressed, or rather undressed, in an old brown coat, red waistcoat, old corduroy small-clothes much soiled, woolen hose, and slippers without heels. I thought him a servant, when General Varnum surprised me by announcing that it was the President.” The English chargé d’affaires (later ambassador) John Foster gave a similar description: “He wore a blue coat, a thick grey-coloured hairy waistcoat with a red under-waistcoat lapped over it, green velveteen breeches with pearl buttons, yarn stockings and slippers down at the heel, his appearance being very much like that of a tall, large-boned farmer.” The editor of the Evening Post, in 1802, found him “dressed in long boots with tops turned down about the ankles like a Virginia Buck; overalls of corduroy faded, by frequent immersions in soap suds, from yellow to a dull white; a red single-breasted waistcoat; a light brown coat with brass buttons, both coat and waistcoat quite threadbare; linen very considerably soiled; hair uncombed and beard unshaven.”

  Some interpreted Jefferson’s “negligent simplicity” as a calculated provocation. Foster said that the president, in ignoring the standards of dress and grooming expected of a head of state, “flattered the low passions of a mere newspaper-taught rabble, and seemed pleased to mortify men of rank and station.”

  Anthony Merry, the first British ambassador to establish a permanent residence in Washington, was introduced to Jefferson in November 1803. For the occasion, Merry wore formal diplomatic regalia: a dark blue coat, trimmed with gold braid and rich black velvet; immaculate silk breeches and stockings; shoes with highly polished buckles; a plumed hat; and at his belt, a ceremonial sword. Accompanied to the White House by Secretary of State Madison, the two men found the front entrance hall deserted, with no servants within sight or earshot. Undaunted, Madison led Merry directly into the hallway leading to the president’s study. “Mr. Jefferson entered the entry at the other end,” Merry wrote Lord Hawkesbury, the British foreign minister, “and all three of us were packed in this narrow space, from which to make room, I was obliged to back out. In this awkward position my introduction to the President was made by Mr. Madison.”

  The accordion effect of this hallway introduction was embarrassing, but it was not nearly so galling as the contrast between the ambassador’s magnificent getup and Jefferson, who was “actually standing in slippers down at the heels, and both pantaloons, coat, and underclothes indicative of utter slovenliness and indifference to appearances, and in a state of negligence actually studied.”

  The gaffe could have been blamed on Madison, whose responsibility it was to explain the relaxed protocols of official Washington. Merry ought to have received a fair warning, and he apparently did not. In any event, the awkward introduction would have been forgotten if not for a second provocation at a White House dinner on December 2. Among the guests was the French chargé d’affaires, Louis-André Pinchon. To invite the ministers of two warring nations to the same table was an error in diplomatic protocol. If Ambassador Merry was offended, he apparently concealed his irritation well. The real scandal occurred when the assembled party moved from the parlor into the dining room. Merry had been led to believe that he was the guest of honor. As such, the diploma
tic protocols of a European court would have required Jefferson to offer Elizabeth Merry his arm and escort her to the table, where she would have been seated to his right. Instead, Jefferson escorted Dolley Madison to the table and seated her in the place that Mrs. Merry believed was rightfully hers. The Merrys were forced to scramble for their chairs, and Mr. Merry was elbowed aside by a lowly congressman. All of this occurred, Merry reported to his government, “without Mr. Jefferson’s using any means to prevent it or taking care how I might be otherwise placed.”

  Four days later, Merry and the other ministers were invited to dine at the Madisons’ house, and a similar informality was practiced. James Madison offered his arm to Hanna Gallatin, leaving Mrs. Merry to fend for herself and Mr. Merry in a state of “visible indignation.” Quietly infuriated, Merry ordered his carriage brought around as soon as the plates had been cleared away. In the weeks that followed, there were various snubs and countersnubs among the diplomats and cabinet heads, the details of which were spelled out in the British, French, and Spanish ambassadors’ dispatches to London, Paris, and Madrid. The Merrys declined dinner invitations from both the Smiths and the Dearborns. Merry accepted an invitation to tea from the Gallatins but did not turn up. At the end of December, Merry reported to his government that he had decided to “avoid all occasions where I and my wife might be exposed to a reception of the same want of distinction toward us, until I have received authority from you to acquiesce in it.”

  Rightly or wrongly, Jefferson blamed Elizabeth Merry as the ultimate source of the continued rancor. She was a “virago,” he told James Monroe, the American ambassador in London—“she has already disturbed our harmony extremely…. If [she] perseveres she must eat her soup at home, and we shall endeavor to draw [Mr. Merry] into society as if she did not exist.”

  In January 1804, Secretary Madison provided Merry with an official explanation. American diplomatic protocols adhered to a rule of “pell-mell.” Seating at dinners was not determined by rank, but by the same informality that would be observed at a private dinner party among friends. Jefferson had always escorted the wives of his cabinet officers to the table, and that would continue to be his custom. Merry might find these practices objectionable, but it was the right of the host country to establish its own code of diplomatic etiquette, and, as Jefferson told Monroe, “we might as well attempt to force our principle of equality at St. James as [Merry] his principle of precedence here.”

  When the next set of dispatches arrived from London, Lord Hawkesbury firmly instructed Merry to acquiesce in the American protocols. Insofar as the public diplomacy was concerned, this brought the imbroglio to an end. But the Merrys continued to decline invitations to the White House on the principle that they should first receive an apology. It was an apology Jefferson did not believe he owed, and would not give.

  Did the Merry affair have a bearing on the future course of history? Could a pair of slippers come between nations? Could a quarrel over who offered what arm to whose wife end in war? Weighing in Jefferson’s favor the fact that “no law of the United States or treaty stipulation forbade Jefferson to receive Merry in heelless slippers, or for that matter in bare feet, if he thought proper to do so,” Henry Adams concluded that the slippers and the parlor wars that followed “left distinct marks of acrimony in the diplomacy of America and England, until war wiped out the memory of reciprocal annoyances.”

  THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE, by resolving a looming conflict with France on the western border, had freed Jefferson and his cabinet to concentrate on the next-ranking items on the nation’s foreign policy agenda. Prominent among these were neutral maritime rights and the ongoing harassment of American vessels at sea, a crisis that grew in proportion to the size and success of the American merchant marine. The United States nursed grievances against several European powers on this score, but the ascendancy of the Royal Navy gave England the means to do the most harm. Beginning in late 1803, the Jefferson administration took a newly assertive tone with the British government, and seemed determined to obtain a new treaty that would guarantee American rights at sea.

  In a sequence of coldly formal letters to Ambassador Merry, Secretary Madison protested the harassment of American merchant vessels, the violation of American territorial waters by British warships, and the seizure on dubious pretenses of ships and cargoes that should have been protected, in the American view, by the sanctity of the U.S. flag. On Christmas Eve, 1803, Madison wrote Merry to protest that an officer of the HMS Bellerophon had boarded an American merchantman in the West Indies and written in the register that “Every port in the Island of St. Domingo being in a state of blockade by his Britannic Majesty’s Squadron, you are hereby warned off from that Island, and if seen you will be made a prize of.” This rude act of defacing a ship’s register, Madison complained, was not as objectionable as the British practice of declaring blockades but failing to enforce them rigorously—so-called paper blockades. Armed with an impressive set of international legal precedents, Madison argued that England had no right to declare under blockade “a whole Island, of vast extent and abounding with ports and places of commerce,” unless the Royal Navy was willing and able to station a force adequate to the task off each port.

  Merry countered with complaints of his own. Local officials in American seaports, he charged, regularly enticed British seamen to desert British merchant and naval vessels. The problem was especially acute in Jefferson and Madison’s home state of Virginia, where desertions occurred virtually every time a British ship put into Norfolk, apparently with the encouragement of local courts and law officers. Several such deserters, Merry said, were known to have enlisted aboard American frigates preparing to sail for the Mediterranean (Samuel Barron’s relief squadron). Merry also protested the detention of British warships in New York, when they were suspected of planning to follow a French privateer to sea and attack her in American territorial waters.

  The most emotionally charged dispute between the United States and Great Britain was the “impressment,” or forcible conscription, of American seamen into the Royal Navy. Throughout the summer of 1804, Madison addressed angry protests to Merry, using terms that the ambassador described as “high language…accompanied even with some degree of menace.” The impressment of seamen from the decks of American ships, Madison told Merry, could no longer be tolerated by the American people. England must renounce the practice. Several weeks later, the American ambassador in London, James Monroe, protested to the British Foreign Office that more than fifteen hundred Americans had been forced into the Royal Navy since March 1803. Indeed, incidents of impressment were sharply on the rise throughout the summer of 1804, and if the tone of the British government was a guide, they were likely to increase further.

  The system of impressment rested upon the English doctrine of “indefeasible allegiance and the recognized prerogative of the crown to require the services of all seamen for defense of the realm.” In Britain, it was carried out in the seaports by “press gangs” who patrolled the waterfront neighborhoods and practiced a brutal mode of on-the-spot conscription, putatively aimed at “seafaring men and persons whose occupations and callings are to work in vessels and boats upon Rivers,” but often resulting in the detention of any able-bodied adult male unlucky enough to find himself in the gang’s path. Impressment was also carried out at sea, as boarding parties detached from British naval vessels seized men from the decks of British and foreign merchantmen. English law never claimed the right to press foreigners into the Royal Navy, and men who had been born in the United States, before or after the American Revolution, were in theory exempted, but all native-born British seamen could be pressed into service, including those who had been naturalized as American citizens. As a practical matter, it was virtually impossible to distinguish between British and American seamen, either by speech or appearance. As a result, large numbers of native-born American seamen were abducted and forced to serve in the Royal Navy between 1792 and 1812.

  It i
s not known exactly how many were taken. Incidents of impressment often went unreported. The British, by definition, regarded all pressed men as their own, so British naval records did not specify how many Americans had been forced to serve. Contemporary estimates ranged as high as 50,000, but this was almost certainly far above the actual number. Lists of pressed men who attempted to obtain release through official channels were compiled by the U.S. State Department and by American agents in London. These lists, adjusted for duplicate names, yield a figure of 9,991 Americans pressed between 1796 and 1812. Of these, the majority—about 6,000—were pressed after 1803, in the period after the failure of the Peace of Amiens and the return to power of Prime Minister William Pitt.

  The phenomenon of impressment, as it affected both British and American seamen in this era, is best understood in the context of three related trends. The first was the unprecedented wartime expansion of the Royal Navy. Before the outbreak of war in 1792, the British fleets had employed about 10,000 men; by 1812, the number had grown to 140,000. The second was the equally unprecedented expansion of the American merchant service during the same period. Employment in American merchant vessels rose from fewer than 10,000 seamen before 1792 to about 70,000 in the peak years before 1812. By 1800, the United States was the largest neutral maritime power in the world, and by a considerable margin. The third was a pandemic of desertion from the Royal Navy. Horatio Nelson estimated that 40,000 men had deserted the navy between 1793 and 1801, and C. S. Forester judged that “at least” one half of the hands enlisted aboard the typical British warship between 1803 and 1812 would desert at the first opportunity. Every man who deserted had to be replaced. More often than not, he was replaced by a pressed man. But it was the pressed man who was most likely to desert. It was a vicious cycle, and the longer it continued the more vicious it became.