On April 13, 1811, the president invited the editor of the National Intelligencer to a private dinner at the White House. The paper was the semi-official voice of the administration, and three days later it printed a lengthy editorial that named no sources but strongly suggested that diplomacy with Great Britain had run its course. Britain had repeatedly refused even to seriously discuss the three paramount demands that the United States could never concede: revocation of the orders in council, an end to blockades that contravened international law, and abandonment of “the practice of impressing whomsoever her commanders chuse to call British seamen.” The editorial flatly predicted that talks with the newly appointed minister from Britain to the United States, due to arrive in Washington soon, would fail and that it would then be up to the people of the United States to “substitute … some measure more consonant to the feelings of the nation” than the peaceful measures so far tried.33
The new minister was Augustus J. Foster, who had served as secretary to the British legation from 1804 to 1808—and who had once declared that he would not take the job he was now undertaking for ten thousand pounds. When the British warship that brought him to America anchored off Annapolis on June 29, one seaman promptly deserted by leaping overboard and swimming three miles to shore, an ominous reminder of the flash points between the two countries.
But Foster swept into Washington all charm and goodwill. Thirty-three years old, handsome, well-bred, he struck a studied contrast to the prickly arrogance of his predecessors. His mother, herself the daughter of an earl, had married the Duke of Devonshire on the death of her first husband and had used her powerful connections to promote her son for the job. “I know you dislike that country, but it is a wonderful opportunity for future advancement,” she wrote him. Foster arrived with the secure confidence of a man who felt himself so far above the taint of vulgarity that he could even rub shoulders with American republicans with natural ease. He brought with him seven servants and a lavish entertainment budget, and proceeded to exhaust his $50,000 expense account in six months, wooing congressmen, giving excellent dinners for as many as two hundred guests at a time three or four times a week, and confining his contemptuous observations about American crudity to his private notes. Even there he seemed more amused than affronted as he recounted the “droll, original but offending” characters he became acquainted with among the Republican members of Congress, such as the one who had been caught in the act of relieving himself into Foster’s drawing room fireplace when he thought everyone had left the room for supper during a ball the minister gave for the queen’s birthday, or the others, not knowing what caviar was, who mistook it for black raspberry jam and crammed in huge mouthfuls that they immediately spat out. He had moved the legation to a new location at the very heart of the city, taking three of the adjacent row houses that made up the Seven Buildings on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue at Nineteenth Street, just three blocks from the White House. Foster immediately let it be known that he had come with instructions to settle the Chesapeake matter by offering compensation to the victims’ families and returning the seized Americans, still prisoners four years after the event—their sentences of five hundred lashes having since been remitted to “temporary” imprisonment.
And when, as the National Intelligencer—or rather President Madison—had accurately foretold, Foster’s charm offensive failed to distract his American hosts from the inescapable fact that Britain was as unmovable as ever on the central issues of impressment or the orders in council, Foster remained serenely unperturbed. Talk of war was simply electoral politics or bluff, he reported to London, and urged that Britain hold firm; an outward show of bland conciliation would soon enough soothe ruffled American spirits. He wrote a comforting reply to the embarrassed note of apology he received from his “poor Guest,” the congressman who had committed the “act of great impropriety” in his drawing room fireplace. “I most graciously answered and hoped to have gained his vote for peace by my soothing.”34
SECRETARY OF the Navy Hamilton took the unusual step of remaining in Washington through the steaming summer of 1811 when all other sane residents of the city fled for the mountains or home. The American navy’s notably more aggressive stance in showing the flag and resisting British encroachments along the American coast had led to several brushes between the two navies since the Little Belt confrontation in May, and Hamilton wanted to stay on top of what could at any moment become a rapidly escalating situation.
On June 9, 1811, Decatur, in the frigate United States, was sailing from Hampton Roads to New York when he encountered two British warships. As the ships lay side by side the captain of the thirty-eight-gun British frigate Eurydice identified himself and said he was carrying dispatches to the United States government. At that moment a gun on the United States went off. “I am happy that a pause followed,” Decatur reported to Hamilton, “which enabled me to inform her commander that the fire was the effect of accident.” No one was injured, the captain accepted Decatur’s apology, and the ships went on their way.
On August 30 a more serious confrontation was barely averted. Off Norfolk the British sloop of war Tartarus seized two American merchantmen—and then put into Norfolk, in violation of not only the order barring British men-of-war from American ports but plain common sense as well. David Porter, in command at the navy yard there, at once moved to carry out Hamilton’s standing instructions of the year before and ordered a force of two gunboats, the brig Nautilus, and the ship’s boats of the Essex to the roads “with an intention of driving her from that place.” Meanwhile, the British consul at Norfolk caught wind of what was happening and sent the Tartarus’s captain an urgent message: “For God-sake if you are not already gone—get to sea as fast as you can.” The ship cut her anchor cable and fled into the night just ahead of Porter’s small flotilla, leaving a local pilot to retrieve her anchor later.
Two weeks later Hamilton reported to Madison that Decatur’s and Rodgers’s squadrons were again at sea continuing their patrols: “There have been three british Cruisers on the coast of New York besetting, for some time past, our commerce”; there were rumors that a British squadron sent to America following the Little Belt affair was planning to retaliate, and after Rodgers’s full exoneration by a court of inquiry in September the rumors intensified. “As [Rodgers] will, no doubt, meet with the British squadron,” Hamilton said, “it will be ascertained, probably, whether their views are hostile or not.”35
Even members of Madison’s own party and administration had been slow to detect the president’s new militancy. His secretary of state, James Monroe, had at first been convinced that the April article in the National Intelligencer was a plant instigated by his predecessor Robert Smith, designed to embarrass and sabotage his upcoming negotiations with Foster, and Monroe furiously upbraided the editor for printing it. Meanwhile, from the small but vocal “malcontent” wing of the Republican party that had begun agitating for war, Madison was being openly attacked for “pusillanimous” conduct and a want of “spirit.”36
But in fact he was working steadily to build a case, and a sense of crisis, that would bring his party and the public along with the momentous decision for war he had already made. In July 1811 he had issued a proclamation summoning Congress to meet November 5, a month earlier than customary. When the legislators arrived, Madison sent them as their first order of business a “war message” that called for raising ten thousand troops on a three-year enlistment and providing for fifty thousand volunteers. He summarized the failed negotiations with Foster, emphasizing the refusal of the British government to concede anything to American claims. He concluded, “With this evidence of hostile inflexibility in trampling on rights which no independent nation can relinquish, Congress will feel the duty of putting the United States into an armor and an attitude demanded by the crisis, and corresponding with the national spirit and expectations.”
Although conspicuously deferring to Congress’s constitutional authority to
declare war, Madison followed up with behind-the-scenes lobbying. In a private letter to John Quincy Adams, he said, “The question to be decided therefore by Congress … simply is, whether all trade to which the orders in council are and shall be applied, is to be abandoned, or the hostile operation of them be hostilely resisted. The apparent disposition is certainly not in favor of the first alternative.” He also treated Foster’s concessions on the Chesapeake affair as the too-little-too-late window dressing they were: he passed the agreement on to Congress without any official comment, and to John Quincy Adams dismissed it with the observation that it merely “takes one splinter out of our wounds.” On January 16, 1812, the president sought to keep the momentum moving toward war by releasing the full text of the letters exchanged between Foster and Monroe during their futile negotiations. As further evidence of “the hostile policy of the British Government against our national rights,” they were damningly effective; even Federalists were astounded at the arrogance of Foster’s insistence that the orders in council that barred American trade with the Continent would only be rescinded if Napoleon first opened his ports to British goods.37
John Randolph remained true to the old Republican antiwar faith, lambasting his fellow party members for apostasy and accusing them of wanting war with Britain only because they lusted after Canada’s territory. But he was running against an unmistakable tide. The new Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, of Kentucky, was at the forefront of the war faction and filled key committee positions with like-minded allies. He also was the first speaker ever to dare tell Randolph to stop bringing his dog into the House chamber, a small but telling straw in the wind.
Clay and his fellow war hawks fully reflected the “national spirit and expectations” that Madison had alluded to. As tumbling farm prices drove home the connection between trade abroad and prosperity at home, the war spirit grew sharply even in the traditional frontier strongholds of Jeffersonian republicanism. Cotton prices had dropped two-thirds since 1808, along with an overall 30 percent decline in farm commodity prices, and newspapers in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania boldly declared that only war would free America from the British restrictions that had closed off markets to American farmers. “We have now one course to pursue—a resort to arms,” asserted one Kentucky paper. The Ohio legislature adopted a resolution declaring that the report the House Foreign Relations Committee had just issued in response to Madison’s message—and which focused exclusively on British violations of American maritime rights—“breathes a spirit in unison with our own.”38 In western Tennessee, Andrew Jackson, commander of the militia, issued a call for volunteers that began, “For what are we going to fight?”
We are going to fight for the reestablishment of our national charector, misunderstood and vilified at home and abroad; for the protection of our maritime citizens, impressed on board British ships of war and compelled to fight the battles of our enemies against ourselves; to vindicate our right to a free trade, and open a market for the productions of our soil, now perishing on our hands because the mistress of the ocean has forbid us to carry them to any foreign nation; in fine, to seek some indemnity for past injuries, some security against future aggressions, by the conquest of all the British dominions upon the continent of north America.39
If the conquest of Canada was not the reason for war against Britain, it was in the eyes of Jackson and most other war hawk Republicans the most effective means of waging that war. The bill expanding the army was quickly approved and signed into law by Madison on January 11, 1812; a militia bill followed on February 6.
The navy was another matter. Even the war hawks could remain true to the old Republican creed of antinavalism if the coming war was to be fought mainly on land. And then Albert Gallatin, appalled as ever at what the navy was doing to his budget figures—only once during his eleven years as Jefferson’s and Madison’s Treasury secretary had he managed to keep the navy budget under $1 million, as he hoped, and in 1812 it was running $2.5 million—had sent Madison a blistering dissection of the president’s proposed war message to Congress in which he urged Madison to remove any mention of the navy at all. Gallatin argued that to pay for the war the country would have to borrow $6 million at 6 percent interest; adding the navy’s $2 million would not only increase that principal but push the interest rate for the entire loan to 8 percent. The only other option would be to cut the army budget, which Gallatin warned would be a “fatal” misapplication of resources. “Unless therefore a great utility can be proven” for the navy, he admonished Madison, “the employment of that force will be a substantial evil. I believe myself that so far from there being any utility it will in its very employment diminish our means of annoying the enemy.”40
Madison, carefully trying to thread political minefields left and right as he built the case for war, chose the prudent political course and ducked the navy issue altogether. He ended up devoting one sentence to the navy in his message to Congress: “Your attention will of course be drawn to such provisions on the subject of our naval force as may be required for the services to which it may be best adapted.”
In December 1811, Secretary Hamilton had responded to a request from the House Naval Committee asking for an estimate of the expense of building, manning, and equipping for actual service those vessels “most useful and most usually employed in modern naval war.” Hamilton stated that in the event of “a collision with either of the present great belligerent powers,” a force of twelve 74-gun ships of the line and twenty “well constructed frigates” of not less than thirty-eight guns each would “be ample to the protection of our coasting trade” and also “be competent to annoy extensively the commerce of an enemy.”
At $200,000 for each of the new frigates and a third of a million dollars for each of the ships of the line, the total cost of construction would come to a little over $7 million. Repairing the five smaller frigates currently in ordinary (Chesapeake, Constellation, New York, Adams, Boston) so they could join the two small frigates (Essex and Congress) and three large frigates (President, United States, Constitution) already in service would cost half a million dollars.41
The committee prudently scaled back its proposal to ten new frigates and no ships of the line. But even that set off all the old expressions of horror from the Republican faithful when it came before the full House. One alarmed Republican congressman declared that such a navy, once a war was over, “would become a powerful engine in the hands of an ambitious Executive.” The “Navy mania,” warned another, would lead to permanent internal taxes that would fall on the agricultural class while all the benefits would accrue to the mercantile class. Representative Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky ominously observed that of all the great naval powers of ancient times, Tyre and Sidon, Crete and Rhodes, Athens and Carthage, none had ever been able to confine themselves “to the legitimate object of protecting commerce in distant seas,” but had been led inexorably to plunder, piracy, and depredations abroad, tyranny at home: “While their commerce and navy furnished a small part of the people with the luxuries of every country at that time known, the great mass of citizens at home were miserable and oppressed.” Others decried the waste and extravagance of naval expenditures; there were stories of navy yard workers travelling at government expense in stagecoaches, of timber purchased at inflated prices, of ships no sooner built than needing repair, with the frigate Constitution alone running up repair bills of more than $43,000 per year ever since she was launched.42
And then Adam Seybert of Pennsylvania rose to point out that the British navy possessed 1,042 vessels, 719 of those in commission, 111 of those already on the American station; among those were 7 ships of the line and 31 frigates. The entire American navy, by contrast, consisted of 20 vessels carrying a grand total of 524 guns—in other words, half as many guns as the Royal Navy had ships. “We cannot contend with Great Britain on the ocean. It is idle to be led astray by misstatements and false pride—we have no reason to expect more from our c
itizens, than what other brave people have performed,” Seybert asserted. “I fear our vessels will only tend to swell the present catalogue of the British Navy.”43
Nearly every Federalist and two dozen Republicans supported the frigate bill, but it narrowly lost on a 59–62 vote in the House. A proposal to build a dry dock for repairing navy ships was voted down 52–56. The Senate also narrowly defeated the frigate bill, though the speech of Federalist senator James Lloyd of Massachusetts in favor of the measure was subsequently reprinted and sold twelve thousand copies in Boston. In the end, Congress would agree only to a small appropriation to purchase timber and fit out existing frigates. Most Federalists were so disgusted they abstained from voting on the final bill.
Representatives from the frontier had voted 12 to 1 against the frigate bill; six months later they would vote 12 to 1 in favor of the declaration of war against Great Britain. Representatives from Pennsylvania voted 17 to 1 against the naval expansion and 16 to 2 in favor of war. In all, 53 of the 79 House members who would eventually vote for war voted against preparing the navy to fight one.44
NEWS OF America’s move toward war reached William Bainbridge in Russia. He had gone there to try his fortune once again as a merchant captain, having obtained another furlough from the navy, and had sailed twice to St. Petersburg; on the first voyage he made a considerable profit carrying a load of indigo, but by the time he arrived with a second shipment so many American merchants had the same idea that the market was flooded and prices collapsed. In the fall of 1811 Bainbridge took a house in St. Petersburg to wait for prices to recover as Russian re-exports slowly eased the glut.
Perilous Fight Page 13