Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  Napoleon replied to Fox with his Berlin Decree of November 21, 1806 (following his conquest of Prussia, a blitzkrieg as astounding as that of the German army in conquering France 134 years later). Napoleon purported to bar all commerce and communication between Britain and the entire continent of Europe. Jefferson then ordered new negotiations with Britain on the hopeful assumption that the British would prove more amenable after this initiative from the French emperor (who had promoted himself from first consul three years before). The British and French scarcely noticed the Americans as the greatest war in the history of the world until a hundred years later steadily grew in scope and intensity.

  A very galling incident illustrated the dilemma of America and the limitations of its president’s pacifistic impulses in June 1807, when the British frigate Leopard stopped the American frigate Chesapeake beyond the three-mile territorial limit off Norfolk, Virginia, and the American ship declined to have her crew inspected for British deserters. The British ship subdued the American vessel with four broadsides killing three and wounding 18 Americans. Four sailors were seized, of whom only one was a British deserter. The incident inflamed and unified American opinion, Jefferson estimated, beyond anything since Lexington and Concord 32 years before. The U.S. demand for an apology and indemnity was simply ignored by the British, in what was now the customary manner, and Jefferson was finally forced to gamble on his economic response policy, which had been passed over in favor of the Adams-Hamilton military threat of 1798. Jefferson secured congressional approval of an almost complete embargo against trade with all foreign governments (since virtually all accessible countries were now at war with each other) and closed American ports entirely to all British shipping.

  This policy was an inexcusable misreading of what should have been obvious to Jefferson and his collaborators: that the United States would be the principal victim; that the embargo would have no impact on France, which controlled almost all of Europe west of Russia, south of Sweden, and north of the Ottoman Empire; and that the British would benefit from the loss of American competition, and would import foodstuffs from South America instead. American ships at sea when the embargo was imposed simply did not return to American ports and continued as international traders, enjoying the full cooperation of the Royal Navy with any American ship that ignored the American law. An immense smuggling business was carried on through Canada, with the cooperation not only of the British but of most New England and Upstate New York commercial interests.

  The embargo did not prevent British ships from delivering cargos to the United States, but it forbade them to remove American exports, so many dropped off in northern U.S. ports and picked up return cargoes in Canada. And Napoleon, astounded at the absurdity of the American measure and partially justifying Theodore Roosevelt’s disparagement of the comparative naïveté of Jefferson and Madison in dealing with such a man as he, seized all American shipping in French and French-controlled ports and waters, more than $10 million of shipping assets, claiming that any such ships were obviously British vessels with false papers, as no American would ignore Jefferson’s embargo act.

  Jefferson amplified his mistake with draconian enforcement orders, dispensing with the Fourth Amendment requirement for search warrants, ordering seizure by customs officials on suspicion of infractions of the embargo, deploying the armed forces along the Canadian border, and even determining that the Lake Champlain area was in a state of insurrection. None of these measures stopped smuggling on a massive scale, but they invited nullification actions by state legislatures (including by former secretary of state Pickering in New England), the withholding of state militias for enforcement purposes in New England, and unsuccessful constitutional challenges, and they involved clear impositions of force more objectionable than those for which Jefferson had urged revolt from George III in the most empurpled terms in the Declaration of Independence and elsewhere. The policy was an unmitigated economic, political, and moral disaster. The export industry declined by 75 percent and standards of living, especially in New England and the main Atlantic ports, plummeted. Finally, the Congress repealed the embargo and Jefferson signed this abandonment of his policy just three days before the inauguration of his successor, on March 1, 1809.

  11. ASSESSING THOMAS JEFFERSON

  Jefferson had been a good president up to the economic reprisals against the warring European powers. His simple and frugal manner of government, devolving much back on the states and promoting democratic values generally, was popular, and with Gallatin at the Treasury, prosperity continued to increase. The Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark and Pike expeditions were valuable in themselves in laying out settler routes and goals, and fired the nation’s imagination with the organic growth of western settlement. Because the forceful handling of the Genet and XYZ affairs by Washington, and the strong resistance, with clear military overtones, of Adams to the original maritime impressments and seizure crisis of 1798 had been successful, Jefferson had been spared the exposure of his ill-considered economic reprisals against larger economies of much less vulnerability than America’s to misconceived and largely unenforceable laws. He was finally free to present and force through the docile Congress a policy that laid the U.S. economy low and exposed Jefferson as an innumerate blowhard and a hypocrite. He spent much of the last year of his presidency in an immobilized state, racked by migraines and digestive problems.

  Only the happenstance of the Louisiana Purchase made Jefferson a more successful president than Adams, and in that as in previous offices, Jefferson did not have the steady judgment and self-control of Washington, any more than had the quirky and irascible Adams.

  Yet, though Jefferson botched his mad essay at economic warfare, he was a great expander of the country, popularizer of the presidency, and decentralizer of government, and one of the most politically gifted and effective leaders in the country’s history, clearly surpassed in this regard only by Franklin D. Roosevelt and possibly by Lincoln and Reagan also. His principal rival as the greatest intellectual in the presidency, Woodrow Wilson (though John Quincy Adams, John Adams’s son, could also be a rival), wrestled 110 years later with similar maritime provocations in a European war, and had the same pacifistic tendencies as Jefferson, but, at the head of a much more powerful America, would make war rather than tolerate the humiliation of America. Jefferson had done little as the country’s first secretary of state, and less, other than in partisan organization and political rough and tumble, as its second vice president. He was a talented president, but it is not accidental that he directed that his gravestone should refer to his status as author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia statute on the rights of man, and to his status as founder of the University of Virginia, and not to his great offices of state.

  Only the reputation of the Democratic-Republicans as sincere adherents to popular government (which was not an imposture), and the continued erosion of the Federalists and the absence of a galvanizing figure to rally the opposition, prevented a political upheaval in the 1808 elections. Hamilton was sorely missed. Three of the candidates for national office from the previous election ran again. Jefferson followed the Washington precedent and retired after two terms, though he could presumably have been reelected, because of the disarray of his opponents and despite the fiasco of his trade policies. He was replaced by Madison as the presidential candidate of the Democratic-Republicans (Democrats, as they became, and Jefferson and Madison are celebrated as the founders of the modern Democratic Party), and George Clinton was again nominated for vice president. The Federalists again chose Charles Cotesworth Pinckney for president and Rufus King for vice president.

  Some of the Jeffersonians splintered off under the half-mad but brilliant John Randolph of Roanoke, who was a states’ rights and nullification advocate (he proposed that states could decide the federal government had exceeded its powers and simply nullify the application of the offending law within their own borders). The eastern Jeffersonians nom
inated George Clinton, on what amounted almost to a free-trade platform. Clinton thus became the first and to date only person in American history to be nominated and stand for election as president and as vice president in the same year. Technically, he was running against himself, as the same person could not simultaneously hold both positions. The Randolphites were known as the “Quids” (because Randolph said they were neither Democratic-Republicans nor Federalists, and were a “third something,” or Tertium Quids—it was a mark of an erudite electorate that a splinter party acquired a Latin name). They nominated James Monroe for president, but he, unlike his administration colleague Clinton, declined to allow his name to stand against his old friend Madison. The vote was closer than in the previous election, but Madison and Clinton won, by 122 electoral votes to 47 for Pinckney and six for Clinton, who had the consolation of being reelected vice president by 113 to 47 for King. The Federalists made substantial gains in the Congress, but did not secure the majority of either house. Pinckney only received about 32 percent of the votes for president against about 55 percent for Madison.

  The Americans suffered their first serious strategic setback, going back 50 years to the Seven Years’ War, when Jefferson had said that taking Canada was “a mere matter of marching.” It proved to be more complicated than that, but he didn’t even endow his country with the men to make the march. If Jefferson had taken a leaf from the book of his predecessors, and built up a large army and equipped it, he could have threatened Britain with the permanent seizure of Canada, and could have forced some variance in the maritime provocations of the British. The application of simple grade-three arithmetic would have told him, as it told his opponents and the countries he was aiming to influence, that the policies he did adopt could not succeed, and their failure squandered a good deal of the political capital and credibility that had been built up by his comrades in the establishment of the United States—Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and Adams.

  This setback would be compounded by Madison, but was a lost opportunity, not a lasting defeat, and was more than overshadowed by the Louisiana Purchase. In strategic terms, the Jefferson presidency, though more ambiguous than its predecessors, continued America’s advance, in a world where almost all other nations were wracked by war.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Reconciling with Britain Abroad, and with Slavery at Home, 1809–1836

  1. JAMES MADISON AS PRESIDENT

  Madison was the last principal founder of the nation still in harness. His presidency was heavily preoccupied with the perpetual crisis caused by the refusal of the British and French to take the United States and its sovereignty seriously. The novelty had worn off America, and Napoleon was a far more epochal and immense historic figure—other than in the most conventionally idealistic terms—than the American founders, and the struggle with him was entirely engrossing to Europe and terminally enervating to much of it, ultimately including France. Madison drifted through his first year, after the cancellation of Jefferson’s embargo, which act included authorizing the president to resume trade with any country that signaled the end of violations of America’s neutrality.

  While in this mode, Madison was embarrassingly fleeced, first by the British and then by the French, as if in a stately early nineteenth century court quadrille. The British minister in Washington, David Erskine, told Madison’s secretary of state, Robert Smith, that the British orders in council that had so offended America would be withdrawn on June 10, 1809. Madison responded with a proclamation on April 19 lifting the ban on trade with Great Britain. The British foreign secretary, George Canning, disavowed Erskine and pulled him as minister on May 30, and Madison reimposed the trade embargo on Britain on August 9, 1809. The next legislative tackling of the trade question was by the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Nathaniel Macon, in early 1810. His bill stated that if either Britain or France relaxed its offensive measures, the president could prohibit trade with the other. (Only Britain and France were now players in this American game, which the subjects of their attempted reprisals barely seemed to notice.) Napoleon’s foreign minister, the Duke de Cadore,66 informed the American minister in Paris, John Armstrong, that France was ending its trade blockade. Madison, undismayed by the fiasco with Britain, announced on November 2, 1810, that the embargo against France had ended, and that commerce with Britain would end completely if it did not follow the French lead. In retaliation, Britain completely shut down New York as a port and redoubled the impressments of American sailors, before it came to light that Napoleon had not ended the anti-American trade exclusion at all. By then, such matters had been overtaken by more important and drastic events, as France had invaded Russia and America had gone back to war against Britain.

  Madison did seize west Florida, which was the territory along the Gulf coast from the Mississippi to Mobile, Alabama, on October 27, 1810, as it had been Jefferson’s and his contention that American sovereignty over this territory could be legally inferred from the Louisiana Purchase. But Madison continued, almost four years after the imposition of the self-defeating embargo, to shuffle and reshuffle ineffectual remedies to the systematic British and French violations of American sovereignty. If he had followed Washington’s old dictum that peace should be pursued by preparing for war, and assembled an army capable of occupying Canada, Britain would have made concessions. Britain could not transfer the forces that would have been necessary to prevent an American occupation of Canada after it had committed its main army to the war in Spain in 1808. But Madison compounded Jefferson’s error and never armed himself with a plausible stick with which to threaten the British, who continued to treat the United States like a banana republic, a practice in which Napoleon emulated or surpassed them with simple chicanery, as he had no navy (having been relieved of it by Viscount Nelson and other British admirals) with which fully to replicate Britain’s outrages against America.

  As the foreign policy problems worsened and the American foreign trade economy stagnated, apart from the formidable efforts of smugglers, the charter of the Bank of the United States came up for renewal. The tenacious Swiss banker and ethnologist Albert Gallatin, settling determinedly into his third full term as Treasury secretary, fought hard to renew the charter, with Madison’s support. The administration lost in the House, and a tie in the Senate was broken by the vote of Vice President Clinton, against the government, an almost unheard-of rebuff to the president. It was another unfortunate blunder, because the Bank was, as Hamilton had designed it, and as Gallatin had seen, a fine financing vehicle—something that, despite Jefferson and Madison’s aversion to debt and large government, would prove very necessary when, the following year, the United States found itself trying to fund a war against a Great Power. (Gallatin was a great authority on American Indian tribes, and here too his expertise could have been invaluable, as relations with the indigenous peoples were chronically and dishonestly mismanaged for generations.)

  Finally, by 1811, American opinion was moving toward war with Britain despite all the Jefferson-Madison pusillanimity about porous and self-punitive economic embargoes. The formidable Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, and his brother, The Prophet, were being encouraged by the British to build up an Indian buffer zone on the northwest frontier, and there was frequent skirmishing with settlers in the summer of 1811. The governor of the Indiana Territory, General William Henry Harrison, was induced to move against Tecumseh, who had attempted to organize all the main tribes, bands, and nations, as they variously called themselves, including in the Southwest, into a great defensive confederation. The Indians attacked the approaching Harrison at dawn on November 7 at Tippecanoe, and a fierce struggle see-sawed all day until the Americans forced retreat on the Indians, and burned their village down. This entered into American legend, in the absence of real war against sophisticated enemies, as a great victory, and after 30 years for the legend to be magnified by the American promotional machine, Harrison would join a succession of 11 men from Washington to Eisenhower w
ho would ride military renown into the presidency.

  By 1811, the British promotion of the Indians would inflame opinion in the West and North as efficiently as the maritime abrasions had aroused the seaboard states, especially New England and New York. Coming forward in the Congress now were young and aggressive men from the West and the South, who were widely known, following the description of John Randolph of Roanoke, as “war hawks.” Among the most prominent were Henry Clay of Kentucky, Speaker of the House in 1811; John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who followed Macon as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; and Richard M. Johnson (who in 1813 would claim to have killed Tecumseh). They advocated an armed and aggressive response to the British.

  2. THE WAR OF 1812

  On November 5, 1811, Madison, clearly preparing to take the plunge that would have been easier and timelier years before after suitable preparations, blasted the antics of the British on the high seas (“hostile inflexibility in trampling on rights which no independent nation can relinquish”). He was no kinder to the French, who had hoodwinked him for a year into believing the continental blockade in the Berlin Decree of 1806 had been lifted, and finally called for additional commitments to national defense. On April 1, 1812, he asked the Congress for an immediate and general embargo for 60 days, and was empowered three days later to call up 100,000 militiamen from around the country for six months.

  The war that was to follow was farcical in its beginning and in its end, and often in between. The Napoleonic blockade, enforced by the mighty French Grand Army, did cause serious hardship in Britain, and the prime minister, Spencer Percival, was contemplating easing the heavy-handed treatment of America when he became the only British prime minister to be assassinated, by a deranged man of incoherent political views, on May 11, 1812. He was replaced by Lord Liverpool, but the delay held up until June 23 the British suspension of the orders in council that blockaded America. On June 18, at Madison’s request, Congress declared war on Great Britain.