American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  CHAPTER 6

  The American Way of War

  T HE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE Dame, Paris, December 2, 1804. Before a dazzling array of marshals, ecclesiastics, and nouveaux princesses, Napoleon Bonaparte places a fake Carolingian crown on his head and proclaims himself Emperor of France. Behind him sits a glum Pius VII, who has joined Napoleon and Josephine in wedlock only the night before—the couple had neglected to be married in church—in order to legitimate the coronation. At the ceremony Napoleon does not prostrate himself before the Pope, nor will he take communion. The Corsican will bow to no authority, except that of the people, who in a plebiscite hardly a week before have “elected” him emperor by a vote of 3,500,000 to 2,500. He is the new Caesar, the new Charlemagne.…

  Three days later the Emperor presented his colonels with their new battle standards: imperial eagles that would symbolize his leadership in creating a new Roman Empire, though hardly a Holy one. By spring his Grand Army was pressing east, while England desperately organized a defensive alliance of Russians, Prussians, and Austrians. In October 1805 Napoleon’s spirited troops routed the Austrians at Ulm and the Emperor was soon sleeping in the palace of Schönbrunn in Vienna. Six weeks later, at Austerlitz, in a classic maneuvering of massed but mobile troops, Napoleon outgeneraled the combined forces of Alexander of Russia and Francis of Austria, cut the enemy in two, killed or wounded 26,000 men, and sent the rival emperors into headlong retreat. It was at this battle that Andrei Bolkonsky, in Tolstoi’s War and Peace, lying wounded on his back, reflected on the nature of war, leadership, and history.

  In London, an aging monarch contrasted drably with the military hero of France. “Mad” George III reigned in the forty-fifth year of his kingship. Not insane but afflicted with porphyria, he was at times so wild and delirious that his doctors, applying the standard treatment of the day, tied His Majesty to his bed or even strapped him into a “waistjacket.” For months his subjects had stood on the alert while Napoleon built flotillas of flat-bottomed boats big enough to carry infantry, field pieces, and horses into the coves and beaches of southern England. But the Royal Navy stood in the way, and Napoleon turned back to his land conquests.

  Londoners had hardly received the bleak news from Ulm when an electrifying report arrived from the Navy. Admiral Horatio Nelson, victor over Napoleon’s fleet in the Battle of the Nile some years earlier, had decoyed the combined French and Spanish armada out into Atlantic waters off the Cape of Trafalgar, broken the heavily gunned allied line, and routed the enemy. Englishmen thrilled to the news that Nelson had signaled from his flagship, “England expects every man to do his duty,” then grieved over the report that Nelson had fallen before a musket ball. When Napoleon triumphed at Austerlitz a few weeks later, the shape of the military chessboard in the West was set for almost a decade: France was master of the Continent, England mistress of the seas.

  In Washington, Jefferson and Madison followed these events with a sense of both involvement and detachment. They suspected the intentions of both the major powers and saw no need to take sides; the revolutionary France that Jefferson had welcomed had now been compromised and betrayed by a man whose militaristic flamboyance and Machiavellian statecraft he detested. But the President knew too that, however much he and the other Republican leaders wished to maintain strict neutrality, decisions in London and Paris, and at other points in the swaying mobiles of global politics, would closely touch Americans on the high seas and indeed in their ports and farms and factories. The Jeffersonians had reason to fear involvement: a republican disdain for the machinations of the courts of Europe; the vulnerability of a secondary power to the fleets and armies of a major, coupled with the military unpreparedness of the young nation. The President also feared involvements that would allow events to be controlled more by accident than by leaders, more “by chance than by design.”

  Jefferson also had some sense of insecurity about dealing with the veteran diplomats of Paris and London. “An American contending by stratagem against those exercised in it from their cradle would undoubtedly be outwitted by them,” he observed to Madison; the President was referring to Minister Robert Livingston but knew that he himself was widely charged with gullibility in diplomacy. Jefferson had had extensive diplomatic experience, of course; his main handicap was his hope to apply morality to foreign relations. Talleyrand suffered no such encumbrance.

  The President had learned early in his first term that, no matter how eager he might be to follow an independent course, the affairs of the New World would be entangled with the Old as long as American ships sailed the seas. That reminder had come from the rulers of Algiers, Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli, the “Barbary pirates” who had been seizing American ships and their “infidel” crews. American rulers had preferred to pay tribute rather than build a navy big enough for a transatlantic expeditionary force against the pashas’ ships and moated fortresses. When Barbary avarice and truculence seemed to mount at the turn of the century, Jefferson dispatched the Constitution and a few other vessels to bring the pirates to book.

  The results were a comic-opera combination of disaster—the Philadelphia ran aground chasing pirates and was taken by the buccaneers—and some heroic actions, exemplified by young Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, who boldly piloted a captured ship into Tripoli harbor and put the torch to the Philadelphia. Unable to take Tripoli by sea, the Americans now attacked by land. A small band of Arabs, Greek soldiers, and seven Marines marched for an arduous month from Alexandria through the desert, stormed Derna in a brief action, and jolted Pasha Yusuf into making peace, at the additional cost of a $60,000 sweetener for his court. The whole Barbary adventure ended with a few gains: at least temporary peace with Yusuf and the other pashas; training in seamanship, especially with the cheap, shallow gunboats that parsimonious Republicans preferred; and a fine line in a grand Marine song.

  If this was a lesson in Old World involvement from the east, events to the west showed that the most sensitive domestic rivalries could become entangled with foreign relations.

  The event makers were two remarkable men who had lived half inside, half outside, the young nation’s political and military leadership. One was Aaron Burr, who at the conclusion of his vice-presidency in 1805 was still an object of excitement, distrust, and mystery. A descendant of rigorous Presbyterians, including the great scholar-moralist Jonathan Edwards, he had come to reject the moral and political codes of his day. Short, balding, “persuasive” of eye and tongue, he pursued women so indefatigably and successfully as to qualify him for the title of an American Casanova. An able officer in the Revolution and a brilliant political organizer, he seemed to discipline all except himself. Yet if Burr was prepared in 1805 to betray his nation, he felt betrayed by the established leaders—by the Republicans, who had failed to re-elect him as governor of New York in 1799 and closed ranks against him in the presidential competition of 1801, and by the Federalists, who would never forgive him for killing Hamilton on that dubious field of honor, the dueling ground. Even before he left the vice-presidency Burr was conspiring to undertake his fantastic venture: to invade Mexico, a colony of Spain, seize western territories of the United States, and create a new nation headed, presumably, by himself.

  James Wilkinson, the man Burr conspired with, was an even stranger combination of opposites. At the age of twenty a brevetted brigadier general in the War of Independence, he was implicated in a move to unseat Washington as commander in chief. He nevertheless rose to the top of the American military establishment, winning appointment as military governor of Louisiana in 1803. He was also a paid secret agent of Spain—the “most consummate artist in treason,” Frederick Jackson Turner called him, “that the nation ever possessed.” If Burr’s weakness was women, Wilkinson’s was gold, gold from any source, English, Spanish, or American. He was also a faithless ally. At the climactic moment, after Burr had organized men and boats all along the Ohio River for a rendezvous in New Orleans and the presumed attack on Mexico, Wilkinson deci
ded to sell Burr out in order to maintain his own standing with both the American and Spanish governments.

  Burr had talked with so many persons—politicians, soldiers, rivermen, adventurers—that Jefferson had long known he was up to something—but what? Only on receiving from Wilkinson a report filled with horrendous portents and alarums did the President issue a proclamation warning of a “military expedition or enterprise against the dominions of Spain,” though saying nothing of secession. He issued a blanket order to federal and state officials to search out and apprehend the villains. A few weeks later Burr arrived in Natchez with a ragtail collection of men and boats, only to learn that Wilkinson had denounced him and ordered his arrest. Burr surrendered, then jumped bail and raced toward Spanish Florida, but was intercepted and taken to Richmond, there to await trial on a charge of treason.

  Burr had tried to draw scores of western politicos—Ohioans, Kentuckians, Tennesseeans, Louisianans—into his conspiracy. The fact that so few had responded—indeed, state and local officials had tried to thwart his boat-collecting efforts and to indict Burr himself—showed the durability of a young republic in the face of the kind of adventure that had brought earlier republics to ruin. Burr had also tried to lure Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Spaniards into his web. If he had attacked Mexico, Washington’s relations with Paris and London, as well as Madrid, would have been affected. The mobiles were separate but interdependent. But by now the Jeffersonians were in far more direct confrontation with the colossi of Europe.

  “THE HURRICANE…NOW BLASTING THE WORLD”

  By 1806 Britain and France were locked in deadly embrace, but they could not find a place to fight. After Trafalgar the French crocodile could not venture into the water; after Austerlitz the English sea lion could not venture out of it. For a time the two powers fought a mainly economic war. British naval might had swept much of France’s shipping off the high seas, while Napoleon tried every means of stopping neutral trade into England. The French allowed American shippers to trade with the West Indies, while Britain sought to cut off the economic lifelines between the islands and France. Yankee skippers battened on this arrangement by bringing cargos from the French West Indies into American ports, “Americanizing” the cargo by landing it and paying duties on it, and then reloading it and carrying it to ports still under French control.

  For a time, the English tolerated this subterfuge of the “broken voyage.” But, as pressure mounted from British shippers furious over the fast-rising profits and trade monopolizing of the rapacious Yankees, and as the English economic war against the French faltered, a London admiralty judge conveniently ruled that the non-continuous voyages were actually continuous; shortly British warships seized scores of American merchantmen, especially in the West Indian trade. The British sought to settle another grievance. For hundreds of years the Royal Navy had manned its “floating hells” by sending out press gangs to snatch able-bodied young men out of grog shops and off the streets. British seamen fled from their vile living conditions and the cat-o’-nine-tails by shipping in the American naval or merchant services. At times His Majesty’s ships could not leave port because of desertions. Ordered to fetch the fugitives, English sea captains hung off Atlantic ports, boarded American ships, and searched for English deserters. Quarterdeck justice was often harsh, as officers ruled that some seaman pronouncing “peas” as “paise” was an Irishman and hence a British subject, while if he talked through his nose he was probably a Yankee.

  Inevitably, these incidents set off explosions of rage in American ports. When a British warship fired a careless shot across the bow of an American sloop and splintered the main boom instead, killing the mate, the victim’s mangled body was carried to New York and paraded through the streets on a raised platform. Washington and London exchanged protests, but the English public was so angered by the Yankees “stealing” both trade and sailors, and the Royal Navy was concentrating so single-mindedly on its economic war against France, that no basis of compromise could be found. James Monroe, resident minister in London, backed up by William Pinkney, a Maryland lawyer, extracted a treaty from the Foreign Office that was so weak on the question of impressment that Jefferson refused to submit it to the Senate.

  Slowly Britain and France tightened their economic nooses on each other. When London declared a blockade of the European coast from Brest to the river Elbe, Napoleon counterattacked by establishing, under the so-called Berlin Decree, a complete blockade of the British Isles. As decree followed decree, zealous English captains pressed their efforts against American commerce and English “deserters.”

  Then occurred the incident. When on July 2, 1807, the American frigate Chesapeake was hailed off the Virginia coast by the British frigate Leopard, the American commander, assuming the Leopard was bent on an innocent errand, allowed her to draw near without piping his own men to quarters or bothering to have the loggerheads heated red-hot for firing his guns. The English captain requested permission to board and search the Chesapeake, but its commander refused—the English were allowed to search merchantmen, not warships. The Leopard promptly poured three broadsides into the defenseless Chesapeake, hulling her twenty-two times and killing or wounding twenty-one seamen. The search party found only one genuine deserter, who was court-martialed and hanged from the yardarm. Three other sailors, two of them black and all three American citizens, were seized and held by the British.

  Anger swept the Atlantic coast after the Chesapeake labored into Norfolk. British stores were destroyed and seamen roughed up, as editors and mass meetings declared war on the enemy. The Chesapeake seemed to symbolize innocent, defenseless America. Not since the battle of Lexington, Jefferson said, had he seen the country in such a state of exasperation. “The British had often enough, God knows, given us cause of war before; but it has been on points which would not have united the nation,” he wrote William Duane. “But now they have touched a chord which vibrates in every heart.” But what to do?

  For a while the President temporized, hoping that London would offer some concessions on impressment in the wake of the Chesapeake. But by the end of 1807 he knew he must act. Many still called for war, but Jefferson quailed at the prospect. While no pacifist, he dreaded the bloodshed and waste inevitable in a war against Britain, the financial cost for the government, the divisions it would cause between Anglophiles and Francophiles. Another alternative was arming American warships or merchantmen, or both, to protect trade. But these half-measures would have mixed results and might precipitate a war in any event. The only other course was an embargo on all trade with Britain, thus putting the English on short rations. By December the President had concluded that the choice lay among “War, Embargo, or Nothing.”

  In mid-December the President asked Congress for an embargo act, and both House and Senate responded quickly and enthusiastically. The Embargo Act prohibited virtually all land and seaborne trade with foreign nations. American vessels were forbidden to leave for foreign ports; coasters were required to post a huge bond as guarantee that cargos would not be shipped abroad. Foreign vessels could not carry goods out of American ports. It was a desperate, sweeping measure—but even more remarkable was Jefferson’s almost fanatical effort to make the act work. When widespread smuggling and other evasions and violations occurred along the thousands of miles of Canadian border and Atlantic coast, the President’s response was to tighten the act and to strengthen executive control to the degree that he was wielding unprecedented presidential power.

  The Embargo Act was designed to cut and batter the British economy but to be tolerable to the American. It had virtually the reverse effect. The impact on Atlantic ports was immediate and severe, as hundreds of ships and thousands of seamen were idled. “Ships rotted at the wharves; forests of bare masts were silhouetted in the harbors; grass grew on hitherto humming wharves; bankruptcies, suicides, and crimes increased; soup kitchens were established,” Thomas Bailey noted. Ironically, many Yankee sailors sought employment in the British
merchant marine, thus easing the need for impressment. The political effects were also emphatic, as the coastal cities in particular rallied against the “dambargo.” Sang a New Hampshire poet in Dover:

  Our ships all in motion,

  Once whiten’d the ocean

  They sail’d and return’d with a

  Cargo;

  Now doom’d to decay

  They are fallen a prey,

  To Jefferson, worms, and

  EMBARGO.

  The sluggish Federalist party came to life in protest against Jefferson’s “Quaker-gun diplomacy.” Even high Federalists could now appear to be friends of jobless sailors and other workers.

  The strategy of the embargo was that the hurting English economy would cause public opinion to pressure the ministry into compromises. But the persons most affected—workers reduced to pauperism in the English textile industry dependent on American cotton, and people suffering privation in Newfoundland and the West Indies—were the ones with least influence on British policy. The military and business establishments, intent on challenging America’s rising mercantile power, pressed the ministry to stand firm.

  Jefferson had uncharacteristically launched the embargo without full support from his colleagues; Gallatin, for one, preferred war to a permanent embargo. Republican state leaders, especially in the Northeast, were thrown on the defensive. Yet the President pursued his policy with relentless determination, and at cost to some of his basic principles of government. As evasions mounted, he received power to employ the militia freely in enforcing the law. Authority to call out the regular army and navy was granted to collectors, who were placed under the President’s direct policy control. Under the pressure, something of the spirit of “Jeffersonianism” seemed to escape from Jefferson himself, as he verged on embracing guilt by association, condemning whole communities instead of individual violators, and, on one occasion, supporting an effort to indict some embargo violators on the charge of treason; the case was thrown out of court by a Jeffersonian judge.