American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Fisher Ames could even joke about the matter. “I derive much entertainment from the squabbles in Madam Liberty’s family,” he wrote. “After so many liberties have been taken with her, she is no longer a miss and a virgin, though she still may be a goddess.”

  The younger generation of Federalist leaders, however, put modern organization ahead of old ideas. The Federalists had ended the century a disorganized as well as a defeated party. “The Federalists hardly deserve the name of a party,” Fisher Ames complained. “Their association is a loose one, formed by accident, and shaken by every prospect of labor or hazard.” For a time Federalists mocked the organizational efforts of their Republican foes. A Federalist satire, “The Grand Caucus,” presented four Jeffersonians—“Will Sneakup, Esq., Obedumb Bragwell, Esq., Squire Quorom, Esq., and Lord Cockedoodledoo”—constituted as a “self-created convention” which after various shenanigans came up with that very same foursome as its candidates for office.

  But nothing succeeds like failure. As the Federalists suffered defeat after defeat, they imitated the Republicans’ organizational efforts and innovated on their own. They experimented with state legislative caucuses, some of which became increasingly open, with panoplies of state, county, city, ward, and town caucuses, committees, and committees of correspondence. These grass-roots organizations raised money, published pamphlets and broadsides, and above all—their distinguishing feature as a party mechanism—nominated candidates for office. Some of the old-school Federalists were appalled by such political organizing, with all its implications for popular appeal and politicking. Jeremiah Smith frowned on the picture of “half a score of red hot feds well stuffed with brandy and conceit all talking together.…”

  All these were state efforts. Could the Federalists build a national party? The incentive was enormous, since the Republicans’ control of the presidency and Congress cast shadows over the whole political scene. The Federalists were assisted by national developments—most notably the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment, which changed the procedure in the electoral college so that each elector, instead of voting for two candidates without indicating which he wanted for President, would cast separate votes for President and Vice-President. This was the Republicans’ retroactive solution to the Jefferson-Burr impasse of l800, but it meant that the Federalists would not encounter a similar crisis erupting between two leaders or factions of their party. Federalists also experimented with rudimentary “conventions,” as they called them, comprised of delegates from a number of states who “nominated” a presidential candidate—a nomination that was not binding, but had some credibility and impact.

  Given time, the younger Federalists might have built a national organization strong enough to overcome its twin problems of leadership and credo—the former by supplying stable grass-roots support for national candidates and officials, the latter by recruiting a far greater variety and number of third-cadre activists through local caucuses and other party machinery. But history did not allow the Federalists time. Not only were the Republicans moving ahead with their own remarkable leadership, improved organization, and popular appeal, but the Federalists also found themselves on the unpopular side of foreign-policy issues. Inflamed by Jefferson’s “Frenchified” foreign policy as well as by the Louisiana Purchase, Senator Timothy Pickering played with the notion of a Northern Confederacy including the five New England states, New York, and New Jersey. Secession! The idea appealed to some of the Essexmen who had already given up on the new nation; but it outraged others—including leaders of the Junto itself—who had not worked so hard for Union to see it dissolve within twenty years. The “plot” got nowhere—but a few high Federalists talking about it tainted the image of the whole party.

  As the iniquitous Republicans kept their grip on the presidency and Congress during the Jefferson and Madison years, waterside Yankees of the Essex Junto credo and temperament grew desperate about the public interest and security and their own. Feeling had risen to a pitch when ships and sailors stood idle on the heels of Jefferson’s embargo of late 1807. If they could not control or measurably influence the Washington government, what alternatives were there for high Federalists but submission or defiance? Yankee merchants had not grown powerful and prosperous through submission, but whom or what could they defy? A grand precedent stared them in the face—the effort of the Jeffersonians themselves to challenge the legitimacy of the Alien and Sedition Acts. There was more talk of secession on the part of some Essexmen—to the tune of patriotic denunciations by Republicans. Fearing divisive action by the old guard, moderate Federalists diverted much of this feeling into the presidential politics of 1808. Then the War of 1812 brought a far more serious crisis—the Maine coastline occupied, Madison’s war effort faltering, New England ships and commerce devastated.

  Now—at last—the high Federalists acted. Pressured by the waterside Yankees and by their commercial, legal, and political allies along the Connecticut River and its reaches, the Massachusetts legislature invited the New England states to send delegates to a convention in Hartford. The maritime states of Rhode Island and Connecticut supplied members; from New Hampshire and Vermont came only delegates of southern counties bordering the Connecticut. A climactic political event seemed at hand—and the testing of a third, and politically dangerous, brand of Federalism.

  What followed illustrated the crucial difference in politics and history between what politicians do and what people perceive them as doing. In fact moderates were in control of the convention process from start to finish. Not Pickering or Sedgwick and the other extremists, but sober and responsible men such as George Cabot and Nathan Dane and, above all, the pleasantly soothing Harrison Gray Otis attended. Of the twenty-six delegates at Hartford, twenty-one were lawyers, five merchants. While the convention did call for state interposition “in cases of deliberate, dangerous and palpable infractions of the Constitution, affecting the sovereignty of a State and liberties of the people”—shades of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions!—no fiery proclamations or threats of secession emerged from the secret meetings; on the contrary, such safe outcomes as denunciations of Republican rule and calls for constitutional amendments to limit commercial embargoes, trade restrictions, and presidential power in general. The convention “recommended” adoption of such amendments by state legislatures or by conventions of the people.

  The popular image of the proceedings was quite different. Highly embroidered by a gleeful Republican press, a picture emerged of a small cabal of New England arch-conservatives meeting in secret in a Federalist town to plot secession and the disruption if not the overthrow of the republic. Opposition to the rising egalitarianism of the day, a devotion to their selfish interests over the public welfare, and, worst of all, friendship for the British—all this put the Federalists in the worst possible political posture. The Republican leadership, however, was genuinely concerned about the meeting. Madison was found by a visitor to look “heartbroken,” his mind full of the “New England sedition,” and Jefferson was stirred enough in his retirement to demand that the “Essex Junto” be stripped of power.

  Things could hardly have ended worse for the Hartford Federalists. News of the Treaty of Ghent and of Jackson’s victory at New Orleans left the conventioneers looking both foolish and defeatist. It became easy to caricature them as traitors and subversives who put “blue lights” up off the Connecticut shore to signal British privateers. The impression of selfishness, reaction, and subversion was too heavy a load for the Federalists, as they began their protracted death watch.

  CHAPTER 7

  The American Way of Peace

  IN THE SLEEPY FLANDER town of Ghent, in the late summer and fall of 1814, five Americans met, quarreled with one another, parleyed with the enemy—and wrote a treaty that helped keep Americans and British at peace with each other for a century, and in close alliance for decades after that.

  The Americans in Ghent made up a prodigious quintet. The most senior, though still
in his early fifties, was Albert Gallatin, happy to be free of his long tour as Secretary of the Treasury, as sagacious, tactful, and reasonable as ever. The most famous was the young Speaker of the House of Representatives, Henry Clay, the Kentucky “war hawk,” as pacific now as he had been bellicose, but no less a spokesman of the West. There were two experienced diplomats, James Bayard of Delaware, still remembered for having helped Jefferson win the presidency in the crisis of February 1801, and Jonathan Russell, a New Englander. And there was the formal head of the delegation, John Quincy Adams.

  Gallatin was the real leader of the delegation, and it took all his diplomacy to keep the diplomats together. The five men lodged in bachelor quarters in a genteel residence. They usually ate together, save for Adams, who arose early, dined at one, and morosely noted that the others did not fall to until four. “They sit after dinner and drink bad wine and smoke cigars, which neither suits my habits nor my health, and absorbs time which I cannot spare.” Finally Gallatin persuaded him to dine with the others. Sometimes Adams would be rising just as Clay came in from a night of drinking and card playing. The fact that Clay spoke for western interests, and Adams for New Englanders such as fishermen, while both had their eyes on the presidency, did not make for harmony, but Gallatin smoothed matters over with his plea, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, we must remain united or we will fail.…”

  The Americans faced daunting circumstances. Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria were planning a Quadruple Alliance to protect the victorious allies against a resurgent France, which was described to Clay by the American minister in Paris as “a political volcano, ready to explode whenever the match shall be applied.” Napoleon had been packed off to Elba. The Royal Navy now ruled the seas, the Duke of Wellington bestrode Europe. His crack troops were already shipping out of Bordeaux and sailing toward America, where they could join the drives down the Hudson or into the mouth of the Mississippi. The confident English had allowed Adams & Co. to cool their heels for weeks before dispatching their delegation, which on arrival struck the Americans as a collection of nonentities. Even meeting in Ghent was on British sufferance, for the area was occupied by redcoats. “What think you of our being surrounded by a British garrison?” Clay wrote a friend.

  Hardly deigning to conceal their sense of mastery, the British negotiators presented the Americans with stiff demands: the United States to be forbidden fortifications and armed vessels on the Great Lakes; a vast territory south of the lakes to be created for England’s Indian allies, and as a buffer against American expansion; the United States to cede lands in eastern Maine, northern New York, and west of Lake Superior. The Americans were staggered by these proposals, but especially by the notion that they should surrender the whole of the Northwest Territory, comprising the (present) states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, and much of Indiana and Ohio, according to the calculations of Gallatin’s son James.

  “Father mildly suggested that there were more than a hundred thousand American citizens settled in these States and territories,” son James noted in his diary. “The answer was: ‘They must look after themselves.’ ”

  The Americans—all but the poker-playing Clay, who felt he knew a bluff when he saw one—prepared to pack their bags. But the parley did not end, for neither side was wholly happy with this ignominious war. Negotiations for peace had actually started within a few weeks of the commencement of the war, and had continued in various guises until Ghent. What each nation expected of a peace treaty had been closely affected by the turns of fortune on the battlefields.

  Early in October news reached Ghent that Washington had been sacked, but then came the report of Macdonough’s brilliant victory on Lake Champlain. This repulse of the British thrust toward the Hudson, combined with Perry’s and other earlier naval victories, critically influenced the thinking of the pre-eminent English military leader, Wellington. Offered the command in Canada, the Iron Duke bluntly informed his political superiors that he could not promise much in the light of American naval power on the Lakes, and what’s more, they were in no position to demand territorial concessions from America. No ministry could ignore such advice from the hero of Waterloo.

  Both sides at Ghent accordingly modified their proposals. The Americans long since had given up their key demand for the end of impressment, but this was made easier by the knowledge that the defeat of France made impressment no longer vital to the Royal Navy. The British dropped their claim of a huge buffer land—their Indian “allies” could hardly press them on this matter as much as their Canadian brothers could on others—and modified their call for territorial concessions. A last-minute hitch loomed when the British suddenly challenged long-held American fishing rights off Newfoundland. If New England mariners wanted to fish in Canadian waters, Englishmen should have the right to navigate the Mississippi. Clay was furious when Gallatin and Adams supported such a deal. He would sign no treaty, he proclaimed, that granted Mississippi navigation rights to the enemy.

  “A dreadful day,” young Gallatin wrote in his diary. “Angry disputes on the contre-project. ” His father and Adams wanted the deal. “Mr. Clay would not hear of it.…Nothing arrived at.” By now, however, Gallatin knew that peace was likely, for he had received, according to his son, a private note from Wellington assuring him of the Duke’s good offices. When young James started to copy this note, his father snatched it from him and burned it.

  By the day before Christmas 1814, all issues had been agreed on, or postponed. Essentially the parties settled for the status quo ante. It was, as Thomas Bailey later judged, a truce of exhaustion rather than of persuasion, with important boundary issues left for later arbitral commissions. The treaty was signed December 24, 1814. The Americans invited their late adversaries to a dinner at which Adams toasted “His Majesty the King of England!” The British did the honors on Christmas Day, inviting the Americans to a dinner that included roast beef and plum pudding straight from England. The band, young Gallatin recorded, first played “God Save the King,” followed by a toast to the King, and “Yankee Doodle,” with a toast to the President.

  GOOD FEELINGS AND ILL

  Three thousand miles away that President anxiously awaited word of the terms of peace. Madison need not have worried. News of the Treaty of Ghent arrived about the same time as reports of the triumph of New Orleans. The two events seemed to become mixed together in the popular mind. “GLORIOUS NEWS!” proclaimed Niles’ Weekly Register. “Orleans saved and peace concluded.” Bells were rung, guns fired, holidays proclaimed, pupils liberated from school. The public feeling of joy and happiness, reported the New York Evening Post, showed how “really sick at heart” people of “all ranks and degrees” were of the war. “Broadway and other streets were illuminated by lighted candles,” the newspaper reported; “the city resounded in all parts with the joyful cry of a peace! a peace!” Boston was reported to be in a “perfect uproar of joy.” Amid the euphoria the Senate ratified the treaty without a dissenting vote—one of the most popular ever negotiated by the United States.

  But there was some ill feeling too. Bellicose Americans still wanted to attack Canada, especially after General Jackson had shown what could be done on the Mississippi. Some Federalists argued that the war should not have been fought in the first place. Many Canadians felt deserted by the English. And many Britishers felt sold out by their government; their sentiments found a voice in the Times of London, which saw the British as retiring from the combat with “the stripes yet bleeding on our backs,” and lamented that the treaty “betrays a deadness to the feelings of honour.”

  Like all wars, that of 1812-15 extinguished some problems and heated up others. One of the latter was the border with Canada, which remained to be negotiated with London. The Great Lakes, where costly naval battles had been fought, were the critical area. For years American leaders—notably John Adams in Paris and John Jay in London—had dreamed of a permanent disarmament of the Lakes. Now the opportunity had come. The House of Representatives led
the way, though partly out of reasons of economy, by authorizing the President to have the fresh-water navy laid up or sold, after first preserving their “armament, tackle, and furniture.” Would Britain follow suit? John Quincy Adams, now minister in London, sent word that the Cabinet was determined not only to maintain but to increase their naval power on the Lakes. Monroe instructed him to propose a mutual limitation of armed vessels.

  With negotiations well under way, Madison could turn to pressing domestic problems. At war’s end, he had only two more years to serve. His annual message to Congress in December 1815 was the first he was able to devote mainly to domestic issues. It was a paradoxical occasion. Congress was ignominiously meeting in the Patent Office, the only major federal building spared by the British, but its leadership had never been more lustrous: Calhoun, Webster, Pickering, Clay. The Kentuckian had been re-elected to the Speakership the first day he returned to the House after his year and a half abroad as a peace commissioner. The secondary leadership was hardly less impressive: Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, William Lowndes of South Carolina, Samuel D. Ingham of Pennsylvania, all Republicans, and a small band of articulate Federalists. But most remarkable was Madison’s message.