The Republicans did spend money on coastal fortifications—about $2.8 million between 1801 and 1812.28 This was almost three times what the Federalists had spent in the previous decade, but without a fleet to serve as the nation’s first line of defense, this sum was wholly inadequate. Most of the nation’s great cities remained exposed to attack from the sea.
Militia, Privateers, and Jefferson’s “Mosquito Fleet”
The Republicans were willing to cut the nation’s regular forces because they planned to rely on militia and privateers (sometimes called “the militia of the sea”). These forces were attractive because they were democratic in character and posed no threat to republican institutions. They were also cheap. Militia did not have to be paid until they were called into service, and privateers actually brought in revenue because their prizes were taxed. But most militia were so poorly trained that they could not be relied on in the heat of battle. There were drawbacks to privateers, too. Although capable of wreaking havoc on an enemy’s commerce, they were hardly a match for enemy warships and could offer little protection to the nation’s coast or commerce.29
The Republicans favored another instrument of war that was also of doubtful value. These were the gunboats that made up Jefferson’s “mosquito fleet.” Gunboats were small and inexpensive vessels—“oyster boats,” one critic called them—that had proved effective in several wars in the Mediterranean, where they could maneuver in waters too shallow for heavier ships.30 Though serviceable in calm seas, they were too light to be effective in rough waters. Moreover, most of the gunboats built in the United States drew so much water that they were difficult to maneuver and could not venture into shallow waters. Time would prove that gun for gun the American gunboats were more expensive to build and operate than frigates, and they rotted in a year if left unrepaired. Although 174 of the boats were built at a cost of $1.5 million, by 1809 the administration had lost faith in the program, and most of the vessels were taken out of service.31
The Rule of 1756 and Re-Export Trade
The Republican policy of retrenchment was popular with most voters, and initially at least it did little harm. Great Britain and France concluded the Peace of Amiens in late 1801 and remained at peace until 1803. Although most observers recognized that this was little more than a truce, it nonetheless reduced friction between the United States and the Great Powers and thus gave further impetus to the drive to pare defense expenditures.
The Peace of Amiens also eliminated neutral commercial opportunities. American exports plummeted from $94 million in 1801 to $54 million in 1803. When the Anglo-French war resumed, however, exports began to climb again, peaking at $108 million in 1807.32 Such was Great Britain’s restraint in the face of this growing trade that in 1804 James Monroe, the American minister in London, could report: “The truth is that our commerce never enjoyed in any war, as much freedom, and indeed favor from this govt. as it now does.”33
Little more than a year after delivering this judgment, Monroe accused the British of adopting a plan “to subject our commerce at present and hereafter to every restraint in their power.”34 What had happened in the interval? British officials, jealous of American commercial success and suspecting fraud in the neutral trade, had stepped up enforcement of a British maritime doctrine known as the Rule of 1756.
The Rule of 1756 held that trade closed to a neutral in time of peace could not be opened in time of war. The rule was supposed to prevent American merchants from freighting goods between France and her West Indian colonies when French ships could not get to sea. But American ships circumvented the rule by making a stopover in the United States, thus transforming a direct trade between France and her colonies into a triangular trade. At first tacitly, and then officially in the Polly decision (1800), the British held that this re-export trade did not violate their doctrine. As a result, the United States captured most of the trade between Europe and the Caribbean, and re-exports (which constituted about half of America’s export trade) soared from $2 million in 1792 to $53 million in 1805.35
There was a good deal of grumbling in Britain over this mushrooming trade. Having driven France’s merchant fleet from the high seas, the British had no wish to see American ships fill the void and reap the profits. At the very least, they wanted a share of those profits. “The point at issue with the United States on this subject,” British officials privately conceded, “is not a question of great importance, but a mere consideration of how the profit taken from the Enemy is to be divided.”36 To ensure a share of the trade, the British modified their policy. In the Essex decision (1805), the High Court of Admiralty ruled that landing goods and paying duties in the United States was no longer proof of bona fide importation. Thenceforth, American merchants would have to provide additional, though unspecified, proof that ships stopping over in the United States actually broke their voyages.37
Given the Essex decision, the Royal Navy began seizing American ships engaged in the re-export trade, with paralyzing effect. Insurance rates soared, and American merchants faced staggering losses.38 The total number of vessels seized was probably 300 or 400, although most were later released by the British courts. As Monroe put it, Britain “seeks to tranquilize us by dismissing our vessels in every case that She possibly can.”39 Moreover, the new Whig ministry that assumed office under Lord Grenville and Charles James Fox in 1806 found the Essex decision an embarrassment and moved to set it aside. By a government decree issued in May 1806 proclaiming a blockade of northern Europe (the “Fox Blockade”), the re-export trade was implicitly restored to its old status.40
In 1805, however, American merchants could not know that the British lion’s growl would prove worse than his bite. They only knew that they faced heavy losses if their ships were in fact condemned. Hence in every major seaport they banded together to petition the government for relief.41 Federal officials were sympathetic to their appeals, and there was a good deal of support for sending a special mission to London to resolve the problem.
Impressment
Other Anglo-American problems also demanded attention. The most important was impressment—the British practice of taking seamen from American ships on the high seas.42 American trade grew so rapidly in the early national period that there was a shortage of experienced seamen to man the nation’s growing merchant fleet. To overcome this shortage, British tars were recruited into American service. There was no shortage of volunteers because the pay and working conditions on American ships were so much better than on British warships or even British merchant vessels. As a result, probably 30 percent of the 70,000 seamen employed on American ships in the Age of Jefferson were British.43
The problem with this labor system was that the Royal Navy was on a war footing and needed all the seamen it could get. Hence press gangs from British warships regularly boarded American merchant vessels to reclaim British subjects. This practice was objectionable because it sometimes left American ships dangerously shorthanded. Even worse, through accident or design American citizens were sometimes caught in the British dragnet. Between 1803 and 1812, some 6,000 suffered this fate.44 Although the British government was usually willing to release those Americans whose citizenship could be established, the appeals—which were conducted through diplomatic channels—often took years. In the meantime, American citizens were confined to British ships, exposed to the rigors of a harsh discipline and to all the dangers of a war that was not their own.
In the hope of protecting Americans from British press gangs, the United States began issuing certificates of citizenship in 1796. These “protections” (as they were called) were like modern identification cards or passports, but instead of a photograph they contained a description of the individual. Age, height, hair and eye color, and any other distinguishing features were typically included, but often the description was vague. Hence, it was not difficult for a British seaman to acquire papers that roughly matched his appearance. Indeed, many Americans who had no intention of going to sea applie
d for a certificate to sell to a British sailor. For a dollar, it was said, a British tar could instantly become an American citizen.45 Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that British officials gave little credence to the documents. “The flagrant and undeniable abuses of the official documents of American Citizenship,” said the Admiralty, “have obliged their Lordships to look at all such documents with the utmost distrust.”46
Territorial Waters, Naval Blockades, and Contraband
Although the re-export trade and impressment were the most serious problems that troubled Anglo-American relations in 1805, there were other sources of friction as well.47 One was the British practice—all too common—of violating American territorial waters. Under international law a nation’s waters extended three miles out to sea because this was the maximum range of shore batteries. Whether through neglect or design, British warships often operated within American waters. The seizure of enemy ships and the impressment of seamen within the three-mile limit was a violation of the young republic’s sovereignty that Americans found particularly objectionable.
The British use of naval blockades was another source of friction. It was the accepted right of a nation at war to blockade an enemy’s ports in order to interrupt his trade. Neutral powers had to be given sufficient notice of a blockade, there had to be a continued naval presence before a blockaded port, and the naval force had to be large enough to threaten any vessel seeking to enter or leave the port. These were rules that the British recognized in principle but did not always follow in practice.
Still another source of trouble centered on the definition of contraband. It was the accepted right of a nation at war to search neutral merchant vessels on the high seas and to confiscate any contraband headed for the enemy. But there was no commonly accepted definition of contraband. The United States favored a narrow definition—restricted to war material—in order to enhance its commercial opportunities. The British, on the other hand, favored a broad definition—which might include food, naval stores, and even money—in order to deprive their enemies of as many vital supplies as possible. The British were usually willing to pay for dubious items seized—in effect preempting instead of confiscating questionable articles—but this did not mollify American merchants, who were after bigger profits on the continent.
Free Ships–Free Goods
The United States and Great Britain also differed over the status of enemy (French) property on neutral vessels. Upholding the Consolato del Mare, a fourteenth-century maritime code, the British argued that such property was subject to seizure. The United States favored the newer Dutch doctrine of free ships–free goods, which held that any property on a neutral vessel (except contraband) was immune to seizure. To the British the key was who owned the property; to Americans it was who owned the ship.
The doctrine of free ships–free goods is sometimes treated as one of the pivotal diplomatic issues of this period, but by 1800 it was of little practical importance. Although Americans had freighted property for France and other European belligerents in the 1790s, by 1800 they had accumulated sufficient capital to purchase any merchandise they wished to transport. “We are no longer mere freighters for foreigners,” said Republican Barnabas Bidwell in 1806, “but have become the carriers of foreign as well as native produce, on our own capital, and for our own account.”48
The purchase of foreign property Americanized it and thus protected it from seizure, even under the Consolato del Mare. Hence in practice Americans had few objections to the enforcement of this doctrine. “If any of our ships are found carrying the property of the enemies of Great Britain,” said Republican merchant Samuel Smith in 1806, “let them be punished, we mean not to defend them.”49 Federalists even argued that the United States profited from the Consolato del Mare. “The boasted principle of free ships, free goods,” Fisher Ames claimed, “would deprive the United States of a great part of the fair profits of their neutrality. Belligerent nations could in that case transact their own affairs, and neutrals would have no gains but freight.”50
The Monroe–Pinkney Treaty (1806)
These, then, were the issues that troubled Anglo-American relations in 1805: the re-export trade and impressment most of all, but also contraband, blockades, and violations of American waters. In private talks with President Jefferson and in strongly worded public resolutions, members of Congress urged the administration to send a special mission to Loncon to resolve these differences.51
President Jefferson, however, had long since soured on treaties—particularly commercial agreements—believing that mutual interest was the only reliable guarantee for trade. The day was not distant, he said in 1801, when the United States could dictate international law on the high seas. “In the meantime we wish to let every treaty we have drop off without renewal.”52 Jefferson had little love for the Jay Treaty—“a millstone round our necks,” he once called it—and he refused British overtures to renew its commercial clauses when they expired in 1803.53 He was willing to sanction a limited treaty covering neutral rights—the re-export trade, impressment, blockades, and the like—but he wanted to leave the negotiations to Monroe and to exclude commercial issues altogether. But such was the pressure from Congress that he felt obliged to appoint a special mission to work out the whole range of differences between the two nations. “I found it necessary,” he later said, “to yield my own opinion to the general sense of the national council.”54
To join Monroe in the negotiations, Jefferson chose William Pinkney, a Baltimore lawyer who had penned a particularly able memorial against the Rule of 1756 after the Essex seizures. The instructions the secretary of state drew up to guide the American envoys called for a host of British concessions and were largely an exercise in wishful thinking, but only two items were deemed essential to a settlement: an end to impressment and the restoration of the re-export trade.55
The British refused to give up impressment because they saw it as the only way to prevent wholesale desertions from the Royal Navy. But they did offer to observe “the greatest caution” in impressing British seamen and to afford “immediate and prompt redress” to any Americans mistakenly forced into service.56 Monroe and Pinkney realized that this fell far short of their instructions, but Britain showed such a conciliatory spirit on the other issues that they decided to conclude an agreement anyway. The result was the Monroe–Pinkney Treaty of 1806, which was in many ways more favorable to the United States than the Jay Treaty had been.57
By the terms of the new treaty, the British agreed not to interfere with the re-export trade as long as American ships paid a small transit duty on their stopover in the United States—a duty that was actually smaller than they were accustomed to paying.58 The British also conceded a narrow definition of contraband, promised to give proper notice of blockades, and agreed to refrain from interfering with American trade within five miles of the American coast. In addition, the British promised to reduce the duties paid by American ships in British ports, and to allow American merchants continued access to the British East Indies, although on a more restricted basis than provided for in the Jay Treaty. Best of all, the treaty contained a kind of insurance clause that bound the British to indemnify any merchant whose vessel was detained in violation of the treaty.
To American merchants seeking to make a profit in a war-torn world, the Monroe–Pinkney Treaty offered considerable security. There was security against interference with the East or West Indian trade, against hazy definitions of contraband or unannounced blockades, and against impressment or seizure within five miles of the American coast. The treaty also presaged a favorable revision of duties in British ports and assured compensation in the event of violations. Given the state of war in Europe and the relative strength of Great Britain and the United States, the British concessions were significant.
What did the United States have to give up in order to win these concessions? Little more than a promise of benevolent neutrality. The nation agreed to employ no commerc
ial sanctions against Britain that did not apply to other nations, to give up the doctrine of free ships–free goods, to deny the use of American ports to privateers belonging to Britain’s enemies, and to prohibit Americans from serving in the armed forces of Britain’s enemies. Except for the ban on commercial sanctions, these points were of little consequence. Indeed, most were already embodied in American law or were accepted practice under international law. Thus, the United States conceded very little in this treaty that constituted a new obligation.
As favorable as the Monroe–Pinkney Treaty was, it did contain a kicker. Before signing the agreement, the British insisted on appending a note that dealt with France’s recently issued Berlin Decree, which proclaimed a blockade of the British Isles. This was a “paper” blockade—illegal because France did not have the naval power to enforce it. In their note the British reserved the right to retaliate against France—any provision in the treaty notwithstanding—if the United States acquiesced in the French decree.59 The British reservation was extraordinary and put a cloud over the whole treaty, but it did not substantially alter America’s diplomatic position. By ratifying the treaty and making some gesture against the Berlin Decree, the United States could still demand that the entire agreement be implemented.
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