In a rush to get started on his new mission, Ashburton left Britain in mid-February. He arrived on April 2, 1842 in Annapolis, Maryland, on the British frigate, the Warspite, with fifty-four guns and a crew of five hundred. Aberdeen wanted Ashburton’s arrival to be fittingly ceremonial and impressive. It was. Despite its size, the frigate had been blown off course from the scheduled arrival in New York, and so ended up in Annapolis.
To assist him in dealing with the difficulties he would face in Washington, Ashburton brought with him three secretaries, five servants, three horses and a carriage, and a great quantity of luggage.[8] Ashburton arrived in Washington on April 4, and two days later he called on President Tyler and presented his credentials. Tyler, in turn, expressed his satisfaction that Britain wanted to preserve good understanding between the two nations. After those formalities, Webster and Ashburton left the White House to visit the Congress and the Library of Congress.[9]
Presidents do not get the luxury of spending their time exclusively on international affairs or on domestic affairs, as they might choose, and they cannot control when one or the other intrudes, demanding attention. In the midst of the crisis in relations with Great Britain, President Tyler and Secretary Webster also had a major domestic problem that seemed to be getting worse: “Dorr’s rebellion” in Rhode Island. That state retained its highly restrictive property requirements for voting, in accordance with its seventeenth-century British colonial charter.[10] It was virtually the only state falling well short of universal adult white manhood suffrage. At about the same time as the Creole was heading to Nassau, Thomas Dorr, a Rhode Island lawyer, was engaged in a meeting in Providence of the “People’s Convention.” A month later, in December 1841, the People’s Constitution was adopted; it provided for near universal white adult male suffrage, under which elections were scheduled for mid-April 1842. Rhode Island governor Samuel King turned to the federal government—to President Tyler—for help to suppress this “rebellion” against his charter government.
On April 4, 1842, the day that Lord Ashburton arrived in Washington, Governor King sent a delegation to Washington seeking Tyler’s assurance that the federal military would be on the governor’s side in the event that Dorr’s followers got out of hand. A few days later, a delegation arrived representing the Dorr position. In terms of political instinct, Tyler probably was sympathetic to Dorr’s goal of broader suffrage, and since northern Democrats rhetorically supported Dorr’s efforts to change Rhode Island’s ruling structure, but Tyler could not openly attack the People’s Constitution.[11] The Whigs in Congress would probably incline toward Governor King’s position. Tyler sent the governor a letter on April 11, explaining that he had no authority to anticipate insurrectionary activity; but at the same time, Tyler privately instructed General Winfield Scott to ensure that the US army fort at Newport was secure.
Events in Rhode Island continued to get worse. In another letter to President Tyler, Governor King—who “seemed at times to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown”—added that a large “deluded” portion of the citizenry had “declared their intention to put down the existing government.”[12] Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote on April 26 to his old friend Daniel Webster to urge him to have Tyler send troops to Fort Adams in Newport at once. Dorr’s assembly moved into session, and on May 4, the governor again appealed to Tyler for federal help. Once again, Tyler brushed off the governor. On May 9, a warrant was issued for Dorr’s arrest.
On May 10, Dorr met in the White House with President Tyler for four hours. Tyler told Dorr that his activity was “treasonable against the state and if [he] committed any overt acts and resisted the force of the U.S., [he] would then commit treason against the U.S. and as sure as [he] did so [he] should be hanged.”[13] Daniel Webster confirmed this conclusion. On May 14, Secretary of State Webster broke from his negotiations with Lord Ashburton and was dispatched by Tyler to chair a secret meeting in New York City in an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the dispute. (This was not unlike Webster’s successful role in easing the McLeod problem in New York a year earlier; see chapter 2.)
Southern newspapers, interestingly, connected the ideology of Dorr’s Rebellion and the slave revolt on the Creole, in part because of the temporal coincidence of the two events. The Madisonian, published in Washington, DC, asserted on May 21 that those who “encouraged the commission of outrage against the existing government [in Rhode Island were] . . . of the same class that instigated the slaves on board the Creole to commit murder and mutiny.”[14]
By mid-June, charter militias patrolled the streets of Providence night and day. Meanwhile, Dorr assembled a small force in the Gloucester village of Chepachet, close to the Connecticut border, on June 25. On the same day, the Rhode Island General Assembly placed the entire state under military rule. On June 29, Tyler ordered Secretary of War John Spencer to Rhode Island just in case federal military intervention became necessary.[15] In the end, Dorr was forced to leave Chepachet, and he fled the state. After several moves, Dorr ended up settling in New Hampshire on July 8, though he returned to Rhode Island in October 1843. The Dorr Rebellion, however, was over.
In the fall of 1842, the Rhode Island Assembly wrote a new state constitution granting greatly expanded voting rights. Thus, the Rhode Island crisis of opposing governments contending for legitimacy finally ended. However, the ultimate US constitutional issue of the federal role ended up in the US Supreme Court six years later, in a case won by none other than Daniel Webster (see the epilogue).
When Lord Ashburton wrote to Webster about his appointment, he asked for Webster’s assistance in finding appropriate housing for him and his staff. Not surprisingly, Webster found a place for Ashburton right in Webster’s own neighborhood—the best in the nation’s capital.
On his nomination to be secretary of state, early in 1841, Webster felt he simply had to have a grand house in Washington. “Webster was venal even by the standards of his own day, since he encouraged the solicitation of funds from wealthy Bostonian constituents to maintain his lavish life-style in Washington.”[16] He borrowed[17] funds to buy the elegant Swann House, on H Street, facing the Executive Mansion (not formally called the White House until 1901) across from President’s Square, later known as Lafayette Square.[18] At the western corner of that square stood Decatur House, which had been the home of three previous secretaries of state: Henry Clay (under John Quincy Adams), Martin Van Buren (under Andrew Jackson) and Edward Livingston (also under Jackson); at various times, it had also been the home of the ministers of France, Russia, and Britain. One hundred yards to the east of Swann House on H Street was a great house that had been constructed only five years earlier. Webster selected that house for Ashburton, who leased it for ten months for $12,000.[19] One can imagine Webster walking over to Ashburton’s residence, walking up the few steps to the front door, and being greeted by Lord Ashburton. Perhaps the two men looked across the park to where President Tyler lived and worked.
Just fifty feet to the east of Ashburton’s new residence was Dolly Madison’s house—an ironic situation, since that First Lady had fled the Executive Mansion in 1814, just before the British burned it. Mrs. Madison was not living in the house when Ashburton arrived, since she had rented it to former attorney general John J. Crittenden. Just a few dozen yards along Madison Place, along the square from Ashburton’s new residence, was the most fashionable boarding house in Washington. John C. Spencer, whom President Tyler appointed secretary of war less than five months earlier, lived in that boarding house.
Finally, at the southeast corner of President’s Square, about three hundred yards across the square from Webster’s Swann House, was the location of the State Department, housed in the Northeast Executive Building. John Quincy Adams was secretary of state when the building was completed; the State Department moved into seventeen of the thirty-one rooms. By Webster’s time, the full staff of the department consisted of about a dozen clerks.[20] It was in the secretary’s office in the southeast
corner that the Webster-Ashburton Treaty was signed some four months after Lord Ashburton arrived on the square.[21]
By the fall of 1841, when the renovation to Swann House was completed, and when Caroline Webster arrived, Webster hosted lavish dinner parties—as he felt necessary and appropriate for a secretary of state. However, Webster never conducted government business at these functions; rather, they were designed to cultivate “relationships” with members of Congress, diplomats, and other important members of society. Webster personally would select the food and wine, and often ended the evening by leading his guests in song.[22] More than once, the president, the diplomatic corps, the justices of the Supreme Court, and members of Congress would join in. Once Lord Ashburton arrived at his house in April 1842, one hundred yards to the east on H Street, the lavish entertaining moved into high gear. Ashburton offered rare wines and seductive French desserts prepared by his French chef. Ashburton used his elegant table to help smooth negotiations with his American interlocutors.
Even before Lord Ashburton arrived in the United States, Webster had privately consulted his friend from Massachusetts, Justice Joseph Story. Story was a giant on the Supreme Court, having served there for thirty-one years. (He had authored the court’s Opinion in the Amistad case almost exactly one year earlier.) Story shared Webster’s fundamental interest in the importance to society of the protection of property—even property in slaves. Story advised Webster that, in the absence of an extradition treaty with Britain, there was no legal basis to compel the return to the United States of the nineteen Creole slaves jailed in Nassau. Webster asked Story to draft articles that might go into a treaty, dealing with the problem of a ship being driven into a foreign port, and also dealing with extradition.[23]
Ashburton and Webster wasted no time in beginning their negotiation. They talked often, mostly at Ashburton’s house, just yards from Webster’s Swann House, and also in the State Department’s offices. Neither man was young: Alexander Baring was sixty-eight, and Daniel Webster was sixty. They even looked somewhat the same: “Both had large heads, high foreheads [i.e., balding], piercing dark eyes with heavy brows. Ashburton’s complexion, however, was ‘clear red and white,’ Webster’s a dark dusky hue.”[24]
The American lawyer and the British banker ran through all the issues: the boundary, the African slave ship inspection problem, the Caroline, and the Creole. They decide to concentrate on the pressing issue of the Northeast boundary issue. This was extremely complicated, since it involved—on the American side—the participation in some fashion of delegations from Maine and Massachusetts, and there was the almost comical periodic surfacing of old maps, each presenting a different boundary line. Even though the Creole issue was not in the instructions given by Lord Aberdeen, Ashburton—and Webster—simply had to discuss it, since there was a great deal of public excitement about it. Ashburton sought guidance from London, and explained that he thought security for the future was more important for the Southern slaveholders than compensation for past injuries.
On April 28, Ashburton wrote to the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Earl Aberdeen, and explained that Webster hoped to connect the Creole issue to a general extradition treaty. Webster’s proposal would have “compelled British colonial officials not only to abstain from all interference with slave vessels driven by stress of weather into British ports, but went still further in cases of mutiny by slaves, requiring colonial officials to aid the officers and owners to recover possession of their ships.”[25] Ashburton opined that “some” agreement had to be found. In the meantime, the British Foreign Office advised Minister Everett that the colonial officials in Nassau were to be commended for their conduct of the Creole situation.
By mid-May, there were reports of “warm debates” between Webster and Ashburton. Ashburton was of good demeanor and was “quite well received,” whereas Webster looked “grave, and a little care-worn.”[26] The two sides kept their negotiations strictly secret, and so the rumors had little to seize upon except appearances.[27] Nevertheless, by June, there were reports that Lord Ashburton was authorized to make “some prospective arrangement to guard against future cases, but not to allow any indemnification for the Creole.”[28] Lord Aberdeen approved in principle an extradition arrangement, except that he refused to accept, among the list of crimes, “mutiny and revolt on board ship,” which the negotiators wanted to cover the Creole situation.[29]
On June 29, Ashburton sent a dispatch to Lord Aberdeen in London. With respect to the Creole, Ashburton “assured Aberdeen that failure to give satisfaction for the future would be a serious disappointment to the American President and Congress, and threatened the successful conclusion of other matters under discussion.”[30]
Lord Ashburton found the Executive branch and the Congress locked in a bitter power struggle over policy, and he thought Tyler was “a bit testy” about the Creole issue. The negotiations continued into the hot summer of 1842. Ashburton enjoyed amiable dinners with the Websters and glittering official functions at the White House—one of which was a wedding reception for James Monroe’s granddaughter, during which Tyler asked John Quincy Adams to escort Mrs. Tyler, while the president escorted the bride.
Tyler and Webster, and also Ashburton, used secret funds to “soften up” local authorities in Maine and Massachusetts, in order to get them to welcome a compromise borderline that gave more than half of the disputed territory to the American side, but gave the British a fifty-mile-wide buffer between the border and the St. Lawrence River—to permit a military road to defend Quebec and the maritime provinces. That helped to resolve the contentious Northeast border dispute, and a compromise was reached in early July. The matter of the British detaining and inspecting US vessels off the African coast, in connection with repressing the slave trade, was resolved by a decision to form joint cruising squadrons to reflect the common effort to end the international slave trade. That would be contained in the proposed treaty.
Webster proposed a provision in the treaty to deal with extradition. He tried to add “mutiny and revolt on board ship” to the standard list of crimes, and Ashburton at first seemed agreeable. But then Ashburton realized the implications for the Creole issue and refused. Later, when Tyler sent the treaty to the Senate, he explained that his purpose in including an extradition provision was to assist governors of states along the Canadian border in dealing with requests from Canada to surrender fugitives. He explained that the provision excluded “all political offenses or criminal charges arising from wars or intestine commotions.”
By mid-July, Webster and Ashburton had agreed on a framework for an exchange of notes defusing the Caroline issue, along with the more recent but less important McLeod matter. Webster initiated the exchange of notes on July 27. He attached a copy of his note to Minister Fox of April 24, 1841, and a relevant extract from President Tyler’s Message to Congress of December 7, 1841, both dealing with the Caroline. Webster pointed out that the attack was “an offense to the sovereignty and dignity” of the United States and “a wrong for which, to this day, no atonement, or even apology, has been made.” It was almost as if being ignored by the British were a greater affront to American pride than the destruction of the vessel and the loss of life.
Ashburton replied the next day. He agreed with Webster’s statement of the applicable general principles of international law and also with Webster’s presentation of the exception of self-defense (i.e., whether there was “that necessity of self-defense, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means”). More personally, Ashburton said that he had “admiration” for Webster’s “very ingenious discussion of the general principles.” On the other hand, Ashburton asserted that Webster had presented a “highly coloured picture” of the facts. That allowed Ashburton to present the facts as viewed from the British perspective. He also complained about the difficulty of dealing with the McLeod problem arising out of the federal/state system.[31]
Critically, Ashburton explained that “no slight of the
authority of the United States was ever intended, yet it must be admitted that there was in the hurried execution of this necessary service a violation of territory.” Finally, Ashburton explained that what was “perhaps most to be regretted is that some explanation and apology for this occurrence was not immediately made.” Thus, Ashburton in effect claimed that the Caroline facts were on the side of the British, that the British actions were justified, and that the only fault was in not making this point clear years earlier.
Webster’s reply note was dated August 6, 1842. He was masterful in cherry-picking Ashburton’s note, and selecting for acknowledgment only those elements that would allow the US side to rid the parties of this problem. Webster noted that the president was pleased that the British: (1) admitted the American statement of the principles applicable, including the statement of the self-defense exception; (2) solemnly declared that no slight or disrespect was intended toward the United States; (3) acknowledged that, whether or not justified, there was a “violation of the territory of the United States”; and, finally, (4) “it is now admitted that an explanation or apology for this violation was due at the time.” As a result of this reading of Ashburton’s note, the president was “content” to receive those assurances in a conciliatory spirit, and therefore there will be no further discussion about this subject.
Thus, America’s national honor over the Caroline affair could be said to have been restored. Lost in the euphoria, however, was the fact that the British never actually apologized or accepted responsibility or offered compensation. This outcome reflected brilliant diplomacy.
In June and July, the parties turned again and again to the problematic Creole case. Ashburton wrote to Lord Aberdeen on June 29 that this was his “real difficulty.” He further reported that the “President, as a Virginian, has a strong opinion about Creole case, and is not a little disposed to be obstinate on the subject.”[32] Ashburton was inclined to offer some reparations for the slaves, but he lacked authorization and was sure that London would not agree.[33]
The Creole Affair Page 18