by Mark Zuehlke
In a series of meetings in rooms steaming under Washington summer heat, Madison urged Jefferson’s cabinet to react cautiously. Leopard, he said, had executed an order issued by Vice-Admiral Berkeley without the British government’s authorization. An immediate war declaration would be a tactical blunder because of the numerous British warships already concentrated in American waters. These ships could easily close the nation’s ports and seize its merchant ships as they returned home. Better to wait until the majority of the American merchant fleet came home in the late summer and early fall.8
Madison’s moderate line met strong opposition from an unexpected corner, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. Being neither native born nor of British stock, the forty-six-year-old Gallatin was an American political rarity. Born to wealthy parents in Geneva, he had emigrated to the United States in 1780, at the age of twenty, with the desire to “drink in a love for independence in the freest country of the universe.”9 More pragmatically, Gallatin also knew there was more opportunity to make his fortune in a new country than in Geneva, where a financial clique controlled the economy.
Gallatin ventured into the still-opening expanses of western Virginia and purchased a thousand acres on the bank of the Ohio River for 100 Virginian pounds. In partnership with a friend, Gallatin also bought warrants for 120,000 acres between the Great and Little Kanawha rivers in Virginia’s Monongalia County. Selling off some of this land left the two men comfortably prosperous. Within five years of arriving in America, Gallatin owned a farm that he named Friendship Hill, on a bluff overlooking the Monongahela River across the boundary from Virginia in western Pennsylvania. Having just attained his age of majority at twenty-five, Gallatin received a large infusion of capital from his family back in Geneva that cemented his position as one of the county’s wealthiest and most educated citizens. He also married, without the permission of her mother, a woman much younger than himself. She died just a few months later.
As a palliative to his grief, Gallatin threw himself into politics. He was elected to the Pennsylvanian state legislature in 1790 and three years later to the United States Senate. In 1793, Gallatin married Hannah Nicholson less than a month before taking his seat in the Senate that December. Unlike his first wife, Hannah was no beauty, but, raised in a family tightly linked to the navy (her father was a retired commodore with close ties to Washington), she possessed a keen political mind. His twenty-seven-year-old bride, Gallatin confided to a friend, was “far less attractive than either her mind or her heart …. Her understanding is good, she is as well informed as most young ladies … and she is a pretty good democrat (and so, by the bye, are all her relations).”10 Two years later, on December 7, 1795, Gallatin was elected to Congress and hooked his wagon to Thomas Jefferson’s rising star. When Jefferson won the presidency in March 1801, he appointed Gallatin federal secretary of the treasury. It was a position Gallatin had held ever since.
In charge of the federal finances, Gallatin clearly understood how ill prepared the nation was for war. As the men behind Jefferson gathered for another sweaty meeting to discuss how the government should react to the Chesapeake incident, Gallatin’s face was sallower than normal. His hair, sharply receding from a high, sloping forehead, was a tangled, dark mass. His long nose thrust like a sword out from between dark eyes. Gallatin was a hardened survivor, a politician who had held the reins of the treasury for six years despite many House and Senate attempts to get rid of this foreigner, this fiscal rationalist who so opposed incurring national debt that many capital projects that would benefit political colleagues and adversaries alike died for lack of federal funding.
In his cold and ever-rational manner, Gallatin argued for a war he acknowledged would be “calamitous.”11 But this was a war forced on America by the Chesapeake incident and the ever-tightening economic screws of the orders-in-council. Gallatin feared economic chaos and depression, but he feared more that turning the other cheek would be a humiliation the nation would never rise above because its moral supremacy in relation to the corruption of Europe would be forever lost. America’s essence required it to stand up for independence and act against violations of the rights of man. When Leopard tore into Chesapeake with its broadsides, killing three sailors and maiming many others, Gallatin considered a line had been crossed and war was the ultimate and only redress available to the aggrieved nation.
“We will be poorer, both as a nation and as a government, our debt and taxes will increase, and our progress in every respect be interrupted. But all those evils are … not to be put in competition with the independence and honor of the nation; they are, moreover, temporary, and very few years of peace will obliterate their effects. Nor do I know whether the awakening of nobler feelings and habits than avarice and luxury might not be necessary to prevent our degenerating, like the Hollanders, into a nation of mere calculators.”12
Gallatin not only advocated war but he had much considered the means by which it could be waged. America’s navy, severely reduced by his own conservative national fiscal policies, could not best the Royal Navy. From a treasury point of view, Gallatin held that “it would be an economical measure for every naval nation to burn their navy at the end of a war and to build a new one when again at war, if it was not that time was necessary to build ships of war.”13 The best the navy could do was to huddle inside the safety of the few well-fortified American ports or act individually as privateers by preying on helpless British merchantmen. Defending America’s coastline would be a daunting challenge, Gallatin concluded, but not insurmountable if preparations began immediately.
Gallatin recognized that a purely defensive war could not be fought effectively. The initiative always lay with the enemy to choose where and when to fight. He therefore proposed a multi-pronged invasion, conducted in stages over several months, of British North America and the seizure of New Providence and Bermuda by amphibious assault. Only Newfoundland, too far away and too heavily garrisoned, was to be left alone. Upper Canada, Lower Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, all were to be invaded in turn. Halifax, with its great port, was the most difficult objective to capture but also the most vital. So “long as the British hold Halifax they will be able, by the superiority of their naval force, to blockade, during the greater part of the year, all our principal seaports…. If we take it, the difficulty to refit and obtain refreshments will greatly diminish that evil, and enable us to draw some advantage from our small navy on our own coast.” Taking Upper Canada was also critical “in order to cover our northern frontier and to ruin the British fur-trade.”
Gallatin placed the cost of the proposed operation at about $18 million and requiring deployment of around 30,000 men. The war could be financed by drawing down the present surplus by $8 million, dedicating $2.5 million in taxes and duties, selling $500,000 of federal land, and borrowing $7 million.14 Gallatin sat and awaited the response of the rest of the executive.
Madison was aghast and Jefferson in no mood to act so intemperately. No, president and secretary of state argued, diplomacy and economic retribution would be the first response. War was unthinkable before those avenues of winning redress were exhausted. Reluctantly Gallatin acceded to Jefferson and Madison’s arguments. He knew both men well and was first and foremost a loyal servant of the president. But he doubted the efficacy of Jefferson’s proposed course.
On July 2, Jefferson issued a written proclamation denying the Royal Navy access to American ports. The president hoped this measure would satisfy public calls for action while ensuring there would be no further attacks on British ships and crew by mobs or militia. Good, traditional Republicans, Jefferson and Madison were also anxious that the administration not ignite hostilities between Great Britain and America. Authority to make war lay with Congress, Jefferson argued, and the president and his executive “should do no act committing them to war, when it is very probable that they may prefer a non-intercourse to war.”15
Madison sent a dispatch on July 6 to James Monroe, then the
U.S. minister in London, demanding that the British government formally disavow the attack on Chesapeake and return the four seamen. That the entire incident had been the misguided inspiration of one man was increasingly clear, and there was every reason to believe that the British would agree to this demand, but Jefferson and Madison were not content to limit discussions to the incident that had brought the nation to the brink of war. Jefferson, Madison later explained, had decided to convert “a particular incident into an occasion for removing another and more extensive source of danger to the harmony of the two countries.”16Monroe was to wrest from the British a far greater concession than an admission that America’s national sovereignty had been violated by the attack. “As a security for the future,” Madison wrote, “an entire abolition of impressment from vessels under the flag of the United States … is also to make an indispensable part of the satisfaction.”17
Gallatin realized that Monroe was being sent on a fool’s errand. “Great Britain will not, I am confident, give either satisfaction or security,” he commented.18 Jefferson, too, doubted the wisdom of the ultimatum. He confided to a friend: “Although we demand of England what is merely of right, reparation for the past, security for the future, yet as their pride will possibly, nay probably, prevent their yielding them to the extent we shall require.”19 The only recourse when the British refused his demands would be war. More administration meetings followed through July in rooms so scorching hot that clarity of thought was almost impossible. Gallatin’s plans to attack Canada were reviewed in detail and his plans for funding the war discussed.
All this time, nearly three weeks, the dispatch to Monroe rested on Madison’s desk as if there was no urgency in sending it. Finally Madison passed it to a courier, who boarded the USS Revenge on July 28 for the cross-Atlantic journey. Four days later, with nothing decided about how to, when to, or even whether to declare war if the demands were not met, Jefferson fled the steam bath of the capital for his beloved plantation, Monticello. Decisions about how to prepare for war could, it seemed, be left to the cooler days of fall.
Three days before Revenge sailed, the British secretary for foreign affairs, George Canning, had told Monroe the basic facts of the Leopard and Chesapeake incident. Shocked by the affair, Canning expressed regret and assured the American minister that if British officers were found in the wrong, his government would offer a “most prompt and effectual reparation.” Thinking Canning’s comments a sign of weakness, Monroe demanded that Britain admit the incident had been an attempt “to assert and enforce the unfounded and most unjustifiable pretension to search for deserters.” The British government must, he said, immediately renounce the principle that the Royal Navy had used to justify the search and agree to punish the officers responsible.20
Although not yet having received Madison’s instructions to tie the Chesapeake incident inextricably to the issue of impressment, Monroe had seized on precisely the same strategy. Irritated by Monroe’s strident language, Canning snapped back that Great Britain would make reparations only when all the facts were known. Somewhat more calmly he assured the American that His Majesty’s government did not assume any right to search ships of war for deserters. If an investigation revealed that this had in fact taken place, Great Britain would disavow the act and discipline the responsible officers.
Word of Jefferson’s proclamation barring British ships from American ports reached Britain well before Revenge brought Monroe his instructions. A powerful lobby of ship owners, Royal Navy officers, East and West India Company merchants, and leading politicians clamoured for immediate declaration of war on the United States. The president’s actions, Canning advised Monroe, “without requiring or waiting for any explanation” were unwarranted and dangerous.21
There matters lay until Monroe, now with Madison’s terms in hand, sent Canning a note on September 7. America demanded by way of reparations that Britain restore the seamen taken, punish the officer who ordered the attack, abandon all impressment from merchant vessels, and send a special mission to Washington to announce its compliance with these demands. Knowing Britain would not readily accept tying impressment to the Chesapeake incident, Monroe argued that whether the act was carried out on a ship of war or a merchant ship was irrelevant. The simple fact was that impressment, in either case, was a violation of the individual rights of seamen and that a citizen of America was justly entitled to his country’s protection from it.22
Canning fired back that the Chesapeake incident and the matter of impressment from merchant vessels were “wholly unconnected.” Impressment was a right exercised by Great Britain since it first built a navy and the practice was legally legitimized. Monroe offered the faint compromise that he was willing to discuss impressment informally while settling the Chesapeake matter formally. Canning declined, saying that there would be no discussions of impressment until after the Chesapeake issue was settled. With Canning refusing to tie the two matters together and Monroe equally adamant that they could not be separated, the negotiations came to an abrupt end.23
Fitful attempts were made by both the American and British governments to get negotiations going again in either London or Washington, but all met the same result. Each side remained adamant about the terms and so neither budged. In America, the initial fervour for war had begun to decline by the fall of 1807. Although the slight that Americans declared had been inflicted upon their national honour by Leopard’s attack on Chesapeake remained a festering sore, nobody but the most diehard pro-war advocates, like Henry Clay, were ready to resort to violence by way of cure.
As the orders-in-council and decrees by Napoleon made it ever more difficult for American merchantmen and traders to operate freely wherever they chose, Jefferson moved from barring British ships access to U.S. ports to a full-scale embargo. This in turn was weakened by the House and the Senate into a Non-intercourse Act that was only fitfully and ineffectually applied. By 1810, it was clear that these measures had failed and neither the French nor the British, locked as they were in a death struggle, were about to accommodate America’s desire to trade with each and thus profit from its neutrality.
That the orders-in-council and the Chesapeake affair seemed insufficient cause to justify war posed a major hurdle to the loose coalition of politicians that constituted the pro-war lobby. Still, by the winter of 1810, when Henry Clay rode into Washington to assume his seat in the Senate, this group remained undaunted. If maritime issues were insufficient to rally public outcry and force the government’s hand, then additional reasons must be found. And for Clay and the other westerners among their number there was a need to look no further than the wilderness beyond their own doorsteps. In those dense woods lurked Indians, who, rumour had it, were being incited by British agents operating out of Upper Canada to rise up and slaughter American settlers.
FOUR
Imperious Necessities
1794–1795
Independence had freed America to concentrate on expanding its frontiers, and one result was a long, brutal struggle between whites and Indians over supremacy in the Ohio River country. Every time the frontier settlers pushed into fresh Indian territory they met stiff resistance, particularly from the Shawnee, who considered this their native land. The fighting was vicious, with atrocities ruthlessly committed by each side. Warriors and soldiers both took scalps, butchered women and children, burned settlements down upon their inhabitants, and hunted down and killed any enemy that happened across their path. This was war without quarter, each side bent upon purging the land of the other.
The pioneers leading the western expansion had an insatiable thirst for new territory. They were part of “an agricultural society without skill or resources,” noted one observer, who “committed all those sins which characterize a wasteful and ignorant husbandry.” Working with crude tools and even less agricultural knowledge, they cleared only the land in their parcel essential to growing food to meet personal needs or to trade with neighbours. The rest was left in timber t
hrough which farm animals roamed in search of forage. Not realizing that soil required rebuilding with compost or manure, these pioneers, whom contemporary American folklore hailed as the advance guard bringing civilization to the wilderness, soon exhausted their fields. Faced with sudden crop failures and looming starvation, they could think of no other option but to move farther west, where virgin country could be had. This explained, the same observer reflected, “why the American frontier settler was on the move continually. It was not his fear of a too close contact with the comforts and restraints of a civilized society that stirred him into a ceaseless activity, nor merely the chance of selling out at a profit to the coming wave of settlers; it was his wasting land that drove him on. Hunger was the goad …. He could succeed only with a virgin soil.”1
A second wave of far different pioneers followed close on the heels of these frontier settlers. As often as not, these were European immigrants with farming experience in their old countries, who understood the benefits of crop rotation and the need for adequate holdings. From the land speculators, who had happily bought up the depleted plots abandoned by the first settlers, these new farmers assembled parcels from what previously constituted a half-dozen or more crude homesteads. They planted orchards, vegetables, hemp, and other crops that could yield commercial value. And they set about building a society that resembled that to be found in the eastern United States. Roads, even though often rough, connected farms and the small villages and towns that cropped up to provide the stores, banks, offices for doctors and lawyers, churches, courthouses, and other services necessary to the conduct of a relatively civilized agrarian society.