Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  With both impressments of sailors and seizures of American ships increasing during the summer of 1805, Jefferson stopped talking of an alliance with Britain, and the American rapprochement with the former mother country that had begun with Jay’s Treaty a decade earlier now came to an end. In his warlike message to Congress in December 1805 Jefferson called for the fortification of seaport towns, a substantial increase in the number of gunboats, the construction of six seventy-four-gun ships of the line, the creation of a naval militia reserve, and reorganization of the militia. Although he considered Britain’s violation of neutral rights a greater “enormity” than Spanish intransigence over the Louisiana borders, he lumped them together as “injuries” that were “of a nature to be met by force only.” If there were to be a war, he wanted it somehow to result in the acquisition of the Floridas.57

  In response to the British injuries Congress considered cutting off all trade with the former mother country. Finally, however, in the spring of 1806 it passed a much milder Non-Importation Act, while rejecting the proposal to build the six ships of the line. Although the Non-Importation Act ignored the most important imports from Britain and prohibited only those British imports that Americans themselves could produce, the Republicans in Congress, fearful not only of spending money but of creating a military despotism, much preferred some sort of non-importation to building expensive ships. Furthermore, this bland measure was to be suspended until November 1806, provoking John Randolph’s sneering (and prophetic) comment that it was “a milk and water bill, a dose of chicken broth to be taken nine months hence . . . too contemptible to be the object of consideration or to excite the feelings of the pettiest state in Europe.”58

  This Non-Importation Act and its suspension for nine months were designed to put pressure on the British and to give time for a special commission to Britain, composed of America’s minister in London, James Monroe, and a Baltimore lawyer and former Federalist, William Pinkney, to seek a redress of America’s grievances concerning impressment and neutral rights. Because the British violations of neutral rights and seizures of American ships resembled the situation that existed prior to the negotiation of the Jay Treaty, many thought that Monroe’s and Pinkney’s main mission was to negotiate a replacement for that treaty, which had expired in 1803.

  Although American trade had flourished under the Jay Treaty, Jefferson and the Republicans had never liked the treaty, which had barred the United States from passing retaliatory commercial legislation. Jefferson called it “a millstone around our necks,” and he had rejected British proposals to renew its commercial clauses when they had expired. If he had had his way, Monroe and Pinkney would have been authorized to deal with issues of neutral rights only, and not with issues of commerce. Jefferson, like many other Republicans, did not want to surrender the country’s right to impose commercial sanctions against Great Britain, which it had yielded under the Jay Treaty. But pressure from Congress forced Jefferson to allow the Monroe-Pinkney mission to negotiate a whole host of issues between the two nations, including those concerning Anglo-American trade.59

  Given Jefferson’s feelings about the use of economic sanctions, the outlook for the treaty that Monroe and Pinkney sent back to the United States early in 1807 was not good. Since the treaty itself mentioned nothing about impressment on the high seas, Jefferson found it unacceptable and refused to send it to the Senate. “To tell you the truth,” he supposedly said to a friend, “I do not wish any treaty with Great Britain.” But since the British went out of their way to conciliate the Americans on the issue of impressment, informally promising to observe “the greatest caution” in impressing their sailors on American ships and to offer “immediate and promptredress” to any American mistakenly impressed, Jefferson felt pressured to find other objections to the treaty.60 What he particularly wanted to preserve was the right of the United States to retaliate commercially against Great Britain, the very thing the treaty was designed to avoid. “We will never tie our hands by treaty,” he declared, “from the right of passing a non-importation or non-intercourse act, to make it in her interest to become just.”61 Although the commercial clauses gave Americans more advantages than they had had under the Jay Treaty, the unwillingness of Jefferson and many other Republicans to give up the weapon of commercial warfare probably doomed any treaty from the start.

  With Napoleon’s hopes of invading England shattered by Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in October 1805, the recently crowned French emperor turned to the weapon many Americans had been resorting to on and off for decades—economic sanctions against Great Britain. Napoleon thus launched what came to be called the Continental System. In a series of decrees, beginning with the Berlin Decree in November 1806, issued five weeks after he had defeated the Prussians at Jena and Auerstädt and gained control of the ports on the North and Baltic seas, Napoleon believed he was in a position to stifle the British economy. He forbade all trade with the British Isles, ordered the confiscation of all goods coming from England or its colonies even when owned by neutrals, and made liable to seizure not only every British ship but any ship that had landed in England or its colonies. The British responded with a series of orders-in-council that proclaimed a blockade of all ports from which British goods were excluded and required neutral ships that wished to trade with these ports to stop in England and pay transit duties first. In December 1807 Napoleon answered with his Milan Decree, declaring that any neutral ship submitting to British trade regulations or even allowing a British search party to board was liable to seizure.

  The net effect of all these regulations by the warring parties was to render all neutral commerce illegal and liable to seizure by one power or the other. Although by 1807 the French were seizing American ships in European ports, Britain’s greater ability to capture Americans vessels (in 1805 and 1806 it was plundering about one of every eight American ships that put to sea) and its humiliating practice of impressment made Britain appear the greater culprit in American eyes. Indeed, it was difficult for many Republicans to think of France as the same kind of enemy as Great Britain.62

  Fortunately for American trade, the economic sanctions imposed by both empires were never intended to starve their opponents into submission. Instead, they were exaggerated applications of traditional mercantilist principles designed to wreck each belligerent’s commerce and to drain each other’s specie. The British, for example, were happy to carry on trade with Napoleon as long as it was British goods in British ships. As the British prime minister declared, “The object of the Orders was not to destroy the trade of the Continent, but to force the Continent to trade with us.”63 Consequently, there were violations and loopholes everywhere, and trade continued to flourish. Still, the British and French trade restrictions did have some cost. Between 1803 and 1812 Britain and France and their allies seized nearly fifteen hundred American ships, with Britain taking 917 to France’s 558.64

  THESE SEIZURES BY THE BELLIGERENTS, however, did not do as much damage to American commerce in this period as the United States eventually did to itself. In a desperate attempt to break the stranglehold that Britain and France had on American trade, the United States launched what Jefferson called a “candid and liberal experiment” in “peaceful coercion”—an embargo that forbade all Americans from sending any of their ships and goods abroad.65 Perhaps never in history has a trading nation of America’s size engaged in such an act of self-immolation with so little reward. Not only did this experiment fail to stop the belligerents’ abuses of America’s neutral rights, but the embargo ended up seriously injuring the American economy and all but destroying the Jeffersonian principle of limited government and states’ rights.

  Although the origins of this experiment in economic sanctions went back to the use of economic sanctions against the British in the 1760s and 1770s, the immediate precipitant of the embargo was the Leopard-Chesapeake affair.

  On June 22, 1807, the American frigate USS Chesapeake sailed from Norfolk en route to the Me
diterranean as part of a squadron sent to deal with the Barbary pirates. Not far out from Chesapeake Bay the fifty-gun HMS Leopard ordered the Chesapeake to allow a boarding party to search for British deserters. When the Chesapeake refused, the Leopard fired on the American warship, killing three American seamen, wounding eighteen others, and forcing it to lower its colors. The British boarded the American frigate and impressed four seamen as British deserters, only one of whom was actually a British subject.

  Most Americans were outraged by this attack on an American warship. “This country,” President Jefferson observed, “has never been in such a state of excitement since the battle of Lexington.”66 The president looked for some honorable way of redressing the attack peacefully but made some preparations for war in case it came. He issued a proclamation barring all British warships from American ports unless the ships were on diplomatic missions or in distress. He recalled all of America’s ships from abroad, beefed up the country’s harbor defenses, recommended building more gunboats, secretly made plans for the invasion of Canada, requested the state governors to mobilize one hundred thousand militiamen, and convened a special session of Congress for October 1807. He declared the British ships to be “enemies,” who should be treated as such. By contrast, the French ships were “friends,” who should be extended every courtesy.67

  Still, the president was anxious to avoid war with Britain and worried, with good reason, that his proclamation would not satisfy the patriotic ardor of his fellow citizens. He knew only too well that the United States was not ready for a war with Britain in 1807, but if a war had to come, he preferred it to be directed against England’s newly found and incongruous ally, Spain. In August 1807 he told Madison “our southern defensive force can take the Floridas, volunteers for a Mexican army will flock to our standard, and rich pabulum will be offered to our privateers in the plunder of their commerce and coasts. Perhaps Cuba would add itself to our confederation.”68

  The British government did not want war either. Since the British government had never clearly claimed the right to impress from neutral warships, they disavowed the attack on the Chesapeake and recalled the naval commander who ordered it—though he was given another command. The British government offered to pay reparations and to return three of the four deserters, who were Americans; the fourth, who was a British subject, was summarily hanged, thus allowing the British government, Madison complained, to avoid “the humiliation of restoring a British subject” to America along with the other three seamen.69

  Yet Jefferson wanted the British to disavow both the attack on the Chesapeake and the policy of impressment in general, and he thus considered the British response to be “unfriendly, proud, and harsh” and full of quibbles.70 Because he remained deeply suspicious of British intentions, he could not help but welcome Napoleon’s smashing victories over the armies of the British-led coalition that left the French emperor in complete control of the Continent. The President said in August 1807 that he had never expected to be “wishing success to Buonaparte,” whose assumption of an imperial crown had ended once and for all the fiction that France was still a republic. But the English were as “tyrannical at sea as he is on land, and that tyranny bearing on us in every point of either honor or interest, I say, ‘down with England.’ “The warnings by the British-loving Federalists of what Napoleon might do to Americans were about “a future hypothetical” evil; we were now, he said, experiencing at the hands of the English “a certain present evil.”71

  That evil was revealed in a number of new British actions. These included instigating Indian threats in the Northwest, the brutal seizure of the neutral Danish fleet in Copenhagen (which seemed to make every neutral navy vulnerable to British confiscation), and the tightening up of the policy of impressment by allowing for impressments on neutral warships and by denying the validity of naturalization papers. The British duties now required on American goods bound for Europe seemed especially humiliating; they could only remind Americans of the former colonial regulations that they thought they had thrown off with the Declaration of Independence. William Cobbett, the irascible ex-Federalist journalist who had returned to England to become a vitriolic critic of the United States, summed up the hard-line position the British government was now taking: “Our power upon the waves enable us to dictate the terms, upon which ships of all nations shall navigate. . . . Not a sail should be hoisted, except by stealth, without paying a tribute.”72

  With the international situation worsening, few Republicans wanted outright war, but at the same time they wanted to do something to deal with the hostility of the monarchical Old World toward the neutral American Republic. The Republicans were increasingly anxious that not only was America’s national independence at stake but their republican desire for a universal peace and their aversion to war’s horrors and expenses were creating a false impression among the European powers—an impression, as Jefferson put it, that “our government is entirely in Quaker principles, and will turn the left cheek when the right has been smitten.” This impression, he said in 1806, “must be corrected when just occasion arises, or we shall become the plunder of all nations.”73

  With the Non-Importation Act of 1806 in effect after a long delay, the president on December 18, 1807, announced a new policy, which eventually became an expanded version of economic retaliation—perhaps, with the exception of Prohibition, the greatest example in American history of ideology brought to bear on a matter of public policy.

  In his brief message to Congress Jefferson recommended an embargo to protect the “essential resources” of “our merchandise, our vessels and our seamen,” which were threatened by “great and increasing danger . . . on the high seas and elsewhere from the belligerent powers of Europe.”74 Although Jefferson had not fully explained to the Congress why the embargo was necessary, Congress acted immediately and in four days at the end of December 1807 passed the Embargo Act, which prohibited the departure of all American ships in international trade. Although the act did not prohibit foreign ships, including British ships, from bringing imports to America, it forbade these foreign ships from taking on American exports, thus forcing them to sail away in ballast.

  It was a very strange act, as self-contradictory as the Republican party itself. Although American thinking about the British vulnerability to economic sanctions had always emphasized the British need to sell their manufactured luxuries abroad, the embargo actually deprived the British of America’s exports, which was much less harmful to the British economy than the loss of markets for their manufactured goods would have been. Of course, the embargo was accompanied by the implementation of the long-suspended Non-Importation Act, but this act only restricted some British imports, not all; exempt from prohibition were such items as Jamaican rum, coarse woolens, salt, and Birmingham hardware.75 Throughout the life of the embargo Americans continued to import many British goods, which totaled at least half the volume of those they had imported in 1807 before the Republicans had invoked the NonImportation Act. Although the Republicans never fully explained America’s continued importation of British goods (carried on British ships, no less), Gallatin and others apparently felt that the federal government was so dependent on customs duties on its imports that cutting off all imports would have bankrupted it.

  Barring American ships and goods from all overseas trade was a drastic act, but curiously neither Jefferson nor Republicans in the Congress made much of an effort to justify it to the country. This extraordinary measure went through Congress rapidly and with little debate. As Jefferson said, the choices were limited: it was either “war, Embargo, or nothing,” and war and nothing were not really acceptable alternatives.76 Certainly, the Republican supporters of the bill, knowing they had the votes, made little effort to defend the embargo; instead they kept calling for the question. The final vote in the House was eighty-two to forty-four. Jefferson said that half the opposition consisted of Federalists, the other half a mixture of the followers of the eccentric John Rand
olph, who thought the embargo was dictated by Napoleon and aimed at only Britain, and of “republicans happening to take up mistaken views of the subject.”77

  Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin in the cabinet may not have had a mistaken view of the embargo, but he certainly had doubts about it. Because he sensed the possible consequences of the embargo—“privations, sufferings, revenue, effect on the enemy, politics at home, &c.”—he wanted it to be temporary and designed only to recall America’s ships and get them safely into port; indeed, if the embargo were to be permanent, he preferred going to war. Perhaps because of his sophisticated understanding of how economies worked, an understanding not shared by Jefferson or Madison, he realized that momentous actions by governments often had unanticipated consequences. He warned Jefferson that “governmental prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated; and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should hazard to regulate the concerns of individuals as if he could do it better than themselves.”78 This was good Republican advice, but Jefferson ignored it.

  It is not clear that Jefferson and Madison, who were the architects of the embargo, had thought through its implications. Although Madison was the more enthusiastic supporter of the measure, Jefferson certainly shared the Republican faith that almost anything was preferable to war, especially if that war had to be fought against a vigorous and powerful enemy and not a feeble Spain or a petty Barbary rogue-state. “As we cannot meet the British with an equality of physical force,” as Jefferson later put it, “we must supply it by other devices”—whether those devices were Robert Fulton’s submarine torpedoes or the withholding of America’s exports.79 With the belligerents’ orders and decrees putting America’s neutral commerce in an impossible situation, he thought that the embargo might buy time for something to be worked out diplomatically.