by Ian W. Toll
In his diary, Massachusetts senator John Quincy Adams wrote that his colleagues had no real appetite for war. “I observe among the members great embarrassment, alarm, anxiety, and confusion of mind, but no preparation for any measure of vigor, and an obvious strong disposition to yield all that Great Britain may require, to preserve peace under a thin external show of dignity and bravery.”
UNWILLING TO TAKE THE FATEFUL STEP of asking for a declaration of war, Jefferson fell back on the alternative of trade sanctions, or “peaceable coercion.” The strategy was deeply woven into the fabric of American revolutionary folklore. Boycotts against imported British goods dated back to the 1760s, and the domestic substitutes, such as “homespun” clothing, had long been celebrated as symbols of patriotic self-denial. The power of trade sanctions as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy was a mainstay of Republican ideology. Writing to French foreign minister Talleyrand two years earlier, Ambassador Louis-Marie Turreau had said of Jefferson and Madison’s philosophy: “To conquer without war is the first object of their politics.”
Earlier in the year, Congress had passed a Non-Importation Act, but allowed the measure to lie dormant, awaiting the outcome of Monroe’s negotiations. On December 14, over the objections of merchant interests, Jefferson signed an authorization placing the measure into effect. Most English imported goods—including clothing, silk, pictures, prints, silver, glassware, and various other household items—were banned from America’s domestic market.
Now Jefferson sought to go further. He asked Congress to enact a policy of non-exportation, or embargo. By cutting off exports of American foodstuffs and raw materials, he reasoned, the British West Indian colonies would be starved, portions of the British domestic population would go hungry, and the British merchants who relied on the Americans to carry their goods to overseas markets would be bankrupted. The Senate passed the bill promptly, and after a three-day debate the House followed, by a vote of 82 to 44. On December 22, 1807, Jefferson signed the Embargo Act into law.
Upon taking the oath of office in 1801, Jefferson had promised “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” Seven years later, he staked his presidency on a policy of unprecedented federal intrusion into the livelihoods of citizens living in America’s maritime communities.
The embargo was a sweeping prohibition of all foreign trade. The law decreed that no American ship could depart for any “foreign port or place.” The owners of any coastal trading vessel wishing to transport goods from one American port to another were required to post a bond equivalent to double the value of the ship and her cargo. The initial act was enacted hastily and with little debate, and it was soon obvious that enforcement would require draconian measures. Smuggling and other evasions were rampant. Vessels slipped out of port without clearances. Coastal traders were “accidentally” blown off course and forced to seek refuge in the West Indies or Canada. Some six hundred vessels were permitted to sail on the pretext that they were fetching home American property left abroad. Foreign ships brought goods to market and then illegally carried American cargoes out of port. In Vermont, whose economy depended to a great degree on agricultural exports to Canada, the citizens rose up in a general rebellion. Farmers built huge timber rafts on Lake Champlain, to carry enormous quantities of wheat, pork, beef, and potash. One of these rafts was said to be nearly half a mile long, and on it was erected a timber fortress defended by men with small arms and even cannon. They seemed willing to kill any federal agent who was brave or foolish enough to interfere. Jefferson issued a proclamation declaring the Lake Champlain region to be in a state of general insurrection.
With the longer and warmer days of spring, evasions of the embargo were prevalent all up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Jefferson pushed for increasingly severe enforcement measures. The embargo laws, he said, “have bidden agriculture, commerce, navigation to bow before that object, to be nothing when in competition with that.” Jefferson knew, from the outset, that the American people’s tolerance would not continue indefinitely. The nation had decided to “take the chance of one year by the embargo,” he wrote, and if one year was the term fixed in Jefferson’s mind, he was single-minded in his determination to make that year count.
Much of the enforcement responsibility fell to the Treasury Department, and therefore to Albert Gallatin. Though he had opposed the policy, the loyal Gallatin issued some 584 circulars to customs collectors and revenue officers stationed in the various seaports, generally urging more stringent enforcement and authorizing stronger measures. Most of the larger ships of the navy were inactive during the embargo, but a few vessels were deployed to patrol the American coast. Under Secretary Robert Smith’s orders, Decatur and the Chesapeake got to sea on July 13, 1808, and patrolled the coastline between New York and Passamaquoddy Bay at the northern boundary of modern-day Maine. In early September, off the Maine coast, Chesapeake was outrun by two smugglers, prompting Decatur’s remark that the frigate was an “uncommonly dull” sailor. Gunboats were deployed to lie to in the offing near the most rebellious harbors, with orders to “seize the Boats and vessels of American Citizens that may be found violating or attempting to violate the embargo Laws.”
The American economy was devastated. Exports plunged from $108 million in 1807 to $22 million in 1808. Because the federal government was almost entirely dependent on customs revenues, the fiscal surplus vanished. This, in turn, deprived the nation of the resources needed to mobilize for war, just as Gallatin had warned. Farmers and lumbermen shared in the pain with merchants and seamen, as timber, wheat, tobacco, rice, and cotton piled up to storehouse rafters. Imported and manufactured goods sold at scarcity prices. Wages fell, or were not paid. Debtors were unable to manage their debts, and creditors took them to court or threw them into prison. Gangs of idle sailors loafed on the wharves. An Englishman who visited New York during the height of the embargo described the grim scene:
The port indeed was full of ships, but they were dismantled and laid up; the decks were cleared, their hatches fastened down, and scarcely a sailor was to be found on board. Not a box, bale, cask, barrel, or package was to be seen on the wharves. Many of the counting houses were shut up, or advertised to be let; and the few solitary merchants, clerks, porters, and laborers that were to be seen were walking about with their hands in their pockets. The coffee houses were almost empty; the streets, near the water side, were almost deserted; the grass had begun to grow upon the wharves.
Opposition to the embargo gave new life to the Federalists, who took pleasure in reversing the spelling of the word—“O-grab-me”—and held Jefferson personally responsible for its economic privations. New England communities submitted petitions calling for an end to the embargo. Some of the testimonials employed the language of civil disobedience and revolution, language very much like that enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. An Essex County petition cited “a season of uncommon publick danger and alarm,” and protested that the people had been “deprived of the exercise of invaluable rights.” Armed mobs attacked federal collectors on the streets of Newburyport. Referring to Jefferson’s interests in philosophy and the natural sciences, Federalists lampooned the president as an irresponsible dreamer whose fanciful theories had brought ruin to the American people. William Cullen Bryant, still in his adolescence, published a popular anti-Jefferson verse:
Go, wretch, resign the Presidential chair;
Disclose thy secret measures, foul or fair;
Go, search with curious eyes for horned frogs,
Amid the wild wastes of Louisianan bogs,
Or where the Ohio rolls its turbid stream
Dig for huge bones, thy glory and thy theme.
In August, Gallatin informed Jefferson that evasions could only be prevented if federal agents were invested with “arbitrary powers” th
at were “equally dangerous & odious.” Enforcement would require a policy forbidding a single vessel in any port of the United States to move except with the “special permission of the Executive,” to allow the collectors “the general power of seizing property anywhere,” to remove and confiscate the rudder of any suspicious vessel, and to immunize the collectors against civil suits. The president replied that he was willing to authorize whatever measures were necessary to suppress the “sudden and rank growth of fraud and open opposition by force.” Any vessel owned by any merchant suspected of prior violations could be seized. Entire communities were barred from sending a single vessel to sea. Justifying such a measure against Buckstown, in Maine’s Penobscot Bay, Jefferson said that “a general disobedience to the laws in any place must have weight toward refusing to give them any facilities to evade.” As for Nantucket: “Our opinion here is that that place has been so deeply concerned in smuggling, that if it [suffers food shortages] it is because it has illegally sent away what it ought to retain for its own consumption.”
The question of the day was whether the people of England—and France—had suffered enough economic pain to force their governments to the negotiating table. Here the evidence was conflicting. Napoleon’s response was a mingling of disgust and indifference. He remarked that “the United States have preferred to renounce commerce and the sea rather than recognize their slavery,” and ordered the seizure of American ships on the pretext that they must be disguised English vessels. In Britain, the combined effects of non-importation and embargo, conjoined with Napoleon’s Continental System, had severely distorted several important sectors of the economy. Market prices of many imported goods—timber, silk, cotton, flour, rice, flax, linseed—doubled or tripled. The coffee and sugar of the British West Indian colonies, which had once been carried to Continental markets by American vessels, glutted the storehouses of the Channel ports. British manufacturers predicted (cogently) that New England merchants would pour their capital into a domestic American manufacturing industry that would grow to rival England’s.
But the embargo also benefited a number of powerful European interests, who would not have minded seeing it continued indefinitely. Farmers welcomed the high prices that attended the scarcity of imported foodstuffs. English merchants and shipowners were only too happy to see their American competitors yield the sea lanes, and their voices were strongly represented in Parliament. As one British writer later put it: “The late Jeffersonian Embargo was a Rod which produced no other sensation on the rough hide of John Bull, than the pleasurable one which arises from titillation. The poor Animal was delighted, and not suspecting that this philosophical experiment on his Hide was intended to produce pain, he regretted that weariness had ultimately compelled Mr. Jefferson to cease scratching.”
Jefferson’s special emissary to London, William Pinkney, had been instructed to offer an end to the embargo in exchange for a lifting of the offensive Orders in Council. Foreign Minister Canning’s refusal of this offer, dated September 23, was inscribed in terms of heavy sarcasm: “[I]f it were possible to make any sacrifice for the repeal of the embargo,” he wrote Pinkney, the British government “would gladly have facilitated its removal as a measure of inconvenient restriction upon the American people.”
When this stinging rebuff arrived in Washington in late October, Jefferson bowed to the inevitable. The embargo had been an abject failure. He admitted as much in his 1808 annual message, forwarded to Congress on November 8. Though the president would have liked to report that the European powers had revoked “their unrighteous edicts,” they had not done so. Accordingly, the “candid and liberal experiment” of the embargo had “failed.” As to the question of what should be done next, Jefferson offered no direction; it “will rest with the wisdom of Congress to decide on the course best adapted to such a state of things…[and to] weigh and compare the painful alternatives out of which a choice is to be made.”
THE REPUBLICANS WOULD PAY A PRICE in the 1808 elections. The huge Republican majority in Congress was secure, but the Federalist minority doubled its numbers in the House. In Massachusetts, Federalists came within a whisker of defeating the state’s Republican governor, and won a controlling majority in the state legislature. In the presidential campaign, however, the unpopularity of the embargo was not enough to halt a third consecutive Republican landslide. Jefferson having declined to seek a third term, James Madison was elected fourth president of the United States, defeating Federalist Charles Pinckney by an electoral vote of 122 to 47. (Jefferson’s vice president, George Clinton, polled 6 votes.)
In contrast to those of his predecessor, Madison’s inaugural ceremonies had a distinct military flavor. At dawn on March 4, 1809, the deep baritone reverberations of the big shore guns at the Navy Yard rumbled through the capital. Cavalry militia companies from Georgetown and Washington escorted the president-elect’s carriage from his house on F Street down Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill, arriving at exactly noon. An estimated ten thousand people had gathered, easily the largest crowd ever seen in Washington. Stepping down from his carriage, Madison walked past nine companies of uniformed infantry militia in review. In the House chamber, Margaret Bayard Smith told a correspondent, “the sovereign people would not resign their privileges, and the high and low were promiscuously blended on the floor and in the galleries.”
The National Intelligencer reported that Madison was “dressed in a full suit of cloth of American manufacture, made of the wool of Merinos raised in this country.” As was his habit, he dressed all in black from his boots to his neck. He stood all of five feet five inches tall: a shy, wan, uncharismatic man, prone to hypochondria, with his long hair powdered and securely clubbed. Washington Irving, who attended the ceremony, described him as “but a withered little apple-John.”
Carrying on the tradition begun by Jefferson, the new president delivered his inaugural address in a voice so soft and faint that the audience could barely hear a word of it. Mrs. Smith, seated near the rostrum, said that Madison was “extremely pale and trembled excessively when he first began to speak, but soon gained confidence and spoke audibly,” but John Quincy Adams said definitively that “he could not be heard.” There was not much to hear. The speech was moderate, equivocal, and laden with platitudes. At a moment of crisis, when the nation seemed poised on the brink of war, Madison offered barely a hint of the direction he intended to take.
An inaugural ball was hosted that evening at Long’s Hotel. The National Intelligencer described it as “the most brilliant and crowded ever known in Washington,” and John Quincy Adams did not entirely disagree: “The crowd was excessive, the heat oppressive, and the entertainment bad.” The windows were thrown open to bring in the air, but the room remained stifling, and someone had the idea to smash the upper panes. Mrs. Smith and her husband stood on a bench with their backs against one of the walls, and “from this situation we had a view of the moving mass; for it was nothing else.” Dolley Madison, wearing pearls and a garish turban, was “almost pressed to death, for everyone crowded round her, those behind pressing on those before, and peeping over their shoulders to have a peep of her, and those who were so fortunate as to get near enough to speak to her were happy indeed.” The new first lady, seventeen years younger and two inches taller than the president, was “all dignity, grace, and affability.” By contrast, her husband struck Mrs. Smith as “spiritless and exhausted.”
While he [Madison] was standing by me I said, “I wish with all my heart I had a little bit of seat to offer you.” “I wish so too,” said he, with a most woe-begone face, and looking as if he could scarcely stand. The managers came up to ask him to stay to supper. He assented, and turning to me, [said] “but I would much rather be in bed.”
Jefferson seemed “in high spirits and his countenance beamed with a benevolent joy.” In Smith’s version of their conversation, she told him: “You have now resigned a heavy burden,” and he replied: “Yes indeed, and I am much happier at this moment th
an my friend.”
The embargo had devastated Jefferson’s plantations in Virginia, and he had recently learned that his personal financial situation was dire, with debts amounting to about $20,000. But he wore a brave face. “Never did a prisoner released from his chains feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power,” he wrote du Pont de Nemours on March 2, 1809. “Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering them my supreme delight.” A week after Madison’s inauguration, Jefferson climbed into the saddle for the four-day ride to Monticello. He had traveled the same stretch of road at least fifty times before; this would be his last. During the seventeen years remaining in the balance of his long life, Jefferson would never again set foot in the capital.
OF THE NEW PRESIDENT, French consul Beaujour of Philadelphia remarked: “Mr. Madison is an intelligent man but irresolute, who will always see what ought to be done but will not dare do it…. He is a weak upstart who…will be the slave and not the master of events.” The judgment was vicious, but there was a seed of truth in it. As the leading architect of the Constitution, Madison held distinct views concerning the scope of presidential powers and felt obligated to defer to Congress in major decisions of national policy. He did not possess Jefferson’s status as an icon of the American Revolution, and had never mastered Jefferson’s talent for floating above the factional strife within the Republican camp. The foreign policy crises of 1807–09 had left the Republicans more divided than ever before. A congressional caucus had chosen Madison as the Republican presidential candidate in 1808 (disappointing the other leading contender, James Monroe). Because the Republicans maintained a hammerlock on the electoral college, the decision had, in effect, elevated Madison to the presidency. Having placed him in office, House and Senate leaders were hardly in a mood to be steered by him: Madison had inherited an office with much-diminished powers.
