by Taylor, Alan
The British countered that as the world’s dominant naval power, they set and enforced international law on the high seas. Embroiled in a massive war against France, the British demanded greater understanding and restraint from the Americans. Claiming to defend the world, including the United States, against conquest by Napoléon, the British urged the Americans to repatriate British sailors and tolerate the occasional impressment of the American-born.26
Given the weakness of the American navy, Britons marveled at the high pretensions of American diplomacy. To save money, the Jefferson administration had reduced the navy to about a dozen oceanic warships, compared to more than 500 in the powerful Royal Navy. For coastal defense, the Republicans relied on cheap and paltry gunboats that could not venture far from shore. Most Republicans balked at building a stronger navy of bigger ships, for fear that they could never compete with the British and would only invite a preemptive strike, like that recently inflicted on neutral Denmark by the Royal Navy. Consequently, the Americans could only seethe as British warships hovered off the major seaports to board and inspect every passing vessel to impress sailors.27
To sustain their coastal patrols, however, the British warships needed provisions and water bought from the American ports. When the warships sent boats into American seaports to make the purchases, many of the seamen ran away, and mobs of sailors and laborers protected them from retrieval by their officers. The seaport magistrates did little or nothing, for they either applauded the desertions or feared the mobs. Such incidents confirmed the British prejudice against the American republic as anarchic.28
When British officers and diplomats protested, Secretary of State Madison invited the British to forsake impressment at sea in return for an American promise to retrieve naval deserters. In effect, American officials winked at the desertions and mobs as the means to pressure the British. That tacit collusion enraged the British as the consummate mix of republican weakness and perfidy. A British diplomat complained, “I came to treat with a regular government, and have to deal [instead] with a mob and mob leaders.”29
To recoup their losses from desertion, British naval officers impressed more sailors from the ships leaving or entering American ports. A British diplomat conceded that it was “highly grating to the Feelings of an independent Nation to perceive that their whole Coast is watched as closely as if it was blockaded, and every Ship coming in or going out of their Harbours examined rigorously in Sight of the Shore by British Squadrons stationed within their Waters.” In a vicious cycle, Americans enticed deserters, while Britons impressed more Americans, fueling a mutual and deepening animus on British warships and in American seaports. In June 1807, that cycle culminated in the attack by the Leopard on the Chesapeake.30
“Panack”
On June 23, 1807, the return of the battered Chesapeake to Norfolk sparked “a General Panack,” in the words of one resident. The inhabitants assumed that the British would next attack American seaports, beginning with Norfolk. Infuriated by the sight of dead and bloodied sailors, the defiant citizens convened a mass meeting that resolved to deny communication and supplies to any British warships. Hundreds of angry men promptly surrounded the Norfolk home of the British consul, John Hamilton, to demand the surrender of a visiting naval lieutenant as “an Atonement for the Blood shed on board the Chesapeake.” Only the intervention of American naval officers and the Norfolk magistrates saved the visitor from the lynch mob and his schooner from burning. In nearby Hampton, another mob smashed 200 water casks intended for the British frigates in the nearby bay.31
It was all so republican for mobs and a mass meeting of local citizens to act without waiting for direction from their governor or president. Indeed, the state and national leaders had to scramble to catch up. Virginia’s governor, William H. Cabell, called out 700 militiamen to guard Norfolk and nearby Princess Anne County, and he appointed Brigadier General Thomas Mathews to command them. President Jefferson committed the national government to pay for their support, and he issued a proclamation barring supplies to, and contact with, the British warships.32
At the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, Captain John Erskine Douglas commanded two Royal Navy frigates and two larger “ships of the line.” The Americans could counter with only the battered Chesapeake and four petty gunboats. Confident in his superior firepower, Douglas wrote a menacing letter to Norfolk’s mayor, demanding the immediate restoration of supplies and communication with the British consul. Douglas threatened to blockade Norfolk’s shipping until the mayor submitted to the ultimatum. In mock honor of the captain, the Virginians called the crisis “the Douglas war.”33
On July 4, primed with patriotic speeches and alcoholic toasts, Mayor Richard E. Lee responded to Douglas with republican bombast: “The day on which this answer is written ought of itself to suffice to prove to the subjects of your sovereign that the American people are not to be intimidated by menace. . . . We are prepared for the worst which you may attempt.” But Lee knew better, for on the same day he privately warned Governor Cabell, “The militia of this section of the Country are almost defenceless.” The men lacked arms, training, discipline, and able officers. Jefferson’s military advisor in Norfolk, William Tatham, reported, “I wish to God some old officer was sent among us who would introduce order, economy, & discipline, in lieu of shew, puffs, & good eating & drinking. If feasts, popular toasts, fine speeches, patriotic professions, & self important airs were weapons . . . we should drive all our Enemies into the red sea!” After a parlay with Douglas on his flagship, Lee left in a huff, feeling insulted by the British officers, who tended “to cast sarcasms, and to treat with derision and contempt the feelings of the American people and the measures which had been adopted.” The officers mocked the combination of republican boasting with military weakness.34
The crisis deepened as Douglas landed sailors to seek supplies and draw water from isolated shores. On July 16 in Princess Anne County, a militia patrol captured two British midshipmen and three sailors. Another patrol fired on a second landing party, which rowed away, leaving behind water casks and muskets.35
While five Britons entered captivity in Virginia, five slaves from Princess Anne County sought freedom by stealing a canoe and a fishing boat to escape to HMS Triumph. Eager for information and to tweak the Virginians, the naval officers welcomed the refugees. An alarmed General Mathews warned Governor Cabell that the British welcome had “made a deep impression on the minds of our people, and will no doubt increase their resentment.” In addition to fearing the mass escape of more slaves, the Virginians dreaded their potential return as armed emissaries of bloody revolt.36
In mid-July, Douglas sailed away, transferring command to Captain Thomas M. Hardy, who saw the runaways as a chance to intimidate the Virginians. Hardy opened a back channel to the British consul in Norfolk with the covert help of Henry Jackson, “a Black Pilot, whose whole conduct toward us since the 22nd June has been Exemplary.” A free black, Jackson carried to Hamilton a letter from Hardy conveying his plan to awe the Virginians into cooperation:
Now, Sir, I feel it my duty to point out the risk that the Inhabitants of Virginia may incur by totally excluding His Majesty’s Squadron from their Shores, and from Supplies of every description. This Morning . . . a small boat was observed not far from the Triumph apparently in want of assistance. I sent a Boat immediately to her relief and found in her three black Men, who call themselves free . . . & they told me that many hundreds of the same description of persons were ready to come on board, provided boats for that purpose could be procured, and one [man], who seems very intelligent, told me that more than two thousands of the people of Colour would join if I would only land the Soldiers.
Hardy wanted Hamilton to pass on this threat of mass flight and slave revolt to intimidate the Virginians. Although he had no intention of provoking bloodshed, Hardy hoped to bluff the Virginians into reopening his communications with, and supplies from, their shores. He sought to deploy the “internal enemy” i
n the minds, rather than against the bodies, of the Virginians.37
In reply, Hamilton warned that Hardy was playing with fire: “nothing would, at this Juncture, have a more general tendency to increase the popular irritation in this quarter than the Idea of any facility being offered to the Escape of the Negroes, at all Seasons with the inhabitants of the Sea Coast an object of peculiar Jealousy and anxious apprehension.” Far from intimidating the inhabitants, Hardy’s threats would enrage them into overt hostilities, so Hamilton urged the captain to receive no more runaways and return the five already on board his ship.38
Jefferson also wanted to reduce tensions, so he ordered the release of the five captured British sailors, who came back to their warship on August 1. Hardy then forced his five runaways to return to their masters. In 1807 the British were not yet prepared to liberate American slaves. By initially welcoming the five runaways, however, the Royal Navy had planted a seed of alarm in the minds of Virginians, who expected the worst in the event of a future war. Captain Robert Barraud Taylor of Norfolk brought the slaves from Hardy’s ship back ashore to their masters. Five years later, on the eve of war with the empire, he warned Virginia’s governor that “Sir Thomas Hardy [had] received a communication from the slaves that they were ready to unite with the British so soon as they hoisted their war flag.”39
During the Chesapeake crisis, British sailors deserted from their warships, while runaway slaves fled to those vessels in search of freedom. A land of liberty for white men, the American republic sustained slavery for African Americans, who continued to hope for a liberator king. Depending on race, one person’s floating prison was another’s portal to freedom.
Declaration
Nationwide, during June and July 1807, the attack on the Chesapeake outraged Federalists as well as Republicans. Protest meetings adopted angry resolutions demanding preparations for war, while mobs raged in the seaport streets, smashing British boats and the windows where British diplomats resided. In Philadelphia, the British consul also complained that a musical mob sang “Indecent Tunes . . . before my House late at Night.”40
But the republic was better prepared for singing than fighting because the Republicans had curtailed the nation’s military in order to cut costs and diminish taxes. Reduced to a mere 3,287 men, the army struggled to patrol a frontier of 10,000 miles and a coastline at least twice that long, extending from Louisiana, on the Gulf Coast, to Maine, on the Bay of Fundy. For want of warships, soldiers, fortifications, and cannon, the seaports were exposed to British naval attack. Jefferson, however, had to do something in light of the crisis, so he ordered the gunboats repaired, and he directed the state governors to prepare 100,000 militiamen for federal service. A reserve of militia amateurs cost far less than a real army of professional soldiers on active duty. By threatening British Canada with invasion by a militia army, Jefferson hoped to pressure the empire, but his Secretary of the Treasury conceded that the men could come only from the northern states because “none can be spared from the negro country.” The southern militiamen had to stay home to guard against a slave revolt. The Republicans planned a war to liberate Canada while defending slavery in America.41
Neither the British nor the American government wanted war. Jefferson dreaded that the immense costs would swell the national debt and require increased taxes, which would sap his popularity. And the British preferred to concentrate on their pressing struggle against Napoléon. To limit the controversy with the republic, Britain’s rulers agreed to pay reparations, return the three surviving American sailors taken from the Chesapeake, and renounce searches of neutral warships. The British, however, refused to relinquish their power to stop and inspect neutral merchant ships to impress sailors and enforce a blockade on French-dominated Europe.42
Unable and unwilling to declare overt war, the Republicans settled for waging an economic war. Factory workers in Britain and planters in the West Indies would starve, Jefferson reasoned, if the Americans stopped exporting their wheat, flour, fish, pork, and cattle. In December 1807 he proposed, and Congress adopted, an embargo on all maritime commerce; no American ships could leave port, and no foreign ships could export any American produce. The Federalists denounced the embargo as self-destructive and for a bad cause: to retain British subjects on American ships.43
The embargo failed because Jefferson overestimated the British dependence on American imports and underestimated the importance of exports to the American economy. In Latin America, the British found alternative sources of food and a new market for their manufactures. And British merchants could hardly believe their good fortune: that the foolish Americans had abandoned maritime commerce. Meanwhile, the American seaport economy withered, idling thousands of sailors, laborers, and artisans. Unable to export their grain and livestock, farmers glutted the domestic market and suffered from a great fall in the prices paid for their produce.44
The unpopular embargo revived the Federalist Party in the Northeast, a region that heavily relied on maritime commerce. The Federalists insisted that Jefferson’s supposed cure was far worse than the British disease of meddling with ships and sailors. Because the trans-Atlantic trade had been so profitable, the Federalist merchants had become resigned to writing off the loss of some vessels and men to British seizure, but the shippers reaped only losses when Jefferson locked up their vessels for over a year. Northeastern Federalists charged that Jefferson’s southern-dominated party actually designed the embargo to impoverish New England and diminish its political clout in the Union. Accusing Jefferson of favoring Napoléon, the Federalists celebrated Britain as the global champion of true liberty against French despotism and Republican hypocrisy.45
The Federalist revival fell short in the presidential election of 1808, when Madison won the right to succeed Jefferson. The Federalist presidential candidate carried New England (save for Vermont), but the southern, middle, and western states remained solidly Republican. By early 1809, however, most northern Republicans had soured on an embargo that had weakened them by reviving the Federalists. To hold their party together, the Republicans in Congress terminated the embargo on March 4, 1809, Jefferson’s last day in office.46
Embarrassed by the failed embargo, President Madison sought to prepare the nation for war against the British, whom he accused of “trampling on rights which no Independent Nation can relinquish.” Madison insisted that the British imperiled the nation’s sovereignty by impressing sailors and assisting the Indians who resisted America’s western expansion. To bolster a native alliance deemed essential to Canada’s security, the British armed the Indians, who opposed American troops at the Battle of Tippecanoe in northern Indiana in late 1811. Anticipating a tough reelection campaign in 1812, Madison hoped that a war against the British and their Indian allies would unite the fractious Republicans. In the House of Representatives, the president got vigorous support from the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay.47
On June 18, 1812, Madison signed the declaration of war authorized by Congress. In both houses, the vote largely broke along party lines, for every Federalist opposed the declaration, which 81 percent of the Republicans favored. The greatest opposition came from the Northeast, where the Federalists were strongest and where many Republicans felt dismayed by the paltry military preparations for war. Support for the declaration primarily came from Pennsylvania, the South, and the new western states of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee: all Republican strongholds.48
Despite the nation’s military weakness, most Republicans felt that they had to declare war or lose their credibility. Identifying their party with the nation, they feared that inaction would discredit the republic as impotent, which would doom true liberty by inviting the voters to restore the elitist Federalists to power. By winning some quick victories, the Republicans hoped to unify a divided country and discredit the Federalist opposition. By declaring military war on Britain, the Republicans escalated their political war on the Federalists. Domestic partisanship shaped the conflict as much as did t
he international crisis. Tarred as Tory obstructionists by the Republicans, the Federalists sought revenge by frustrating the invasion of Canada.49
Flames
A doctrinaire southern conservative, John Randolph was a rare Virginia congressman who opposed the war. Randolph feared that a bloated military would lead to higher taxes, a compounded national debt, enhanced presidential power, and hordes of parasitical patronage seekers. He also dreaded that a British invasion would provoke a bloody slave revolt in the South: “While talking of Canada, some of us were shuddering for our own safety at home. He spoke from facts, when he said that the night-bell never tolled for fire in Richmond that the mother did not hug her infant more closely to her bosom.” He noted the “repeated alarms of insurrection among the slaves—some of them awful indeed” during “the last ten years.”50
Indeed, the crisis with Britain coincided with a surge of alarms in Virginia. After the June 1807 confrontation between USS Chesapeake and HMS Leopard, the Virginians shifted into their anxious mode, prone to overhear slaves talk of burning towns and murdering masters. In May 1808 in Richmond, a visitor noted that any nocturnal ringing of the fire bell “always produces a very great alarm in this Country” from an “apprehension that it may be the Signal for, or Commencement of a rising of the Negroes.” In November in Norfolk, alarming rumors led the mayor to call out the militia to patrol the streets, search all “the negro houses,” and interrogate suspects. “Unfortunately no single negro has been identified as concerned in this affair,” complained one frustrated militia officer.51
