by Mark Zuehlke
Gallatin reported to Monroe that the commissioners were finally gathering. “This does not bespeak any wish [by the British] to hasten the negotiations.”13 In past letters he had reported continuing naval and army reinforcements being sent to North America and predicted that between 15,000 and 20,000 troops could soon be landed on the nation’s Atlantic coast. A confidant had informed Gallatin that Castlereagh and other ministers now agreed with the national sentiment that they should “inflict on America a chastisement that will teach her that war is not to be declared against Great Britain with impunity.”14
Gallatin was not far off the mark. While Castlereagh truly desired an end to the war in North America and so hoped the negotiations bore fruit, he also believed the tide ran against the Americans. So while the British government inched through the early summer toward the talks, it simultaneously sped the flow of troops and ships across the Atlantic and urged its commanders there to carry the war to American soil.
In a secret dispatch sent on June 2 to Governor Prevost, Bathurst advised that before year-end more than 13,000 troops would arrive in Quebec. “His Majesty’s Government conceive that the Canadas will not only be protected for the time against any attack which the enemy may have the means of making, but it will enable you to commence offensive operations on the Enemy’s Frontier before the close of this Campaign …. The object of your operations will be; first, to give immediate protection: secondly, to obtain if possible ultimate security to His Majesty’s Possessions in America.”
To fulfill the first object, Bathurst ordered the “entire destruction of Sackets harbour and the Naval Establishments on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain.” Fort Niagara was to be retained and Detroit and Michigan Territory occupied as part of the second object. Success on this front would restore “Detroit and the whole of the Michigan Country to the Indians,” rendering “the British Frontier … materially improved.” Prevost should also extend the British lines south to gain as much country around Lake Champlain as possible, but with the proviso that he not extend his line of advance so far that his troops were exposed to being cut off. To secure the St. Lawrence River from Halifax to Quebec, Bathurst ordered Lt. Gen. Sir John Sherbrooke, commanding the British army in Nova Scotia, to occupy a corridor of the District of Maine—part of Massachusetts State—paralleling the shoreline.
While these operations were conducted in the north, four regiments from Europe would assault America’s coastline. The government also planned to collect “a considerable force … at Cork without delay” that would “make a more serious attack on some part of the Coasts of the United States.”15
This rapid escalation of British strength in North America would not, of course, happen overnight. Ten thousand troops bound for Quebec would be moved in three convoys spaced several weeks apart because of difficulties assembling sufficient ships. But even to the defensively minded Prevost the intention was clear. He was to seize the initiative from the Americans and occupy territory that the British government would retain either for the Indians or as part of an expanded British North America. The adjustment of boundaries enabling this would be imposed on the Americans as a condition of peace.
Bathurst held no illusions that the negotiations would proceed smoothly, with the British commissioners simply submitting the government’s settlement to the Americans and having it confirmed. There must be some give and take. Compromises were likely. Demands would necessarily require adjustment and clarification. He and Castlereagh concurred that they must approve any changes in the British position. The commissioners, therefore, were selected to ensure they would do nothing intemperate that might commit Britain to an unapproved course.
As the alleged causes of the war primarily regarded maritime issues, it was deemed that the commission’s head should not only be a member of the House of Lords but also a senior ranking officer of the Royal Navy. Vice-Admiral James Gambier was appointed to this role. Also included was an expert in maritime and naval law, William Adams, who would be responsible for drafting the treaty’s clauses. Gambier and Adams, however, were not expected to lead negotiations. That fell to the third member, War and Colonial Office Undersecretary Henry Goulburn. Trustworthy and loyal, he could be relied on to resolutely advance the British position with clarity and precision. He would also maintain strict lines of communication through Bathurst with Castlereagh and other senior cabinet members.
Despite Goulburn’s being junior to Gambier and Adams in both age and social position, neither man was likely to protest his degree of influence over the proceedings. The forty-two-year-old Adams was noted for his mastery of legal details, but had no diplomatic experience. Like Goulburn, he was a graduate of Trinity College and had begun to practise law in 1800. His foray into naval law had come in 1811, when he was appointed by the Admiralty to a commission charged with regulating how vice-admiralty courts were conducted at stations abroad.16
Gambier’s forty-seven-year career had concluded in 1811, when his term as commander of the Channel fleet expired and the Admiralty offered no other posting. Born on October 13, 1756, in Bermuda, where his father served as the colony’s lieutenant governor, Gambier had been signed on as a midshipman aboard Yarmouth when he was eleven. Fifteen years later he gained command of the frigate Raleigh and fought several small engagements against French and American ships until 1781, when he asked to be relieved of command because of illness. By now Gambier had grown into a spare-framed man with a square face, his expression seemingly fixed in thought, his hairline receding. He was noted as a humourless soul who tended to tilt his head in a manner that some thought concealed a sinful measure of pride.
This observation would have horrified the devoutly religious Gambier. In the early 1800s he penned a tract defending the Church of England’s right to impose tithes, and he insisted on the Sabbath services being properly conducted aboard ship at a time when such observances were normally perfunctory. In another departure from the norm, he denied women from coming aboard unless they could prove they were seamen’s wives. Until a sailor was injured by the practice, anyone overheard swearing had to wear a wooden collar to which two 32-pound balls of round shot were attached by short lengths of chain. Such practices earned Gambier the nickname Dismal Jimmie.
On June 1, 1794, Gambier distinguished himself during a battle with the French near Ushant. At the helm of the 74-gun Defence, Gambier charged the French line with such dash that fleet commander Lord Howe cried, “Look at the Defence, see how nobly she goes into action!” Soon all Defence’s masts were shot away, her decks running with blood, but Gambier refused to strike the colours while the superior 100-gun Républican pummelled her. When the French ship turned to meet another threat, Defence was towed to safety. Gambier’s casualties totalled 17 killed and 36 wounded, but his fellow officers lauded this resolute stand. A fellow captain remarked jokingly, “Jemmy, whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth!”
On the first anniversary of the battle Gambier was promoted to rear admiral and four years later to vice-admiral. In 1802, he undertook a two-year posting as governor of Newfoundland and then returned to serve as First Lord of the Admiralty. Three years later he assumed command of the 98-gun Prince of Wales.
When France entered into a secret treaty with Russia that would bar British ships from using the ports of Portugal, Denmark, and Sweden and hand the fleets of each nation to the French, the Admiralty was ordered to either capture or destroy the Danish fleet. Gambier sailed from Yarmouth on July 26, 1807, with seventeen ships of the line. Copenhagen was subjected to a long siege that included a three-day bombardment that resulted in the Danish surrender on September 7. Gambier’s performance brought him a peerage. Given command of the Channel fleet in May 1808, he led it in one major battle off Isle d’Aix near Lorient. Aided by fireships under command of Lord Cochrane, the British ships of the line either destroyed the French ships or drove them aground. Gambier, however, was not accorded the glory that would normally be his for such an achievement because of accusations by Cochr
ane that the entire fleet could have been destroyed had the admiral shown more vigour. A court martial convened at Gambier’s request exonerated him. Cochrane’s career was ruined while Gambier returned to command the Channel fleet until his term expired. But his reputation remained sufficiently clouded to ensure that he would not again see active service.17
Retiring to his estate in Buckinghamshire, Gambier set to gardening with a passion. He avidly oversaw efforts by head gardener T. Tomson, who made botanical history in about 1811 by producing the first pansies by hybridizing varieties of Viola tricolor with the yellow Viola altaica common to Crimea. Gambier was deeply immersed in this project when called by Castlereagh to head the peace commission.
Gambier, Adams, and Goulburn had all accepted their commissions in mid-May, but, despite the assurances to Gallatin that they would move promptly to Ghent, they remained in England after the promised departure date of July 1 had passed. In part this was due to Castlereagh’s being in Paris concluding the final peace treaty with France and his insistence on personally drafting their final instructions. As the House of Commons spokesman for the War and Colonial Office, Goulburn had to be present to answer the many questions regarding the war with America and other colonial matters.18 The House would not rise until the end of the month, so it would be early August before Goulburn was free to depart for Ghent—a fact of which the American commissioners were not advised.
John Quincy Adams and Jonathan Russell had reached Ghent on June 24. Unwell, Russell immediately took to bed in the sumptuous Hôtel des Pays-Bas, while Adams dined alone in his room, strolled through the ancient city, and started a letter to his wife, Louisa, which he finished the next day.19 Adams was in foul temper, bitterly resenting the move to Ghent. Had the winds not delayed his departure from Reval, he would have been at Clay’s side when the letter from Bayard and Gallatin was delivered “and in that case none of us would ever have come to Ghent …. I never would have consented to come here. If a majority of my colleagues had concluded upon the measure, I would have returned immediately to St. Petersburg, and left them to conclude the peace as they saw fit.” The negotiations, he believed, would either succeed or fail in three weeks, but the change of venue meant that discussions would not begin until mid-July. The move to Ghent had wasted two months, “to no useful purpose whatever.”20
Adams also feared that the British had successfully played the Americans for fools. In a letter to Monroe, he charged that by effecting the move from Gothenburg to Ghent the British were able to “remove us from neutral territory to a place occupied by a British garrison.” All the Allied powers covetedBelgium, Adams believed, but the presence of British troops on its soil and the influx of British gold into its economy made it inevitable that it would become a British province—a fate he considered to have already befallen Holland. Although as yet no redcoats paraded through the streets of Ghent, Adams reported that both Brussels and Antwerp were under their occupation and troops were expected to move into Ghent any day.21
While Adams groused to Monroe and Louisa, he knew that to move the talks yet again would only delay matters. Bayard had arrived on June 27, Clay the following day. Gallatin was expected shortly. On the 30th the four met in Adams’s hotel room. “The conversation was desultory,” Adams confided to his diary. They agreed only to soon send John Adams home and drafted a letter to acquire a British passport allowing her safe passage.
While they waited for Gallatin, the four did their best to treat each other cordially. They visited the city’s mayor, walked its narrow cobblestone streets or strolled along the canals either singly or as a group, and shared meals together until Adams suddenly chose to dine alone at the hotel’s midday table d’hôte. “They sit after dinner and drink bad wine and smoke cigars, which neither suits my habits nor my health, and absorbs time which I cannot spare. I find it impossible, even with the most rigorous economy of time, to do half the writing that I ought,” Adams grumbled. The next day, however, Clay took him aside and expressed regret that Adams had not joined them. He decided to henceforth make a point of sharing meals with his colleagues, no matter how unpleasant he found their behaviour.22
In early July his prophecy that the city would be garrisoned by British troops came true. When Gallatin’s entourage arrived on July 7, young James noted how the many men in scarlet uniforms made “the streets very bright.”23 Albert Gallatin met with the other commissioners on the 9th. A major topic of discussion during the four-hour session was whether they should continue lodging at the hotel or lease a house. Adams alone wished to remain at the hotel because he thought their time in Ghent would “be very short; but the other gentlemen are all of a different opinion. They calculate upon passing the winter here. It is impossible to form a decisive opinion upon the subject until the British commissioners arrive.”24 Adams announced that the commissioners would meet daily at noon, a decision with which the others reluctantly agreed.
On July 11, Adams turned forty-seven and lamented: “Two-thirds of the period allotted to the life of man are gone by for me. I have not improved them as I ought to have done.” His personal disillusionment intruded on the day’s meeting when he accused the others of having wasted government money sending special messengers about Europe on various unimportant diplomatic missions. Clay remarked that he had understood from Monroe that they should make use of special messengers as often as necessary rather than risk miscommunications. There the matter rested, but Adams was determined to raise it again at the first opportunity. “I should not have sent one of the messengers hitherto employed, neither were they … at all necessary.”25 That evening Adams was embarrassed when Bayard rose and offered a toast acknowledging his birthday. The Delaware Federalist, whom Adams had been predisposed to dislike because of his politics, was disarmingly polite and congenial.
The daily meetings quickly disenchanted everyone. Adams attempted to breathe vigour into the process by assigning each member to analyze how a particular part of their instructions might affect negotiations. It was a hopeless task, likely to be rendered irrelevant during the first meeting with the British.26 On July 15, James Gallatin recorded that there was “nothing to do. Mr. Adams in a very bad temper. Mr. Clay annoys him. Father pours oil on the troubled waters.”27 Gallatin generally sided with Adams while Russell tended to back Clay in a manner that bespoke a growing sycophancy.28
While struggling for days over the wording of a joint communiqué to Monroe, each man wrote his own private letter to the secretary of state. They concluded a protracted and delicate negotiation among themselves on July 19 that resulted in agreement to rent a house on a monthly basis. “Although,” Adams confided to Louisa, “we had all agreed … to live together, yet when it came to the arrangement of details, we soon found that one had one thing to which he attached a particular interest, and another another, and it was not so easy to find a contractor who would accommodate himself to five distinct and separate humors.” They settled on the Hôtel d’Alacantara, which despite being called a hotel was a private residence because of a quirk in Flemish expression.29 It was a large, three-storey house on the Rue des Champs that provided each commissioner with a private apartment. Their landlord had trained as a professional cook and promised satisfactory daily meals. He was also to provide the best liquors to be found in Ghent. “This was the article that stuck hardest in the passage, for [Adams] was afraid that he would pass off upon us bad wine, and make us pay for it as if it was the best.” Finally the landlord agreed that if the wine provided was not acceptable “we shall look further, and draw the corks without paying him any tax or tribute for it at all.”30
Having resolved their housing issues, the commissioners idled about awaiting the British. The Americans soon read in the British newspapers a report that during Commons debate on July 20 Castlereagh had been asked “whether the persons sent to Gothenburg from the American government were quite forgotten by his Majesty’s Ministers, or whether any one had been appointed to treat with them?” Castlereagh replied
that the British commissioners would travel to Ghent immediately upon being informed that all the Americans were in place and that it was known that Gallatin was lingering in Paris. This was crock, Adams told Louisa, for the British papers had announced Gallatin’s departure from Paris on July 4 and “Lord Castlereagh had special and precise information that he had been here at Ghent, a full fortnight, on the day of the debate.”
During the same Commons debate the chancellor of the exchequer, Nicholas Vansittart, argued that the delay was irrelevant as “the war with America was not likely to terminate speedily, and might lead to a considerable scale of expense.” There was in the Commons, Adams noted, a disposition to continue the war “to accomplish the deposition of Mr. Madison.” The Federalist Party was fuelling this notion, he believed, by claiming that Britain would not “treat with a person from who she has received such unprovoked insults, and such deliberate proofs of injustice.” Impeachment was likely, according to the British newspapers, because Madison “had deceived and misled his countrymen by gross misrepresentations [and] abused their confidence by secret collusion with the late Tyrant of France.”31
To a man the American commissioners worried that the British had no intention of coming to Ghent at all. Rather, they were stalling in the hopes that the United States would be so humbled by battle that the Federalists would succeed in ousting the president.
