by Mark Zuehlke
On reading the American response, the British commissioners concluded they required instruction from London. Goulburn advised Bathurst that the American.’ refusal to enter into any provisional agreements was an outcome “not provided for in our instructions” and wanted to ensure cabinet agreed that the negotiations should be broken off. He suggested replying “that their proceeding throughout this part of the negotiation has been nothing more nor less than a dictation to Great Britain that Although America declared War for the sake of annexing our dominions yet she will cede nothing which can contribute to increase their security or difficulty of annexation at a future time.” Goulburn thought the Americans sought to blame the rupture of negotiations on Britain. All he desired from Bathurst was a “single line informing us whether [to] break off or not.”7
The American response startled the British cabinet. From Paris, Castlereagh warned Goulburn against any written reply until briefed by the government on its intention. Writing to Lord Liverpool, the foreign secretary suggested the commissioners had stated the proposition regarding Indian boundaries too “peremptorily.” In more muddied language than in previous written instructions, he again argued against Britain being drawn into a territorial war over the Indian question. Against all reason, he suggested, the Americans could be drawn into provisional agreement to the British demands before confessing that the result would just be rejection by Madison’s government. As he was leaving Paris within the hour and so lacked time to generate anything but this hasty note, Castlereagh left it up to Liverpool, Bathurst, and the foreign secretary’s staff to decide the ultimate response.8
Along with the American reply and his personal letter to Bathurst, Goulburn had included a draft response for consideration. While approving its general outline, Liverpool thought the commissioners “had certainly taken a very erroneous view of our policy. If the negotiation had been allowed to break off upon the two notes already presented, or upon such an answer as they were disposed to return, I am satisfied the war would have become quite popular in America.” If there was to be a rupture in the negotiations, blame for it “should be thrown upon the American commissioners, and not upon us.”
He therefore wanted a more conciliatory tone adopted while offering no significant change of course because there remained no military justification for compromise. “If the campaign in Canada should be as successful as our military preparations would lead us to expect, I do not think we should be justified in conceding more at present than we have done, especially after the demands already made,” Liverpool wrote Castlereagh. He expected that the negotiation was unlikely to proceed further; the Americans would likely consult their government and that would necessitate a long adjournment during which time “the result of the campaign” would become known. “If our commander does his duty, I am persuaded we shall have acquired by our arms every point on the Canadian frontier which we ought to insist on keeping.”9 So the British would soften their language while maintaining a tough stance.
As Liverpool and Bathurst massaged Goulburn’s reply into something deemed more palatable for American consumption, relations between the commissioners in Ghent remained tense. Despite this they went through the pretense of civility, even dining again at the monastery. Everyone but William Adams and James Bayard made a show of being overly polite and courteous. Under the guise of rough joviality, the naval lawyer and Delaware senator exchanged veiled insults over the value and quality of their respective fowling guns. John Quincy Adams noted how pleased Gallatin was to see Bayard, the Federalist, mocked by the pompous, coarse Englishman. Bayard proclaimed to the other Americans that his adversary was “a man of no breeding.”10
At every turn Bayard privately cornered Goulburn, determined to convince the young man that a generous treaty would ensure Federalist power, which would be to Britain’s advantage. Goulburn declined comment, thinking anything he said would be “liable to much misrepresentation and cannot lead to any good purpose.” He advised Bathurst that all he had learned was “that the Federalists are quite as inveterate enemies to us as the Madisonians.”11
On September 1, Adams, hoping to chat with the British commissioners and Jane Goulburn, called on the monastery. Her husband received him. Lady Goulburn was indisposed and the other commissioners, along with Baker, had gone to Brussels for a couple of days. The ensuing discussion quickly degenerated into a heated argument that Adams thought unmasked “the violence and bitterness of his passion against the United States.” Conquering Canada had been the war’s only object, the intense Englishman declared, and it was to “the astonishment of the whole world that Canada had not been conquered at the very outset.” This was why the Great Lakes must be secured and a barrier nation created for the Indians—to preclude America’s embarking on another war of conquest.
Adams denied America had sought to conquer Canada. That was an effect of the war, not a cause. By circuitous turns the argument led to Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane’s encouraging slaves to take refuge aboard British ships. It was widely known, Adams charged, that many naval commanders had subsequently sold these slaves to plantation owners in the West Indies. Goulburn, personally embarrassed by the use of slaves on his Jamaican plantation, with “apparent agitation” dismissed this allegation as “originating only in the spirit of hostility, and totally destitute of foundation.”
Feeling he was gaining advantage, Adams suggested both sides grant amnesty to those Indians living inside their existing boundaries that had fought for the other nation. They must be considered independent nations, Goulburn insisted. America had entered into treaties with them in the past. Did that not reflect acceptance that these peoples enjoyed nationhood?
Where the Indians formed settlements and cultivated land, Adams said, such civilized behaviour resulted in respect of their property by the United States. But most Indians were “wandering hunters” with “habits and attachments and prejudices … so averse to any settlement … it was impossible for such people ever to be said to have possessions. Their only right upon land was a right to use it as hunting-grounds, and when those lands where they hunted became necessary or convenient for the purposes of settlement,” the U.S. would acquire it by treaty. This approach was fair and just. The proposal that the Indians have a nation with inviolable borders was bound to fail. “It was opposing a feather to a torrent.” The United States numbered eight million; its boundaries must expand as the population grew.
“What!” cried Goulburn. “Is it, then, in the inevitable nature of things that the United States must conquer Canada?”
“No.”
“But what security, then, can Great Britain have for her possession of it?”
A “liberal and amicable course of policy toward America,” Adams replied. Or in the absence of that Britain must deploy her great military superiority to secure Canada’s borders.
Goulburn rejected this, pointing out that the United States—by sheer dint of proximity and weight of its great populace—must always enjoy military dominance in North America. Canada could have no security. There were also many civilized Indians, and the American policy of pushing them back from their lands only drove these people into the British provinces where they encroached on the boundaries of Indians already dwelling there.
Adams claimed to have “never heard any complaint of this kind before.” If true, he dismissed it as something easily solved.
Goulburn offered no reply and Adams sensed, “in the pressure for an argument, he had advanced more than he was inclined to maintain.” Nor would he agree that the demand that the Americans remove their military from the Great Lakes was “humiliating or unusual,” even when asked if Britain would ever accede to such a stipulation. Adams finally said that if Goulburn saw nothing “dishonourable” in this then there was hardly any point in continuing the argument. “We and our nation would feel it to be such; that such stipulations were indeed often exhorted from the weakness of a vanquished enemy, but they were always felt to be dishonourable, and
had certainly occasioned more wars than they had ever prevented.”
Having gained the last word, Adams took his leave. Goulburn, he concluded, was “personally the most inveterate of the three … and the most in the confidence of his Government.”12 The British commissioner, for his part, thought Adams “a very bad arguer” and a bully.13
Everyone believed negotiations were at an end. They merely awaited confirmation by the British cabinet. The Americans renewed their lease only to mid-September; by then they would surely be gone. Goulburn chanced upon Gallatin on September 3 and was in no mood for normal niceties. “I don’t think you have the slightest intention of making peace,” he challenged.
“Surely you cannot mean this! Why should I have taken the long journey to Russia in 1813 and given up everything else in the one hope of making peace?” To James he suggested that Goulburn’s bilious accusations stemmed from his having made “serious mistakes” during the negotiation that had resulted in a stern reprimand from his superiors.14
On September 4, the British cabinet’s response arrived. Goulburn and William Adams took immediate advantage of the permission granted to “make some alterations in its style” before passing a copy to the Americans. These changes, Goulburn assured Bathurst, were intended “with a view of rendering the note more consistent with what had been before expressed by us.” He expected the Americans to remain inflexible, more convinced than ever “that their government had no real intention of making Peace but had acceded to the proposal of negotiating with the sole view of deriving from the negotiation some means of reconciling the People of America to the continuance of the War—The Indian Boundary appears to them calculated to answer this object, and their desire of negotiating is therefore at an end.”15
The British reply, combative as ever, opened with “unfeigned regret” that the Americans demonstrated so little interest in negotiating a peace while their British counterparts had “departed from the usual course of negotiating, by disclosing all the objects of their Government.” While the Americans might claim the war had been declared over maritime issues, “it is notorious to the whole world that the conquest of Canada, and its permanent annexation to the United States, was the declared object …. If, in consequence of a different course of events on the continent of Europe, his Majesty’s Government had been unable to reinforce the British armies in Canada, and the United States had obtained a decided superiority in that quarter, is there any person who doubts that they would have availed themselves of the situation to obtain on the side of Canada important cessions of territory, if not the entire abandonment of that country by Great Britain?”
A decade of American frontier expansionism and in the Spanish Florida and Louisiana colonies was detailed. While America boasted a population exceeding seven million, British North America numbered merely 500,000. Those colonists posed no threat to America, while, given past attempts to conquer Canada, the same could not be said for the United States. Yet the reasonable proposal that America remove itself militarily from the Great Lakes and accede to an Indian nation whose boundaries provided a protective buffer between British and American territory had been rejected. A vigorous defence of the proposition that America should return to the Indians all territory acquired that lay beyond the Treaty of Greenville boundaries was offered. In closing, the British demanded to know whether the Americans “will take upon themselves the responsibility of breaking off the negotiation altogether.”16
Bayard declared the response “a very stupid production.” Through a long afternoon the five men discussed the sixteen-folio-length-page document, each seemingly bent on outdoing the others in expressing outrage. That the conquest of Canada should be held up as “the declared object” was ridiculous. Never had the American government officially stated that intention—it had always remained a topic to be discussed or articulated in informal ways by senators and congressmen, such as Henry Clay, during speeches or in the pages of the party and unofficial government newspapers, or occasionally in secret memoranda penned by the likes of James Monroe. Clay, who often claimed Canada ripe for the picking if only military competency were to be had, declared that their reply should warrant no more than a terse half-page to finish the matter. Ever inclined to be contrary, the prickly Adams calmly announced that he thought the British response was “neither … stupid nor proper to be answered in half a page.” Gallatin suggested that he dissect the document and minute whatever warranted notice. With relief the others, due at the theatre for a production of La Rhétorique, consented. When the curtain went up, the actors delivered lines in Flemish. Mystified, Adams kept drifting off. Finally he slipped out an exit and spent the remaining evening walking on the Place d’Armes.17
The following afternoon, Gallatin met the others armed with a detailed analysis of the British response and minutes regarding what warranted comment. Pessimistic and depressed, Bayard suggested compromise. The Americans could agree that the Treaty of Greenville should stand despite subsequent settlement beyond its borders. Adams and Clay denounced any stipulations regarding the Indians. Perhaps referring disarmament on the Great Lakes to Washington would sustain the negotiation, Gallatin offered. Dismissing this, Adams dragged out Monroe’s initial instructions, which sanctioned no military or territorial concessions. Ever since his argument with Goulburn, Adams had been churning the Indian question about. The “very employment of Indians by Great Britain was contrary to the laws of war,” he announced. So far as the avowed concern about Canada’s security, the threat of American invasion was offset by the vulnerability of the nation’s vast commercial fleets to capture by the Royal Navy. These points must be made.
To his chagrin, the others thought use of Indians in war an issue best left alone. After all, the Americans employed them whenever possible. But they agreed to employ the naval argument. That their response would likely end the negotiation charade was much on everyone’s mind. Gallatin suggested that once the rupture was final, Washington might consent to retain several ministers in Europe who could renew discussions in the future.
The next day Adams doggedly pursued insertion of a paragraph condemning “employment of savages as contrary to the laws of war.” To mollify him, it was agreed Adams should draft a paragraph for consideration. That night, he laboured over the paragraph and examined Gallatin’s draft reply. From Clay’s room, Adams could hear a card game going on; Jonathan Russell and two others were present. He went to bed to the sounds of their voices. Awakening at 3:45 the next morning, Adams heard the men finally retiring. Long before daybreak, Adams washed and dressed, then sat at his desk waiting for the sky to lighten sufficient to enable reading or writing. He wrote a long draft to replace Gallatin’s, only to strike most of it out when he decided the other man’s was preferable except in regard to the Indian boundary.
That afternoon the commissioners accepted Gallatin’s draft as amended by Adams with respect to the Indian boundaries. They also adopted the essence of his paragraph against employing Indians in war, but made a multitude of amendments that little satisfied him. There followed the laborious task of having Christopher Hughes pen the response under the careful eye of the others to ensure no changes slipped in. Not until the afternoon of September 9 was the reply delivered.18
In the main there was little new. The response largely refuted the need for an Indian boundary and decried any limit on American expansion as “arresting the natural growth of their population and strength” and dooming the Indians “to perpetual barbarism.” Untrue was the contention that America bore hostile intentions toward the Indians. They sought only peaceful coexistence. But the British “employment of savages, whose known rule of warfare is the indiscriminate torture and butchery of women, children, and prisoners, is itself a departure from the principles of humanity observed between all civilized and Christian Nations, even in war” and led to “unjustifiable aggravation of the calamities and horrors of war.” Without offering specific incidents, they accused British officers of watching over massacres
and despoiling of the dead by Indian warriors. They proposed that each nation disavow using Indians in warfare.
Again they rejected an independent Indian nation, as well as disarmament of the Great Lakes. Referring either idea to Washington would be useless, doomed to immediate rejection. The Americans closed by saying they remained ready as always to continue the negotiation.19
Illogical, emotional, full of unsubstantiated ravings, this American response seemed certain to break the negotiation. Adams expected word that very day, but there came only silence. He realized that the test of wills might continue as each side tried to force the other to make the break. But he remained certain that further discussion could not bear fruit.20
The British commissioners agreed. While they forwarded the document to London with a covering note requesting “instructions as to the line of conduct which it may be proper to adopt with respect to the continuance of the negotiation,” it was plain they considered matters at an end.21 On September 15, the Americans hosted what they thought would be the last dinner taken together. Before the sitting, Gambier asked Adams if he planned to immediately return to St. Petersburg. “Yes, that is, if you send us away,” Adams replied. Gambier deeply lamented the outcome and hoped they should be friends some day.22
