by Mark Zuehlke
The British proposed that, immediately upon entering into a treaty, both countries be bound to end all hostilities with Indian tribes they were at war with and “restore to such tribes or nations, respectively, all the possessions, rights, and privileges, which they may have enjoyed or been entitled to in 1811, previous to such hostilities; provided always, that such tribes or nations shall agree to desist from all hostilities” upon being notified of the treaty agreement.
“Whatever may be the result of the proposition thus offered,” this was “their ultimatum.” They awaited a response “with anxiety” because on this “their continuance in this place will depend.”19 A gauntlet had been dropped.
The Americans received the British note while having dinner on the evening of October 8. Everyone was in a foul mood. They had spent the day arguing over the protocol by which a report on the negotiations should be sent to Tsar Alexander I. Adams, Russell, and Clay ended up shouting at each other about which of their secretaries should carry the report to the emperor in Vienna. Although the issue was insignificant, their display of temper worried them all. Until now strained harmony had been maintained between these five men of very different temperaments. But the stress of months together and the likelihood of failure was wearing them down. Tempers simmering, they agreed to not discuss the proposal until the next afternoon.
At first blush, the Americans found the note “domineering and insulting” as ever. The ultimatum forced them into a corner. Even though it was couched in relatively moderate language and signified a substantial retreat on earlier demands relative to the Indians, rejecting it would be politically damning. When the record of the negotiations was made public, which would certainly happen, President Madison’s government would face the outrage of New England and probably other parts of the nation for turning its back on peace by rejecting such a seemingly moderate proposal. As for the five commissioners, they would be saddled with full blame for mishandling the negotiations. If they could not reject the article, though, how were they to accept it without appearing to have meekly given in?
Bayard suggested a face-to-face conference where they would demand to see a draft of the entire proposed treaty. It was unreasonable of the British to present them with just one article with an attached ultimatum. But if the British refused his request, Bayard still opposed ending the negotiation. Clay favoured accepting the article, but insisted they must reject any demand that America disarm on the lakes. The two things taken together, he said, “would deliver the whole western country up to the mercy of the Indians.” Trouble was, they had no idea of knowing whether the British continued to want disarmament or not. They were being forced to accept one article blind to what other treaty terms would then be presented.
For days they argued. Clearly they had no choice but to accept the article, but how? Clay and Gallatin favoured a short response of no more than four pages. Adams wanted to match the British word for word. Gallatin proposed usurping the article as representing precisely the view the Americans had expressed on the Indian subject. Taking entirely the opposite tack, Adams was for representing “it as a very great concession, made for the sake of securing the peace.” He wanted to include a paragraph arguing for the cession of Canada to the United States as being in the interest of all. The others rejected that notion out of hand, as they did his concession idea. Finally it fell to Clay to merge both men’s drafts into something everyone could accept.
Clay’s response, much edited by the group, followed Gallatin’s idea of portraying the article as essentially being what the Americans had always proposed. It would place “these tribes PRECISELY and in EVERY RESPECT, in the same situation as that in which they stood BEFORE the commencement of hostilities.”
In accepting the article, they then requested that the British provide the projet of a treaty “embracing ALL the points deemed material by Great Britain” to which they would then present “a counter projet with respect to all the articles, to which they may not agree and on subjects deemed material by the United States, and which may be admitted in the British projet.”20
On the 14th the response was finally ready, Hughes busy writing it up in final form, when the British commissioners delivered copies of more London papers. The Americans read about Passamaquoddy Bay being taken, the frigate Adams burned, British successes on Lake Huron and in the northern Mississippi. Plattsburgh, too, was reported captured.
It was a defeated five who signed their response at noon for delivery. Adams disliked the response “very much in all its parts,” but had little luck in any of his proposed amendments. Clay, who had always predicted the war would carry no public losses for America, railed “at commerce and the people of Massachusetts, and [told] what wonders the people of Kentucky would do if they should be attacked.”21
The note was delivered that afternoon with the expectation that it would be at least ten days before the British responded. In the ensuing days Russell confronted Adams. He was dissatisfied with the note sent to the British. Adams concurred and asked why Russell had not supported him in opposition. Because, Russell answered, he had thought Clay “would have been the most stubborn … upon the point relative to the Indians, and, finding him give way, and being himself the youngest member of the mission, and being from a State that cared nothing about Indian affairs, he had not thought it was his business to be more stiff about it than others.” Bayard, Adams pointed out, had argued against the article. If three of them had upheld this view, Gallatin and Clay would have been forced to come around. Russell sniffed off this conjecture. “Bayard always talked about keeping a high tone,” he said, “but when it came to the point he was always on the conceding side.”22
Two days before the American commissioners agreed to the Indian article, their report on the negotiations and record of dispatches up to the date of George Dallas’s sailing home aboard John Adams came under scrutiny during a secret session of the House of Representatives in Washington. Dallas had hand-delivered the materials to James Monroe on October 6. Meeting in the study of Octagon House—the unusual three-storey, octagonal brick building that had been given up by the French minister to provide a suitable residence for the president—James Madison’s administration found the packet’s contents a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the excessive British demands might help galvanize the nation behind the war effort. Opposed to that was the probability that the negotiations had by now collapsed.
The immediate question was how to exploit the material to advantage. Madison solved that problem by providing its entire contents to the recently reconvened Thirteenth Congress. Three days of secret deliberations resulted in passage of a motion ordering the printing of 10,000 copies of the dispatches and their public distribution. This propaganda ploy proved moderately successful. While Republicans could be expected to decry the British demands as unacceptable, some Federalist newspapers and politicians also condemned them as tantamount to requiring the nation to surrender its freedom.
Privately Madison believed there was no further prospect of a negotiated peace unless the British cabinet was drastically reconstituted so that moderate politicians became ascendant. This he realized was improbable despite young Dallas’s assurances that some, including Lord Chancellor David Erskine, who had once been Britain’s minister to America, opposed the war. Dallas reported a conversation in which Erskine allegedly declared, “America is right and we are wrong in this war.” To this Attorney General Richard Rush commented: “I am not without a hope that the events of Baltimore, Plattsburgh, and Champlain, with the drubbing that my Lord Wellington’s heroes have received on the Niagara, will induce many people in England to Lord Erskine’s way of thinking.”23
Monroe, meanwhile, drafted further instructions for the commissioners in Ghent in the faintest hope that the talks might not yet have irreparably ruptured. He authorized them to drop all previous demands if the “status quo ante bellum” could be restored. They were empowered to follow their own judgment in agreeing to treaty articles, s
ubject, of course, to ratification by the government.24
Madison remained dubious that peace was possible, but took consolation in the hope that, “if the English force us to continue the war, they will make us do in ten years what we perhaps would not do in half a century.” The struggle of arms, the president believed, would hasten the country’s political and economic development, ultimately uniting its disparate peoples and interest groups in a common national purpose that would be sustained after war’s end.25
Unity of purpose was more easily forecast than achieved in the present. In New England illicit trade with Canada thrived, as did the refusals of financiers to issue war loans to the federal government and of the states to fill militia requests. The government in October skated perilously along the knife-edge of bankruptcy, with the navy unable to meet its payroll. Secretary of the Navy William Jones, near ruin from spiralling personal debts occasioned by bad investments in questionable Asian merchandise, pleaded for Madison to accept his resignation. Treasury Secretary George Campbell’s health was broken. After tabling a report that forthcoming federal expenses would run to $24.8 million while revenues delivered barely $13 million, he resigned. Alexander Dallas, father of young George, stepped into his shoes.26He could offer no solution to cover the gap other than the dreaded political deathtrap of direct taxation. The House and the Senate would have none of it. The treasury must lurch along as before. So, too, the army. Conscription was jettisoned in favour of greater bounties and call-ups of phantom militias who might or might not make an appearance in the moment of necessity.
Fluctuating between resolution and despair, Madison soldiered on with tempered patience. New England was the problem, he quietly told friends, and its lack of patriotic fervour served to encourage Britain’s continuing hostilities. Madison hoped for a turn in fortune, but braced for the worst. “In the meantime,” he wrote, “the course to be taken by the Government is full of delicacy and perplexity, and the more so under the pinch which exists in our fiscal affairs, and the lamentable tardiness of the Legislature in applying some relief.”27
In the absence of action, Congress turned to prayer. A day of “Public Humiliation, and Fasting, and of Praying to Almighty God, for the safety and welfare of these states” was proclaimed. Opposed to religious proclamations on principle, Madison kept his personal opinion quiet, and, on November 16, signed the bill to set aside January 12, 1815, as a national fast and prayer day.28
British resolve rather than divine intervention was more at work on America’s behalf in the autumn of 1814. Mid-October brought to London official reports of the string of misfortunes on the North American battlefields. Lord Liverpool summed up the cabinet’s feelings in an October 21 letter to Castlereagh. The news was “chequered.” While the failed raid on Baltimore could be considered somewhat successful in its having “done them as much mischief as the capture of Washington,” it had come at the price of Maj. Gen. Robert Ross’s death. That left the Gulf of Mexico expedition without a commander until Maj. Gen. Sir Edward Pakenham, Wellington’s brother-in-law, could cross the ocean to replace him. That was one setback, but not in itself critical. The truly devastating news was the complete failure of Prevost’s offensive at Lake Champlain. “He has … managed the campaign in that quarter as ill as possible, and if he cannot redeem himself by some brilliant success … must be recalled at the end of the campaign.” Liverpool regretted sending the majority of reinforcements to Canada. Had they been given to Ross, who knew what might have been achieved? “We thought, however, we were acting for the best, and so we were if we had had a competent officer in the command in Canada.”
However, Liverpool took heart in the news gleaned from American papers that showed the populace failing to rally around Madison’s government despite Washington’s having been burned. Having Madison remain president, he felt, was “the best thing for us …. His government must be a weak one, and feeling that it has not the confidence of a great part of the nation, will perhaps be ready to make peace for the purpose of getting out of its difficulties.”
As for the negotiations, he reported that the Americans had accepted the Indian article and so the talks continued “with more prospect of success than has hitherto existed.” The negotiations should come to a head in ten days, after which it would be clear whether a treaty could be agreed upon.29
Goulburn warned Bathurst that Prevost’s defeat at Plattsburgh seriously handicapped Britain’s ability to negotiate from strength. “Even our brilliant success at Baltimore as it did not terminate in the capture of the town will be considered by the Americans as a victory…. We owed the acceptance of our article respecting the Indians to the capture of Washington and if we had either burnt Baltimore or held Platsburg I believe we should have had peace on the terms which you have sent to us in a month at latest. As things appear to be going on in America the result of our negotiation may be very different.” Only New England’s lack of support for the war kept him from “despair.”30
Goulburn was responding to a covering letter from Bathurst that contained the next set of instructions for the British commissioners, received on the 21st. Duly informed, they presented another note to the Americans the following day. Adams thought it presented “the same dilatory and insidious character as their preceding notes,” but appreciated its being shorter.31 While not containing the requested projet of a treaty, it did outline what Britain considered should and should not be included. Forcible seizure of mariners was an issue that could be let lie to some other time; same with the fisheries. Regarding boundaries, it seemed the northwest boundary could be agreed as running from Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi, and the others could be negotiated.
Over the ensuing week the American and British commissioners exchanged several terse notes that inched the negotiations slowly toward the next step—which side would table a draft treaty. On the 31st, the British played a trump card that decided the issue. The article concerning the Indians accepted, and everything Britain desired having been outlined in their note of October 21, they had “no further demands to make, no other stipulations on which they are instructed to insist, and they are empowered to sign a treaty of peace forthwith in conformity with those stated in their former note.” They urged the Americans to “no longer hesitate to bring forward, in the form of articles or otherwise … those specific propositions, upon which they are empowered to sign a treaty of peace between the two countries.”32 If America truly wanted peace, her commissioners were going to have to frame a treaty that could secure it.
TWENTY-SIX
A Game of Brag
NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1814
Not surprisingly, preparing the projet fell to Albert Gallatin and John Quincy Adams, the two men working independently according to their own designs. Each day some of the commissioners gathered to discuss the work so far completed. James Bayard assumed a moderating role, counselling compromises that would advance matters. Henry Clay attended sporadically, Jonathan Russell rarely. The latter, increasingly complaining that his opinions were ignored, his presence unwanted, spent most of his time shut away at his hotel.
When Gallatin presented clauses that restored the rights of Americans to fish and dry catch in British waters in exchange for navigational rights on the Mississippi, Clay went into a rage. Say nothing about the “trifling” fisheries, he said. Who cared if that right was lost? Clay wanted no Englishmen plying the Mississippi.1
No attempt by Adams to explain the fishery issue’s importance to New England could reach the Kentuckian. He disagreed, as if on principle, with anything Adams advocated. Clay was routinely “losing his temper and growing peevish and fractious.” A gulf was developing between the two men that extended beyond clashes of ideas. Each man sharing as he did quarters that adjoined the other, lifestyles created equal friction. Clay, the gambler, cigar smoker, heavy wine drinker, almost nightly saw his guests off as Adams was rising between five and six in the morning. “I light my candle and my fire immediately on rising,” Adam
s wrote, “and now read and write about an hour by candle-light every morning.” The first book opened was the Bible. He breakfasted at nine, maintained his nightly walk regimen whenever the rains relented. Tuesdays and Fridays he wrote to Louisa. Evenings were longer than customary, as he tended to partake of the theatre once a week and did not take his walk until after dark because the hours before were spent writing or in meetings. But the rains discouraged venturing out for long. “My chief fault now is a great relaxation of my customary exercise. This must be corrected,” he confided to his diary.2
Occasionally, the Americans dined with their British counterparts, but the atmosphere was increasingly strained. Etiquette prevented discussion of either treaty or war, but after months together most polite, general topics were exhausted. The Americans found the British dull, while their counterparts scorned these colonials’lack of refinement. “As an instance of their vulgarity what think you of their turning up their coat sleeves at the commencement of dinner as if they intended to act the part of the cooks rather than guests?” Henry Goulburn asked.3 The British were bored, stuck in Ghent until the Americans presented a draft treaty.
From London notes urgently enquired when the treaty would be ready for consideration. Goulburn could offer no prediction. Lord Liverpool knew the negotiation would determine whether the war effort must be escalated or terminated. Lord Bathurst urged the recall of Sir George Prevost, but who was to replace him? One choice, obviously the best, was Wellington—the fabled Iron Duke whose star had so risen he could dictate whatever terms of service to the country suited his personal ambition. Wellington’s influence was such that he could be ordered nowhere, so Liverpool extended an invitation.
