Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  Instead of the president himself explaining to the country and the Congress the rationale for such an extreme act, Secretary of State Madison took on the task in three anonymous articles published in the Washington National Intelligencer, a pro-administration paper, several days after the enactment of the embargo. The embargo, Madison wrote, was “a measure of peace and precaution,” without “a shadow of a pretext to make it a cause of war.” It was a kind of test of America’s republican character amidst a world of hostile monarchies. “Let the example teach the world that our firmness equals our moderation; that having resorted to a measure just in itself, and adequate to its object, we will flinch from no sacrifices which the honor and good of our nation demand from virtuous and faithful citizens.” Relying on his Republican understanding of the contrasting political economies of America and Britain, Madison argued that while an embargo would deny Americans some British-made “superfluities,” the British “will feel the want of necessaries.” America was blessed. It did not have to choose, as other injured nations did, “between graceful submission or war.” With the embargo, a benign providence had given to America “a happy recourse for avoiding both.” This experiment might even bring about a commercial world that Americans had dreamed about ever since the model treaty of 1776. The “embargo,” said Madison, “whilst it guards our essential resources, will have the collateral effect of making it to the interest of all nations to change the system which has driven our commerce from the ocean.” Madison, in other words, seems to have envisioned the embargo as an opportunity to initiate the enlightened dream of transforming the character of international relations.80

  Although Jefferson eventually came to share Madison’s grand vision, he initially saw the embargo as little more than a defensive device to prevent the capture of American ships, cargoes, and seamen. “The great objects of the embargo,” he told the governor of Virginia in March 1808, “are keeping our ships and seamen out of harm’s way.”81 He thought that an embargo for a certain length of time was “a less evil than war. But after a time it will not be so.”82 In the meantime, however, he believed that the withholding of American trade might bring pressure on the two belligerents, Britain and France, to negotiate “a retraction of the obnoxious decrees.” The United States would prepare for war with the one that refused to withdraw its restrictions on American trade—though Jefferson and Madison knew only too well that the embargo hurt Britain more than France and that it would be Britain they would fight if the United States went to war.83 To get ready for this possibility of war, Congress appropriated $ 4 million for eight new regiments for the U.S. Army, bringing it to about ten thousand men, new weapons for the militia, 188 additional gunboats, and harbor fortifications for the ports.

  This military buildup created painful problems for Republican congressmen who had vowed never to vote for raising an army in time of peace. John Randolph urged delay and mocked his colleagues for their inconsistencies and contradictions. “We had just navy enough to bait the war-trap,” he jeered, “to bring us into difficulties, not to carry us through them.” The government was building gunboats to protect the harbors, and erecting forts in the harbors to protect the gunboats. The eight new regiments seemed to have no purpose—except as “a cause for laying taxes, which ruined those in public opinion who imposed them.” If war were expected, then, said Randolph, the embargo made no sense at all. It was supposedly designed for peace, “at least such were the arguments adduced in its favor—that it would save all the expense of armies; that the annual millions otherwise to be thrown away upon armies would be saved; that we should keep close house and there would be no danger.” The embargo, which Randolph derided as the great American tortoise drawing in its head, a system of “withdrawing from every contest, quitting the arena, flying the pit,” was, he said, totally incompatible with the raising of troops and the building of fleets. “If war be expected, you must raise the embargo, arm your merchantmen, and scuffle for commerce and revenue as well as you can.”84

  In the end the Republicans’ long-standing fears of standing armies and a militarized government led them to label their measure, “an act to raise for a time an additional military force.”85 The act was in fact more than many Republicans had wanted or expected. Of course, passing an act was one thing, implementing it was quite another, and the army never attained its authorized strength during Jefferson’s presidency. As a consequence, the British government could scarcely develop much respect for whatever military force the Americans were mustering.

  At the same time, Congress enacted legislation closing loopholes in the embargo, including requiring bonds from vessels in the coastwise trade and forbidding the export of goods out of the country by land as well as by sea—which suggested that the policy was becoming much more than a defensive device to protect the capture of ships and seamen. The system leaked everywhere, but particularly in the Maine and the Lake Champlain borders with Canada. Ultimately Gallatin’s Treasury Department, which administered the embargo, was authorized to use armed ships to search and detain vessels suspected of violating the embargo, especially those vessels engaged in the coastwise trade. Earlier exemptions were eliminated, new licenses and bonds were required, and licensed vessels had to be loaded under the supervision of revenue officers. In its heyday the British navigation system regulating the trade of the eighteenth-century colonies had never been so burdensome.

  Jefferson finally had to proclaim the Canadian–New York border area in a state of insurrection, and he ordered all civil and military officers to put down the rebels. “I think it so important in example to crush these audacious proceedings, and to make the offenders feel the consequences of individuals daring to oppose a law by force,” he told the governor of New York, “that no effort should be spared to compass the object.”86 Hamilton could not have put it better. In using armed force to enforce the embargo, including dispatching some army regulars, Jefferson was violating all of his beliefs in minimal government. That he did so was a measure of how crucially important the embargo had become to him in what he called this “age of affliction, to which the history of nations presents no parallel.”87

  In April 1808 Congress authorized the president to withdraw the embargo against one or both of the belligerents if, in the judgment of the president, one or both suspended hostilities during the congressional recess.

  During the summer and fall of 1808Jefferson, confused and sometimes desperate, began emphasizing the experimental character of the embargo—that it was a trial in peaceful coercion. Perhaps under the influence of Madison, the embargo now became less a defensive and protective device and more an offensive and coercive measure to compel the belligerents to remove their trade restrictions. Indeed, Jefferson now saw it as a means of “starving our enemies,” by which he meant the British.88

  Jefferson seems to have had an exaggerated idea of America’s international clout. He continued to think, for example, that he could use the European war to acquire the Floridas. When he learned of Napoleon’s troubles with Spain in the summer of 1808, he told his secretary of the navy, Robert Smith of Maryland, that this might be the moment for the United States to take possession of “our territory held by Spain, and so much more as may make a proper reprisal for her spoliations.” A few months later he thought that if Napoleon succeeded in Spain, the French emperor would be so gratified to have America’s neutral carrying trade with the Spanish colonies that he would repeal most of his restrictive decrees, “with perhaps the Floridas thrown into the bargain.”89

  Given Jefferson’s evolving belief that a grand experiment in peaceful coercion was being tried, the stakes could not have been higher, and inevitably he became obsessed with its enforcement. He would tolerate no violations, and, as he said, “I set down the exercise of commerce, merely for profit, as nothing when it carries with it the danger of defeating the objects of the embargo.”90 He thought the real needs of the American citizens must not become “a cover for the crimes against their country, w
hich unprincipled adventurers are in the habit of committing.”91

  The New England Federalists were furious. With their region bearing the brunt of the enforcement, they urged resistance and civil disobedience. The Republican clergyman William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts, was astonished to see several Boston papers taking “a decided part against our own Country in favour of the British.”92 During the summer and fall of 1808 a number of New England towns flooded the president with petitions calling for the suspension of the embargo, so much so that Jefferson later recalled that he had “felt the foundations of the government shaken under my feet by the New England townships.”93 The towns complained that their ships were lying idle in the harbors and that thousands of sailors, dock workers, and others employed in mercantile activities were out of work. The inhabitants of the little border town of St. Albans, Vermont, told the president that they could not understand how stopping their trade with Canada could possibly help the United States if it hurt the people of St. Albans. “Exchanging their surplus production for many of the conveniences, and even necessaries, of life,” they said, was what the townsmen did; it was the source of their daily existence.94

  The commercial losses were substantial. During the first year of the embargo the Massachusetts fleet, which comprised nearly 40 percent of the nation’s total tonnage, lost over $ 15 million in freight revenues alone, a sum equal to the entire income of the federal government in 1806. During 1808 American exports declined nearly 80 percent (from $103,343,000 to $22,431,000) and imports declined nearly 60 percent (from $144,740,000 to $58,101,000).95 Most of the decline in exports took place in the last three-quarters of 1808, as stricter enforcement of the embargo steadily took effect.

  As a measure of the extent to which ideology trumped commercial interests, the Republican legislatures of the Mississippi and Orleans territories supported the embargo even as the Southwestern cotton planters suffered severe losses. The value of exports from New Orleans and Mobile fell precipitously and would not return to preembargo levels until 1815. The house of representatives of the Mississippi Territory told Congress that “our produce lies unsold and unsaleable in our Barns.” Still, as good Republicans most of the cotton planters blamed Britain and Europe, and not the Jefferson administration, for their plight.96

  Although administration officials may have exaggerated the extent of smuggling, they became determined to tighten up the system even more. Congress called for the closing of all ports to the armed vessels of both France and Great Britain and for the prohibition of all imports from both belligerents. During the summer of 1808 Gallatin told the president that “Congress must either vest the Executive with the most arbitrary powers and sufficient force to carry the embargo into effect, or give it up altogether.”97 Faced with these choices, the administration opted to enforce the embargo even more harshly, and early in January 1809 Congress passed and Jefferson signed an extremely draconian enforcement act.

  This act closed all additional loopholes and granted the president extraordinary powers to capture and punish any violators, including powers that were clearly contrary to the search-and-seizure provisions of the Fourth Amendment. Almost nothing could be loaded onto vessels or moved in oceanic commerce without a permit or license, usually backed by a large bond; and the federal authorities were granted enormous discretion in deciding who was to be permitted to trade. “This was regulatory authority of astonishing breadth and administrative discretion of breathtaking scope,” concludes a modern historian of administrative law.98 The United States government was virtually at war with its own people, especially those in Massachusetts, whose opposition to the embargo, said Jefferson, “amounted almost to rebellion and treason.”99 For their part, “the people of Massachusetts,” declared the state’s senate, “will not willingly become the victims of a fruitless experiment.”100

  The embargo revived the fortunes of the Federalist party in New England, New York, and Maryland, but not as much as the Federalists had expected. By 1808, for example, the fourteen Federalist congressmen that the South had sent to Washington in 1800 had diminished to seven.101 Nevertheless, the Federalists taunted the Republicans with hypocrisy and inconsistency and mocked the Jeffersonians’ pretensions to limited government and their earlier fears of executive power. As the parties reversed their traditional positions, everything was turned upside-down. The Massachusetts legislature condemned the enforcement measures as “unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional and not legally binding on the citizens of this state.” In language reminiscent of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798, the Connecticut governor declared that the state legislatures had the right and duty “to interpose their protecting shield between the right and liberty of the people, and the assumed power of the general government.”102 The Republicans responded with a Hamilton-like defense of their actions. They were not trying to establish a military despotism, declared Senator William Branch Giles of Virginia; instead, they were merely seeking the means “necessary and proper for carrying into effect a great national and Constitutional object . . . and thus to make a last effort to preserve the peace of the nation.”103

  The pressure to repeal the embargo mounted, especially among Republican congressmen from the Northeast. With the unity of the Republican party that had sustained the embargo for over a year finally disintegrating, Congress voted to end this liberal experiment in peaceful coercion.

  Both Republican leaders, Jefferson and Madison, were opposed to the repeal of the embargo; they thought that a few more months of enforcement might have succeeded in compelling Britain to relax its commercial restrictions.104 Both Republican leaders believed that a great opportunity to teach the world a new way of dealing with international conflicts had been lost. “There never has been a situation of the world before in which such endeavors as we had made would not have secured our peace,” Jefferson lamented. “It is probable there never will be such another.” He was filled with regret that this grand and enlightened experiment had failed; it had been “made on motives which all mankind must approve.”105

  The embargo was ended on March 4, 1809, on the day the new president, James Madison, took office. In its place Congress substituted non-intercourse with both Britain and France; that is, it retained the embargo with these two nations but now permitted trade with all other nations. At the same time, it authorized the incoming president to reopen trade with whichever nation ended its violations of America’s neutral rights. Three years later President Madison called for a declaration of war against Great Britain; yet because the Republicans were still in charge of the Congress and the presidency, it was to be a war like no other.

  18

  The War of 1812

  The War of 1812 is the strangest war in American history. It was a war in its own right but also a war within a war, a part of the larger war between Britain and France that had been going on since France’s National Convention declared war on Britain in February 1793. Although the total American casualties in the war were relatively light—6, 765—far fewer in the entire two and a half years of war than those killed and wounded in a single one of Napoleon’s many battles, it was nonetheless one of the most important wars in American history. It was, said Virginia’s John Taylor, the philosopher of agrarian Republicanism, a “metaphysical war, a war not for conquest, not for defense, not for sport,” but rather “a war for honour, like that of the Greeks against Troy,” a war, however, that “may terminate in the destruction of the last experiment in . . . free government.”1

  The United States told the world in 1812 that it declared war against Great Britain solely because of the British impressment of American sailors and the British violations of America’s maritime rights. Yet on the face of it, these grievances scarcely seemed to be sufficient justifications for a war, especially a war for which the United States was singularly unprepared. In 1812 the U.S. Army consisted of fewer than seven thousand regular troops. The navy comprised only sixteen vessels, not counting the dozens of gunboats. Wi
th this meager force the United States confronted an enemy that possessed a regular army of nearly a quarter of a million men and the most powerful navy in the world, with a thousand warships on the rolls and over six hundred of them in active service.

  Yet President James Madison was supremely confident of success. Indeed, right after Congress declared war Madison personally visited all the departments of government, something never done before, said the controller of the treasury, Richard Rush, the young son of Benjamin Rush. The president, who presumably abhorred war, gave a pep talk to everyone “in a manner,” said Rush, “worthy of a little commander-in-chief, with his little round hat and huge cockade.”2

  From beginning to end the war seemed as ludicrous as its diminutive commander-in-chief with his oversized cockade, the symbol of martial spirit. The British against whom the United States declared war in June 1812 did not expect war and did not want it. In fact, just as America was declaring war in June 1812, the British government repealed the orders-in-council authorizing the seizure of American ships and the impressment of American sailors that presumably had been a major cause of the war—too late, however, for the Americans to learn of the British action and reverse their decisions already taken. It turns out that many Americans did not want to go to war either; indeed, the leaders of the governing Republican party were devoted to the idea of creating a universal peace and had spent the previous decade desperately trying to avoid war. Nevertheless, it was the Republican party, which most loathed war and all that war entailed in taxes, debt, and executive power, that took the country into the war, and some Republicans did it with enthusiasm.

  The vote for war in the Congress (in the House of Representatives seventy-nine to forty-nine and in the Senate nineteen to thirteen, the closest vote for a declaration of war in American history) was especially puzzling. The congressmen who voted for the war were overwhelmingly from the sections of the country, the South and West, that were farthest removed from ocean traffic and least involved in shipping and thus least affected by the violations of maritime rights and the impressments that were the professed reasons for declaring war. At the same time, the congressmen most opposed to the war were from the section of the country, New England, that was most hurt by the British impressment of American sailors and British violations of America’s maritime rights.