by James Laxer
Jefferson did more than posture. He sent Robert R. Livingston, the U.S. minister to France, to Paris to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans. When the possibility of acquiring the entire Louisiana Territory was broached, Jefferson also sent James Monroe, the previous U.S. minister to France (and future secretary of state and U.S. president) to meet with French authorities. Having concluded that the Royal Navy would almost certainly seize New Orleans and that the Louisiana Territory would be lost to France in any event, the French emperor had already reconciled himself to the purchase. Napoleon had had enough of the western hemisphere by then: France had squandered an army of thirty-five thousand men during the Haitian revolution led by Toussaint Louverture.1
On April 30, 1803, Livingston and Monroe signed the Louisiana Purchase Agreement. Although Jefferson faced some domestic opposition for the purchase, he announced the deal to the American people on July 4, and on October 20, the U.S. Senate ratified the agreement. On December 20, the United States took possession of New Orleans; on March 10, 1804, the U.S. formally acquired ownership of the Louisiana Territory at a ceremony in St. Louis and organized its possession of the territory effective October 1.
For the paltry sum of approximately fifteen million dollars, the deal transformed the United States into a continental nation that now controlled the lands on both shores of the Mississippi and at New Orleans, the mouth of this essential corridor of commerce. By this time, the U.S. was already a nation pointed westward, with settlers flooding into Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee — a flow of settlement that confronted the native peoples of the region with a threat to their very survival.
Jefferson’s brilliant coup in acquiring the Louisiana Territory gave the leaders of the new nation the assurance that the United States was destined to become a first-rank power. The purchase was bound to exacerbate hostilities with the native peoples in the interior. And this was happening at a time when the U.S. was being drawn into tense relations with both Britain and France as a result of the interference by the two powers with American commerce on the seas.
Throughout the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars from 1793 to 1815, strategists in Britain and France regarded economic warfare as an indispensable weapon. Both countries issued instructions to their navies to disrupt the commerce of the enemy, with dire consequences for American merchants. The U.S. government insisted that the goods on board “neutral” ships must be free from interference, a doctrine that the French and British stoutly rejected.
In July 1805, the British Admiralty Court issued a ruling that heightened tensions with the United States. The case involved the Essex, an American ship that loaded a cargo in Barcelona that was ultimately intended for Havana (in Spanish-ruled Cuba). Since Barcelona was within Napoleon’s continental sphere, the vessel was liable to be seized by the Royal Navy. The American practice was to undertake what were called “broken” voyages to avoid British seizure, by landing en route at an American port, in this case Salem, Massachusetts. There the cargo was offloaded, and the ship was repaired and reloaded to set sail for Havana. It was then that the British took possession of the vessel. The British court ruled that since Havana had been the intended destination all along, the seizure was legitimate.
The only way around such a seizure would have been for the shipper to pay an import duty when landing in the U.S., before the cargo was shipped elsewhere. The Essex decision gave the Royal Navy licence to take over U.S. vessels involved in the re-export trade.2
Britain reinforced this tough stance by blockading major portions of the European coast. To this provocation, Napoleon responded with the Berlin Decree, which banned all trade with Britain. In turn, Britain shot back with the Orders in Council, which stipulated that neutral ships en route for Europe, most of which were American, must first call at a British port to be inspected and licensed and to pay customs duties. Britain’s foreign minister, George Canning, convinced the Tory government in London that a prohibition on the neutral carrying trade between the West Indies and Europe would be the surest way to retaliate against Napoleon. This edict was particularly resented by the United States because it hindered American commerce with Britain’s competitors.3
In December 1807, Napoleon answered with the Milan Decree, which permitted France to seize ships that followed the rules set down by the British Orders in Council. This pair of duelling decrees, if fully implemented, would ban virtually all American trade with Europe.4
In 1807, even before learning of the Milan Decree, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson prompted Congress to pass the Embargo Act,5 which made it illegal for American vessels to sail to any foreign port. The effect of the act was to call a halt to American exports. While foreign vessels remained free to carry imports to the United States, they too were barred from carrying American exports to foreign destinations on their return trips. Few foreign shippers were much interested in one-way trade. Through the Embargo Act, the U.S. was cutting off its nose to spite its face. The primary victims of the act were American ports, shippers, and commercial interests.
Jefferson hoped to teach both the British and the French the lesson that if they persisted in their ways, they would have to live without American goods. As a consequence, the value of American exports plunged from $108 million in 1807 to $22 million in 1808, while imports to the United States contracted from $138 million to $57 million. Not surprisingly, Jefferson’s attempt to isolate the U.S. from Europe generated a sharp rise in smuggling, not least between British North America and the U.S. With their strong trading interests, New Englanders particularly loathed the Embargo Act. Their Federalist opposition to Jefferson’s Republicans expressed the fury of the region.
Early in 1809, during its last days, the Jefferson administration pushed the Non-Intercourse Act through Congress to replace the reviled Embargo Act.6 The new act banned trade only with Britain and France. Before the end of 1809, further legislation allowed American ships to trade anywhere but kept the ports of the United States closed to British and French ships.
British and French interference with American trade, combined with Jefferson’s ineffective response, left Americans in a surly mood. But American rage was further provoked by an action undertaken by the British alone.
Throughout the presidency of Thomas Jefferson and in the early years of the Madison administration, American resentment mounted against the British for their actions on the seas and in the North American interior. Power brokers in federal politics were well aware that the United States was a sanctuary for British sailors looking for a better life than the one they had in the Royal Navy.
In 1805, an estimated eleven thousand sailors on American merchant ships were Royal Navy veterans or deserters. The United States allowed British deserters to become naturalized American citizens, but Britain did not respect the right of the U.S. to naturalize anyone born in the United Kingdom. The British claimed the right to halt American ships on the seas and search for sailors who had deserted from the Royal Navy. On occasion, the Royal Navy executed men they seized from American ships; others were flogged, and most were “impressed” (forced back into service). This form of impressment infuriated Americans, who saw it as an assault on the sovereignty of the United States.
In June 1807, for example, a British naval squadron lay in wait on the waters of Chesapeake Bay, hoping to intercept two French ships in the vicinity. The presence of British warships in Chesapeake Bay, near the crucial ports of Baltimore and Annapolis and close to the republic’s federal capital in Washington, D.C., infuriated the United States, but there was little they could do about it. In addition, the close proximity of the American coast proved too great a temptation to a number of sailors on the British ships. They deserted.
An incident on Chesapeake Bay brought Britain and the United States to the brink of war. The fifty-gun HMS Leopard,7 commanded by the Royal Navy’s Captain Salusbury Humphreys, pursued and intercepted the USS Chesapeake, an American fr
igate, off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia. U.S. Commodore James Barron refused the British demand to turn over British deserters to the Royal Navy. Operating under orders from Vice Admiral George Berkeley, the commander of the Royal Navy’s North American station, Humphreys opened fire on the Chesapeake, killing three Americans, wounding eighteen others, and forcing the U.S. vessel to strike its colours. The British seized four members of the Chesapeake’s crew and carried them off. One of them, Jenkin Ratford, a well-known deserter, was later hanged from the yardarm of the HMS Halifax.
Two of the Americans seized had volunteered for service in the Royal Navy in 1806. They were both sentenced to receive five hundred lashes, but their sentences were later commuted. When the Chesapeake sailed back to Hampton Roads, the report of the incident provoked American fury and demands for retaliation. Realizing that its forces had gone too far, the British government decided to disavow Berkeley and issued an apology to the United States. By the autumn of 1807, the war fever had abated.8 Although the Chesapeake incident did not lead to war, the Americans and the British remained deeply and bitterly divided over impressment.¶ 9, 10
The impressment of British sailors seized from U.S. ships was the sharpest wound endured by Americans before the War of 1812, the wound that would not heal. But in the interior, another struggle was underway, and this struggle also sharpened American antagonism toward Great Britain.
If embargo and impressment were front of mind for American statesmen, a new group of American politicians with a different set of priorities came to the fore during this dangerous time. Land-hungry politicians exerted growing influence in the corridors of power of the United States. The goal of these new power brokers was the expansion of the American Republic. As the years passed, they whipped up sentiment in favour of a war that would drive the old imperial power out of its remaining holdings in North America. Deeply hostile to Britain, they became known as the War Hawks.
Henry Clay, the young politician from Kentucky nicknamed “the Western Star,” personified the new breed. He spoke for the America of the early nineteenth century, the America that had left the eastern seaboard behind in favour of the rising power of the West. His America pointed beyond the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi and west of the great river into the Louisiana Territory. Expansion west, south, and north was Clay’s agenda for the future of his young country.
Henry Clay was born on the Clay family homestead in Hanover County, Virginia, on April 12, 1777. He studied law at the College of William and Mary, and in 1797 he was admitted to the bar. That same year, he relocated to Lexington, Kentucky, where he set up a law practice and soon became renowned for his courtroom oratory. Tall, gaunt, even cadaverous, the ambitious Clay married Lucretia Hart, the youngest daughter of the wealthy Colonel Thomas Hart, in 1799. This alliance connected him with the leading business elements in Kentucky.11 He became a successful lawyer and a shrewd investor with a knack for speculating in land.
Clay soon developed political ambitions. In 1803, he won the election to become the representative of Fayette County in the Kentucky General Assembly. Three years later, the Kentucky legislature appointed him to complete the term of a U.S. senator who was forced to resign his seat. On his return to the state in 1807 after serving in the upper chamber in Washington, he was elected Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives. During these years he made himself the voice of Kentucky, whose population nearly doubled to four hundred thousand in the first decade of the century.
Clay was an economic nationalist who from the first days of his career set out to foster a national economic design that would forge ties of mutual interest between manufacturers in the East and agrarian interests in the West, and between the industrializing North and the frontier West. He later called this concept the American system.12
Clay made himself the leading spokesman of a band of young politicians from the West and the South whose belligerence toward Britain was a defining sentiment. With Henry Clay and others like him, the popular image of the United States morphs from the days of the American Revolution and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution to the age of the frontiersmen. The late-eighteenth-century figures seem antiquated in their fussy wigs and fancy garb; they appear in the guise of philosophers who are soberly and disinterestedly creating a new country based on a constitution intended to fashion a new beginning for mankind. From there, America bolts forward in the popular imagination as a land of plain-spoken individualists living on a vast continent and leaving the old ways behind them.
Both of these images are simplifications and distortions. They do contain a glimpse of the truth, however. Between the days of the Revolution and the drafting of the Constitution, on the one hand, and the epoch of migrants heading west on riverboats and horse-drawn wagons, America ceased to be an affair of the East Coast and instead became a continental project. The United States became markedly less European and more specifically American.
The Americans who led the Revolution were very much at home in both Europe and America. Although they regarded his clothing as odd, the French were happy to fete Benjamin Franklin as a philosopher cut from the same cloth as they were. Thomas Jefferson fitted in easily in Paris. He made sense of the world through the eyes of the European Enlightenment. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was as much a product of European thought as it was of American thought. In fact, he wrote it for audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. While the document roused Americans to the righteousness of their cause, it explained the need for independence — “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation” — to a European audience.
The Revolution severed the link in political identity between America and Europe. After the Treaty of Paris of 1783, immigrants to America could no longer see themselves as transplanted Englishmen. They had to become Americans. A large part of the formative background of the Thirteen Colonies fell away with the Treaty of Paris, and those residents were already looking west while they fought for their independence from the mother country. Their future, revolutionary leaders such as George Washington believed, lay in the lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains.
Washington’s appetite for new land could only be satisfied through the demolition of the barriers Britain placed in the way of western settlement. The War Hawks, in particular, had their eye on the desirable farmlands of Upper Canada. And those from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio were intent on ending what they saw as the Indian menace along the frontier of American settlement. As a result, they detested the alliance between the native peoples and the British Crown, an alliance of convenience to be sure, but an alliance that still stood in the way of the movement of settlers onto native lands.
In the years immediately prior to the outbreak of the War of 1812, Henry Clay managed to make himself a key power broker in national politics. In 1810, the Kentucky legislature picked him to complete the term of a senator who had resigned to serve as a judge on the United States Circuit Court. In 1811, he was elected to the national House of Representatives, where he was chosen as Speaker of the House on the first day he sat in that body. Never had Washington seen such rapid elevation to the high office of Speaker, and it has never happened since.
Clay was a staunch adherent of the Republicanism of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and as Speaker of the House he learned how to wield immense influence. Despite Napoleon’s interference with American shipping, Clay had not the slightest temptation to go to war with France. Instead, he saved his considerable bellicosity for the British. In Clay’s mind, war with Britain would resolve a host of problems. For one thing, it would help resolve the economic downturn that for half a decade had plagued the regions of the United States west of the Appalachian Mountains. The British blockade of Europe had barred the farm produce of the Ohio Valley from the markets of the continent.13 The disruption of the trade that flowed down the Mississippi to New
Orleans and from there to Europe contributed to the strong anti-British sentiments of the West.
In addition, Clay and other western advocates of a showdown with Britain perceived that the British were constantly stirring up the native peoples against the settlers. In the minds of westerners and their political representatives in Congress, the best way to end the native threat was to drive the British out of Canada.
As Speaker of the House, Clay packed key committees with members who were equally antagonistic toward the British. One of them was John C. Calhoun, who was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1810, after having served as a member of the South Carolina legislature. He and Clay would be associated with each other for decades. Later in his career, Calhoun served as vice president of the United States, first under John Quincy Adams and then under Andrew Jackson.
Calhoun was born in 1782, into a family that owned a farm in the backcountry of South Carolina. When his father, a Scots-Irish immigrant from Ulster, fell ill, Calhoun quit school to devote himself to the family farm. Later, his brothers supported him financially so that he could resume his studies. In 1804, he graduated from Yale College, and then he studied law at the Tapping Reeve Law School in Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1807, he was called to the bar in South Carolina.
