engagement to deliver up deserters, provided there should be no further forcible seizures from American vessels; but this proposal was not accepted, and abuse and remonstrance continued until the peace of Amiens. Upon the renewal of a maritime war between Great Britain and France, King, the 1803. American representative at St. James, brought the Addington ministry, in 1803, nearly to an experimental compromise for five years. Both England and the United States were to prohibit strictly the clandestine concealment or deportation of one another's seamen, in consideration of which the search of American vessels was permitted in British harbors but not at sea. At the last moment, however, Lord St. Vincent insisting upon search in "the narrow seas" likewise, the effect of which must have been to expose the whole commerce of the United States which passed round to Holland, Germany, and the Baltic, King refused his assent. King left for home immediately after, and the Addington ministry soon dissolved. All tokens of condescension had disappeared with the return of the Pitt party to power. The American flag 1803-6. was subjected to new annoyance and insult. British war vessels now came close up to our seacoast to watch our commerce and search for sailors. New York harbor was used by the British squadron as a cruising station. Instead of sending over to board an American vessel, the British naval commander would require the merchant captain to transmit his papers for inspection by his own boat. Remonstrance through the Department of State received little heed. Our Executive would have assented to an arrangement on the basis of King's compromise; but so far from abating the claim to impress on the high seas, the British ministry had nearly arrogated the right to take seamen out of American vessels within American waters. Meantime the commercial articles of the Jay treaty had expired, and Jefferson desired that a new convention should definitely exclude impressment on the high seas and regulate the right of search, a mutual surrender of deserters from ships and garrisons serving the convenience of the two countries instead. He was not, however, greatly concerned should the treaty fail of renewal, for in theory he 1806. NON-IMPORTATION SCHEME. 105 thought it as advantageous to let the dealings of nations depend on voluntary good treatment as to fix them by a written contract, which in any strait was likely to become a cause of war through the forced interpretation of an interested party.* January. Such being the British situation, the House, by the time the President's British message was received, evinced great distrust of Randolph's committee, but concluded finally to refer spoliations thither, and impressments to a select committee. The Ways and Means hung back as if to baffle the Executive once more; two members were absent; the chairman gave out that he was sick; January had nearly passed without eliciting even a report upon the President's opening message. At length the House agreed to Jan. 29. discharge Randolph's committee, upon which Gregg, of Pennsylvania, at once offered a resolution for suspending British importations; his preamble reciting the wrongs the United States had suffered from England's arbitrary seizures and impressments.† March 5-17. Gregg's resolution was presently debated by the House in committee of the whole. Gregg claimed in his opening speech, as did the administration party in Congress generally, that non-importation was not intended for a war measure, but as a means of aiding pending negotiations with Great Britain in the American interest. Samuel Smith's elaborate argument in the Senate, where the same subject was under discussion, set forth this theory in detail. Out of $75,000,000 imported by the United States at the present date, $47,000,000 were for consumption, and of this $47,000,000, at least $30,000,000 came from Great Britain and her dependencies, to whom our merchants carried in return for consumption scarcely half this amount; and to make up the balance thus owed, were obliged to exercise their talents and enterprise in seeking other markets, from which the new British rules now sought unjustly to exclude them.‡ * See Jefferson's and Madison's Writings, 1803-5; Annals of Congress, and Executive documents. † Annals of Congress, January, 1806. Annals of Congress, March, 1806. This non-importation scheme was doubtless inspired at the White House. We have seen that under Washington's administration, Jefferson and Madison strongly favored a system of discriminating duties, or commercial retaliation, upon Great Britain as an efficient weapon for causing America's commercial rights to be respected.* Non-importation was tried dur ing the Revolution, though not with marked success. To such a policy, of which the Jay treaty for a time deprived us, they turned in this new emergency, confident that the experiment, if fairly pursued, would reduce Britain's arrogance and bring her to terms by a process of material exhaustion. But there were two considerations not to be properly eliminated from such an experiment: (1st) the question how far a naval power, vastly superior to our own, would passively suffer it to continue; and (2d) whether the patience of our own people, who must needs suffer under the dispensation, would endure sufficiently long. Upon the latter of these considerations, at least, Jefferson in the end miscalculated, though the retaliation policy might be viewed as a preliminary rather than a preventive of war. Randolph, no longer at liberty to play the sick man, now sprang upon the Executive with the ferocity of an Indian whose ambush has been discovered. All the armory of his oratory-his eloquence, his caustic satire, keen ridicule, and bold defiance-was now opened in promiscuous fire upon the foreign policy of the administration. He forgot all political restraints. He spared neither party. First he flung out at what he termed the pusillanimous policy of the President, and the subtle Executive influence to which his fellowmembers of the House so tamely submitted; next at the merchants, whose neutral trade, which Congress was called upon to protect, he pronounced dishonest, the mushroom, the fungus of war. Randolph was far from consistent or logical. He called for Treasury figures, and then professed he had not time to look them over. His principles of international law he took bodily from a pamphlet lately published in Great Britain, entitled War in Disguise, or the Frauds of Neutral Flags, upon which he relied without caring to know what might be said * See vol. i, p. 261, 262. 1806 NON-IMPORTATION SCHEME. 107 on the American side. Freely as he had favored the chastisement of the Spaniards on the disputed Louisiana Territory, after contending that the United States owned not a foot beyond the Iberville, the drift of his present argument was the cowardly one that we could not fight Great Britain on the seas, and hence ought to retreat, abandoning our commerce to its fate. Non-importation, he contended, was not even a manly opposition, as embargo would be; it would lead necessarily to war, and, for his part, he was averse to a naval war with any nation whatever. Even the impressment of our seamen furnished him with argument against provoking a contest for American rights. "You cannot," he said, "command seamen for your navy in time of war without impressment. The wealth of Croesus could not sustain the expense; and even if that objection could be removed, the operation by enlistment is too tardy to meet a sudden emergency." "What!" he continued, reverting to the main theme, "shall this great mammoth of the American forest leave his native element and plunge into the water in a mad contest with the shark? After shrinking from the Spanish jackal, do you presume to bully the British lion? Are you mad enough to take up the cudgels that have been struck from the nerveless hands of the three great maritime powers of Europe?" Such a diatribe from one who for years had been accustomed to commend Republican principles, and who was instrumental in the practical legislation under which the Louisiana purchase was lately consummated, could not be ascribed to a well-matured conviction of the public interests, nor even to that whimsical partiality for Englishmen and English things in which Randolph indulged as a virtuoso. A wounded sel!esteem was now perceptible, which no longer discharged its venom upon the judiciary, the Postmaster-General, and the Yazoo claimants alone, but forked its tongue at Madison and the President himself. Through the session he protested constantly against this "secret, irrepressible, overruling influence which defies the touch but pervades and decides everything," and (lashing at Varnum and Bidwell) against "the back-stairs influence" of men who bring messages to the House, which govern its action without appearing on the journals. To sow distrust between Madison and Gallatin he praised the latter as one whose vigorous understanding and practical sense were ousted from the council, while Jefferson and Madison managed the foreign relations by themselves; and went so far, after he was forced to correct this assertion, as falsely to intimate that the Secretary of State would have sent money to France in advance of a legal appropriation.* "I ask," he says, unmindful that the Constitution created neither cabinet nor directory, "what is the opinion of the Cabinet, and find there is no longer any Cabinet." One stinging taunt of Randolph's had some foundation. D'Yrujo, the Spanish minister, whose recall, as we have seen, Madison demanded because of misconduct,† had at the request of his own government been suffered to depart on the footing of a minister asking leave to return home. But instead of departing, as he himself had professed to desire, D'Yrujo still hovered about Washington while the Spanish question was before Congress, and upon being notified by Madison that his presence was displeasing to the President, published two insolent replies, announcing that he should stay at the capital as long as he liked. Nothing further could be done in this awkward affair, and Madison bore the insult in silence. A bill was proposed in the Senate, authorizing the President to order the departure of foreign ministers in certain cases; which, however, was dropped, for to have passed it would import that in the present instance the Executive had moved precipitately. Randolph's onslaught upon the administration, sudden as it was vituperative, dismayed at first the House Republicans, none of whom could measure him with his own weapons; but they quickly rallied, and the majority stood firmly by the President, maintaining their side fairly in argument against him. The course of the debate showed, however, that on the Gregg resolution the party was not united; and news * See Adams's Gallatin, pp. 340–344. † Supra, p. 95. |