tral and belligerent interests, and rule the ocean in alliance. Already enraged over the loss of one French colony after another in the West Indies, rebellions against the Bonapartes in Spain, which England espoused, and the United States had an interest in fostering, he comprehended by a single glance at the unexpected act of May 1st, in an American paper transmitted to him, that the United States, vexed by his Rambouillet decree, its whole commerce was now irrevocably made over to England, upon England's own terms, unless he made the first bid which that act invited. Angry as he was, even furious, he made that bid at once, and close upon his worst manifesto, sooner than give his island enemy so decisive a commercial advantage. Like a Frenchman, he now accosted the United States with bland politeness; like an emperor, with dignity and the air of a benefactor; but, like a Napoleon, with the meanest duplicity. Professing great pleasure at learning that Congress had repealed its interdiction of French commerce, and engaged to oppose whichever belligerent refused the rights of neutrals, he announced through ChamAugust 5. pagny, now Duke of Cadore, to Armstrong, that the decrees of Berlin and Milan were revoked, and would cease to be in force from the 1st of November; "it being understood that in consequence of this declaration the English shall revoke their Orders in Council, and renounce the new pretences of blockade which they have attempted to establish, or that the United States, conformably to the act just communicated, shall cause their rights to be respected by the English." "It is with the most particular satisfaction," adds the minister, "that I inform you of this resolution of the Emperor. His Majesty loves the Americans. Their prosperity and their commerce enter into the views of his policy. The independence of America is one of the principal titles of the glory of France." The fervor of this epistle can hardly take off the chill of an imperial decree, dated at Trianon on the selfsame day, secretly promulgated, and only accidentally known in America years after Napoleon's downfall. The ultimate disposition the Emperor would make of the American property whose proceeds * Executive Documents. 1810. NAPOLEON SEEMS TO YIELD. 305 July 5. had been swept into the "chest of death" under the Rambouillet decree, must have become an important ingredient of his new policy. Against all such confiscation, which afforded in reality a new grievance on the part of the United States, unforeseen when the act of May was passed, Madison had remonstrated through the State department, informing Armstrong that some satisfactory provision for restoring that property "must be combined with a repeal of the French edicts," in order to justify non-intercourse against Great Britain.* It suited the Emperor's plans, however, to make a constant mystery of that point; to conciliate, to amuse, but not to yield. Both greed and revenge forbade that a franc should be paid over to the sufferers. While publicly defending his past course as a result of our own past legislation, and giving out the idea that this produce of plunder was to be a sort of reprisal security against potential, but not actual confiscations of French vessels, he turned the key of this chest of death stealthily, and appropriated the contents to himself. That secret decree of August 5th confiscated into the imperial treasury, without trial or further delay, all American vessels and merchandise brought in previous to May 1st, 1810. It provided, also, that until November 1st, when the Berlin and Milan decrees were conditionally revoked, American ships should be allowed to enter French ports, but not to unload (nor, presumably, to depart) without the imperial permission. This "mean and perfidious act," as Gallatin styled it in after years, was Napoleon's infliction upon the first neutral which had ever forced him to pacify.t Madison and his Cabinet, knowing only the Cadore letter, accepted the French assurance in good faith as they were justified in doing, leaving the spoliation fund for separate adjustment. For, at a certain point in public intercourse, either the word of a potentate must be taken as a pledge, or inter * Executive Documents. "Such a provision," adds Smith, "being an indispensable evidence of the just purpose of France towards the United States." † See 2 Gallatin's Writings, 198; Adams's Gallatin, 422. This secret was revealed to Gallatin in 1821, while he was minister to France. VOL. II.-26 national law has no security at all. Any relief, moreover, from this aimless and imbecile drift of foreign relations was to be welcomed. It remained, therefore, to summon Great Britain to repeal her own edicts against neutral commerce within three months, as the act provided, or else to suffer nonintercourse to revive against her alone. Here was the turning-point in American relations. Our administration wanted no war, but to escape an intolerable dilemma, and have but one enemy at a time. A little of Napoleon's rapidity and power of adaptation to novel surroundings, and the Perceval cabinet might have preserved peace with the United States, for the Rambouillet decree festered in the side of our commerce.* But Napoleon's deceitful pretensions were less of a barrier to confidence than the blunt and contemptuous incivility of the British ministry. No flattering ambiguities were furnished in this quarter. Neither the equal opportunities which the act of May offered, nor the imminent revival of restraints under Bonaparte's protection, moved the Perceval cabinet. They made no independent offer to repeal injurious decrees. They did not thwart Napoleon's new designs by recalling Orders in Council, even with the reservation they might have employed that his revocation of decrees should be honestly fulfilled, a course of procedure which would have rescued England's honor and our own, and held the Emperor by a double pledge. They did not interrogate for themselves whether the Cadore announcement, which appeared final and positive enough upon its face, so as to deprive Britain of plausible grounds for maintaining longer the present neutral system, was a snare and delusion. But taunting the Emperor to the utmost, they assumed that before England need move a hair's-breadth the United States were bound to extort a continuous performance of Napoleon's undertaking for some indefinite period; all this in fundamental disregard of that * Smith to Armstrong, November 2d, 1810, shows that the French situation was thought not to warrant putting more of our vessels within Napoleon's reach at present. †This was hardly to be expected when they held American commerce subservient to their policy in spite of France.-Madison's Writings, May 7th, 1810. 1810. BRITISH CABINET STUBBORN. 307 legislation upon which the Emperor himself had relied, and by whose tenor a genuine revocation was the essential fact; and, in a word, so as to require us to impeach Napoleon's veracity to his face, and confess that King George and not he could be trusted. A posture this more worthy of the sardonic Canning than the fair-tempered Wellesley. And, as if it were not enough to constantly discredit the imperial acts and motives, the British ministry soon developed the intention of insisting that the repeal of the Berlin and Milan decrees would not suffice, but France must be led to abandon her whole continental system before the British Orders in Council, hitherto justified as retaliation for the Berlin and Milan decrees alone, could be recalled. In other words, the United States must not only force an entrance for her neutral trade, but lay Europe open to British goods, and the produce of British colonies besides. And, finally, the question of repealing British Orders in Council must be separated from that of new pretences of blockade, to which Napoleon's conditional repeal had alluded; for England would not consent to blend the two subjects in discussion, nor admit that any blockade had been proclaimed by her not strictly conformable to the laws of civilized warfare and the approved usages of nations. Such was the British Cabinet, unimpressible as iron, upon which Pinkney vainly labored with a copy of Cadore's letter from August, when he received it, until the following February, when non-importation must needs revive; urging repeatedly a revocation of British Orders, and as for blockades, asking no more than the reasonable concession that a blockade, to be effectual, must be maintained by an adequate blockading force,-a principle England had repeatedly admitted in other wars. Wellesley was bland as to what might be granted under impossible circumstances, but obstinate as to all practical means of turning the present situation to good use.* All this, the reader should remember, was at a time when the wounds of the Chesapeake had become a rankling sore; * See Executive Documents; Pinkney's Correspondence, August, 1810-February, 1811. when American sailors by the hundreds, each year,* were seized by press-gangs, or dragged from the decks of our peaceful merchant-vessels, to man the yards and fill the bloody cockpits of frigates whose flag they detested; when a British minister, discarded for his insolence to our Executive, had gone about the country like a spy, fraternizing with our British faction, and his final recall had left the British government long unrepresented at Washington, whence a suspicion, perhaps unfounded, that Wellesley had determined to humiliate this government by sending no successor of rank at all.† What substantial wrong had we inflicted on France or England to be thus treated by either? What did the United States ask from one belligerent or the other that was not just and equitable upon the soundest maxims of international jurisprudence? But from the long sequence of events, and as one feels most keenly the wrong committed by his own kindred and those whose esteem he holds dearest, our people had grown more sensitive to British than French enormities. It was a fact upon which politicians might comment in vain, and yet a stubborn one, that all Napoleon's wanton seizures of American vessels, and wholesale confiscation of property, aroused in the United States not one-fifth part of the public indignation which the developments of Jackson's mission alone occasioned. Nov. 2. Our President could not, consistently with his own rules of public action, balance French and English aggressions apart from the effect they produced upon the country. He issued his proclamation, November 2d, giving initial operation to the late act of Congress, on the ground that Napoleon's actual repeal of the Berlin and Milan decrees had, by the terms of the Cadore letter, gone into effect the day before. This proclamation had the effect of a three months' warning to Great Britain. It was not certain that this action, necessarily hasty, was for the best; but, doubtless a stage had * See Secretary Smith's Report, 11th Congress, Second Session. This was Madison's own interpretation of the conduct of Wellesley, from whose high personal character he had, at first, cherished better expectations.-Madison's Writings, May, October, 1810. Morier, a chargé, was the only British representative now left at Washington. |