10. RESPONDING TO WAR IN EUROPE
As war had resumed in Europe in 1803, it was not long before the high-handed conduct of the European powers, especially Britain, made America’s maritime rights again become a scorching issue. Both Britain and France claimed the right to prevent neutral countries from trading with the other, which in practice, since Britain held the scepter of the sea, meant that America was soon back to the exasperating practice of having the British seize and search her ships, confiscate cargo, and remove alleged deserters and impress American seamen into British service. It was a straight oppression by the stronger naval power of the weaker, and international law walked the plank as soon as hostilities commenced. The British invoked the Rule of 1756, successfully imposed in the Seven Years’ War, whereby European powers that had forbidden trade with its West Indian colonies in time of peace should not open trade up to neutrals in wartime. Thus phrased, it seemed to put the onus for simply squashing trade by imposition of naval force on the exporting country, though the victim would be the neutral carrier, trying to pick up from one combatant and use his neutrality to assure delivery that the combatant power with inferior naval strength (France) could not assure himself. The legalities were a little more complicated than they at first seemed. But it was all made excessively difficult by the British practice of not just inspecting American ships and seizing cargos but also dragooning American sailors, along with alleged defectors from the Royal Navy, into that navy.
The turning point came when a British court determined that the practice of the French delivering to American ports cargo that American ships then conveyed to French ports would be considered as direct commerce from the French West Indies unless the Americans could satisfy the intercepting British that they had intended originally for the voyage to terminate in an American port. This was not going to be easy to establish, but it was at least a variation on outright seizure, and the product of a British court decision and not just an executive naval command order. Madison reported the decision in a trenchantly worded report in January 1806, and the Senate condemned “unprovoked aggression” and the “violation of neutral rights.” When Britain ignored American threats and protests, the Congress voted an embargo on an extensive list of items that the U.S. imported from Britain that it could produce itself or buy from other countries. The statute was only in effect from October to November 1806, when Jefferson asked for its suspension until after the election of his successor, in December 1808. European affairs vastly surpassed the efforts of America to make itself felt. In May 1806, Charles James Fox, again British foreign secretary, had declared an absolute naval blockade of the European Atlantic coast from Brest in northwest France to the mouth of the Elbe in Prussia.
At the end of 1806, Jefferson sent William Pinckney (a member of a temporarily ubiquitous family) to London to join the minister there, the already ubiquitous James Monroe, in trying to sort out an agreement with Britain, with the imposition of the trade embargo against British goods as a bargaining chip. The British weren’t interested: a treaty was negotiated that produced only slight concessions on West Indian trade and none at all on British impressment of American sailors or the American ambition for payment of indemnities for British ship seizures. It was a painful lesson in the comparative importance of and correlation of forces between states, and Jefferson declined to send such a feeble arrangement to the Senate for ratification.
Napoleon replied to Fox with his Berlin Decree of November 21, 1806 (following his conquest of Prussia, a blitzkrieg as astounding as that of the German army in conquering France 134 years later). Napoleon purported to bar all commerce and communication between Britain and the entire continent of Europe. Jefferson then ordered new negotiations with Britain on the hopeful assumption that the British would prove more amenable after this initiative from the French emperor (who had promoted himself from first consul three years before). The British and French scarcely noticed the Americans as the greatest war in the history of the world until a hundred years later steadily grew in scope and intensity.
A very galling incident illustrated the dilemma of America and the limitations of its president’s pacifistic impulses in June 1807, when the British frigate
Leopard
stopped the American frigate
Chesapeake
beyond the three-mile territorial limit off Norfolk, Virginia, and the American ship declined to have her crew inspected for British deserters. The British ship subdued the American vessel with four broadsides killing three and wounding 18 Americans. Four sailors were seized, of whom only one was a British deserter. The incident inflamed and unified American opinion, Jefferson estimated, beyond anything since Lexington and Concord 32 years before. The U.S. demand for an apology and indemnity was simply ignored by the British, in what was now the customary manner, and Jefferson was finally forced to gamble on his economic response policy, which had been passed over in favor of the Adams-Hamilton military threat of 1798. Jefferson secured congressional approval of an almost complete embargo against trade with all foreign governments (since virtually all accessible countries were now at war with each other) and closed American ports entirely to all British shipping.
This policy was an inexcusable misreading of what should have been obvious to Jefferson and his collaborators: that the United States would be the principal victim; that the embargo would have no impact on France, which controlled almost all of Europe west of Russia, south of Sweden, and north of the Ottoman Empire; and that the British would benefit from the loss of American competition, and would import foodstuffs from South America instead. American ships at sea when the embargo was imposed simply did not return to American ports and continued as international traders, enjoying the full cooperation of the Royal Navy with any American ship that ignored the American law. An immense smuggling business was carried on through Canada, with the cooperation not only of the British but of most New England and Upstate New York commercial interests.
The embargo did not prevent British ships from delivering cargos to the United States, but it forbade them to remove American exports, so many dropped off in northern U.S. ports and picked up return cargoes in Canada. And Napoleon, astounded at the absurdity of the American measure and partially justifying Theodore Roosevelt’s disparagement of the comparative naïveté of Jefferson and Madison in dealing with such a man as he, seized all American shipping in French and French-controlled ports and waters, more than $10 million of shipping assets, claiming that any such ships were obviously British vessels with false papers, as no American would ignore Jefferson’s embargo act.
Jefferson amplified his mistake with draconian enforcement orders, dispensing with the Fourth Amendment requirement for search warrants, ordering seizure by customs officials on suspicion of infractions of the embargo, deploying the armed forces along the Canadian border, and even determining that the Lake Champlain area was in a state of insurrection. None of these measures stopped smuggling on a massive scale, but they invited nullification actions by state legislatures (including by former secretary of state Pickering in New England), the withholding of state militias for enforcement purposes in New England, and unsuccessful constitutional challenges, and they involved clear impositions of force more objectionable than those for which Jefferson had urged revolt from George III in the most empurpled terms in the Declaration of Independence and elsewhere. The policy was an unmitigated economic, political, and moral disaster. The export industry declined by 75 percent and standards of living, especially in New England and the main Atlantic ports, plummeted. Finally, the Congress repealed the embargo and Jefferson signed this abandonment of his policy just three days before the inauguration of his successor, on March 1, 1809.
11. ASSESSING THOMAS JEFFERSON
Jefferson had been a good president up to the economic reprisals against the warring European powers. His simple and frugal manner of government, devolving much back on the states and promoting democratic values generally, was popular, and with Gallatin at the Treasury, prosperity continued to increase. The Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark and Pike expeditions were valuable in themselves in laying out settler routes and goals, and fired the nation’s imagination with the organic growth of western settlement. Because the forceful handling of the Genet and XYZ affairs by Washington, and the strong resistance, with clear military overtones, of Adams to the original maritime impressments and seizure crisis of 1798 had been successful, Jefferson had been spared the exposure of his ill-considered economic reprisals against larger economies of much less vulnerability than America’s to misconceived and largely unenforceable laws. He was finally free to present and force through the docile Congress a policy that laid the U.S. economy low and exposed Jefferson as an innumerate blowhard and a hypocrite. He spent much of the last year of his presidency in an immobilized state, racked by migraines and digestive problems.
Only the happenstance of the Louisiana Purchase made Jefferson a more successful president than Adams, and in that as in previous offices, Jefferson did not have the steady judgment and self-control of Washington, any more than had the quirky and irascible Adams.
Yet, though Jefferson botched his mad essay at economic warfare, he was a great expander of the country, popularizer of the presidency, and decentralizer of government, and one of the most politically gifted and effective leaders in the country’s history, clearly surpassed in this regard only by Franklin D. Roosevelt and possibly by Lincoln and Reagan also. His principal rival as the greatest intellectual in the presidency, Woodrow Wilson (though John Quincy Adams, John Adams’s son, could also be a rival), wrestled 110 years later with similar maritime provocations in a European war, and had the same pacifistic tendencies as Jefferson, but, at the head of a much more powerful America, would make war rather than tolerate the humiliation of America. Jefferson had done little as the country’s first secretary of state, and less, other than in partisan organization and political rough and tumble, as its second vice president. He was a talented president, but it is not accidental that he directed that his gravestone should refer to his status as author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia statute on the rights of man, and to his status as founder of the University of Virginia, and not to his great offices of state.
Only the reputation of the Democratic-Republicans as sincere adherents to popular government (which was not an imposture), and the continued erosion of the Federalists and the absence of a galvanizing figure to rally the opposition, prevented a political upheaval in the 1808 elections. Hamilton was sorely missed. Three of the candidates for national office from the previous election ran again. Jefferson followed the Washington precedent and retired after two terms, though he could presumably have been reelected, because of the disarray of his opponents and despite the fiasco of his trade policies. He was replaced by Madison as the presidential candidate of the Democratic-Republicans (Democrats, as they became, and Jefferson and Madison are celebrated as the founders of the modern Democratic Party), and George Clinton was again nominated for vice president. The Federalists again chose Charles Cotesworth Pinckney for president and Rufus King for vice president.
Some of the Jeffersonians splintered off under the half-mad but brilliant John Randolph of Roanoke, who was a states’ rights and nullification advocate (he proposed that states could decide the federal government had exceeded its powers and simply nullify the application of the offending law within their own borders). The eastern Jeffersonians nominated George Clinton, on what amounted almost to a free-trade platform. Clinton thus became the first and to date only person in American history to be nominated and stand for election as president and as vice president in the same year. Technically, he was running against himself, as the same person could not simultaneously hold both positions. The Randolphites were known as the “Quids” (because Randolph said they were neither Democratic-Republicans nor Federalists, and were a “third something,” or Tertium Quids—it was a mark of an erudite electorate that a splinter party acquired a Latin name). They nominated James Monroe for president, but he, unlike his administration colleague Clinton, declined to allow his name to stand against his old friend Madison. The vote was closer than in the previous election, but Madison and Clinton won, by 122 electoral votes to 47 for Pinckney and six for Clinton, who had the consolation of being reelected vice president by 113 to 47 for King. The Federalists made substantial gains in the Congress, but did not secure the majority of either house. Pinckney only received about 32 percent of the votes for president against about 55 percent for Madison.
The Americans suffered their first serious strategic setback, going back 50 years to the Seven Years’ War, when Jefferson had said that taking Canada was “a mere matter of marching.” It proved to be more complicated than that, but he didn’t even endow his country with the men to make the march. If Jefferson had taken a leaf from the book of his predecessors, and built up a large army and equipped it, he could have threatened Britain with the permanent seizure of Canada, and could have forced some variance in the maritime provocations of the British. The application of simple grade-three arithmetic would have told him, as it told his opponents and the countries he was aiming to influence, that the policies he did adopt could not succeed, and their failure squandered a good deal of the political capital and credibility that had been built up by his comrades in the establishment of the United States—Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and Adams.