For Honour's Sake (4 page)

Not that Bayard was a man of pure reason and little passion. On May 5, 1800, a heated debate on the Senate floor erupted between Bayard and Christopher Champlin, the representative for Rhode Island, when the latter moved to redraft a bill setting commissions paid to port collectors so that the percentages allowed collectors in Wilmington and New London could be reduced. Bayard saw the move as a personal swipe at those particular port collectors—the one in Wilmington was a friend. Two days after the exchange, the two senators met in Philadelphia to settle the matter with pistols. It was a grim day, raining heavily, so the duel occurred in an abandoned shed next to a stone bridge. Champlin and Bayard paced off the agreed distance, turned and fired. Bayard's ball ripped open Champlin's cheek while his opponent's struck his thigh.

Duelling being illegal in Pennsylvania, both men and their seconds were forced to flee the state's jurisdiction or face charges. Bayard wrote his cousin, Andrew Bayard, a couple of weeks later to say that the “escape I made from the city was quite lucky, but I do not like the idea of perpetual banishment which the affair is likely to occasion.” He asked the cousin to enquire of the state governor whether it would be possible for him to grant everyone involved clemency from prosecution.
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Perhaps this incident served even more to incline Bayard toward caution, for by the time Clay took his seat in the Senate his debating style was noted as the exact opposite of the young senator's. New Hampshire Federalist William Plumer considered Clay more emotional and enthusiastic while Bayard's style was that of the “precise reasoner.”
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Clay's first foray into Washington politics was short; the senatorial term he filled expired after just one session.

Back in Kentucky, Clay was re-elected to its legislature and appointed Speaker. Rather than adhering to tradition by confining himself to maintaining order and ensuring that legislative procedure was upheld,
Clay never hesitated to step down from the chair in order to wade into the midst of debates—a practice he would continue as Speaker of the House of Representatives. During one such foray, an observer wrote that “every muscle of [Clay's] face was in motion; his whole body seemed agitated, as if every part were instinct with a separate life; and his small, white hand, with its blue veins apparently distended, almost to bursting, moved gracefully, but with all the energy of rapid and vehement gesture. The appearance of the speaker seemed that of a pure intellect, wrought up to its mightiest energies, and brightly glowing through the thin and transparent veil of flesh that enrobed it.”
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In December 1808, Clay brought before the legislature a series of resolutions intended to support President Thomas Jefferson's responses to maritime measures taken by Great Britain to bar America and other neutral nations from conducting trade with France. Under these measures the Royal Navy had been authorized by House of Commons orders-in-council to seize neutral merchant ships apprehended while attempting to enter any French Empire port. Increasingly outraged by Britain's apparent disregard for America's sovereignty, Clay sought legislative approval of Jefferson's embargo, whereby the United States would voluntarily cease conducting any trade with either Britain or France. He also called upon it to condemn Britain's orders-in-council and to pledge that Kentucky would back the U.S. government in any measure considered necessary to uphold its rights.

Humphrey Marshall was the only legislator to oppose the resolutions. On January 4, 1809, the two locked in a heated verbal joust that ended with Marshall calling Clay a liar. A fistfight would have ensued had others not intervened to restrain the two. When Clay calmed down, he apologized to the House and then poured more coals on the fire by stating he would never have resorted to blows if Marshall had been a man of honour. Marshall snapped back that Clay's apology was that of “a poltroon!” He then issued a challenge, accepted by Clay in a formal note that same evening.
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On the early morning of January 19, the two men, their seconds, and appointed surgeons gathered on a meadow covered in frost-hardened Kentucky bluegrass next to the Ohio River near Louisville. Clay and
Marshall faced each other from a distance of ten paces with pistols hanging down by their sides. One of the seconds called out, “Attention! Fire!” Two pistols cracked, and Marshall was staggered when Clay's ball grazed his stomach. Both took aim again, but Clay's pistol failed to fire and Marshall missed again. Marshall reloaded more quickly and snapped off a slug that tore a gash out of Clay's thigh. Unbalanced as he was by the ball's impact, Clay's third round went wild. Although Clay demanded that the duel continue, the seconds hastily announced that his wound meant that the men now fought an unequal contest and that honour had been served.
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The duel only furthered Clay's reputation throughout Kentucky, so it was hardly a surprise when he was once again selected to serve out the term of a federal senator upon completion of his sixth term in the state's legislature. Clay rode toward Washington in January 1810 preoccupied with one overriding concern. The time had come, he believed, when the United States must make war on Great Britain.

When Clay's tired mount plodded up the muddy streets, past the many half-built houses that had stood abandoned since the collapse of Washington's building boom three years previous, there was little about the capital to inspire a man into believing this was the seat of power of a nation capable of challenging one or both of the world's most powerful empires. Although still growing rapidly, Washington's population was just 5,650. Large stretches of farmland and small woods separated tiny clusters of buildings. The capital of the United States was no more akin to London, the world's most populous and powerful commercial centre, or Paris in all its elegant opulence than was America's economy a challenge to that of Britain and France. Except in its slightly larger size and the presence of a handful of modest government buildings, Washington more closely resembled Clay's Lexington than the great European cities.

This was true for all of America's burgeoning cities. Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia were older and larger than Washington and presented a more orderly form, with cobblestone streets running between rows of stone and brick buildings. But Boston and Philadelphia
were suffering decline brought on by harbours clogged with silt and a resultant loss of commerce to the new shipping capital of New York City. With its deep harbour surrounding three sides of Manhattan Island, this was the new boomtown where the real estate speculators, shipping magnates, trading houses, and financial firms concentrated.

But in 1810 even New York City was only just beginning a process of growth that would in the near future transform it from village to large city. Together, the four most populous American cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—claimed no more than a combined population of 175,000 out of a national population of 5.3 million. Two million white males in the land were enfranchised, and 85 percent of these were farmers. The United States was an agrarian nation. Its economy was almost entirely dependent on, in the words of President Jefferson, what its “yeoman farmers” produced. These farmers, Jefferson had declared, were the backbone of the nation, and it was to them that the Republican Party pandered.
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That suited Clay, for he was a man of the new west, where most men held modest land holdings. They tilled fields with ploughs either dragged by a mule or propelled forward by nothing but the brute strength of a man's shoulders and back. Food was what could be raised or grown. Wives spun the family's clothing from cotton or wool either produced on the farm or bartered for, and it was easy to place a man's social position by whether he wore homespun or imported British broadcloth. Cash was of little importance to such men, for during an entire lifetime of toil few would ever see a hundred dollars pass through their hands.
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In recent years, as anti-British sentiment rose to fever pitch in Kentucky, a wise politician like Clay had stored most of his broadcloth fineries and donned the rough homespun of his neighbours. But that would not do in Washington. His luggage contained the clothes that had given him the reputation of a dandy in earlier years.

Clay rode into a Washington in turmoil. Jefferson was gone, President James Madison just eleven months into his term after taking the oath of office on March 4, 1809. The government was in crisis, beset by how to respond with any effect to what many Americans called the British outrages. Clearly Jefferson's embargo, brought into effect on
December 22, 1807, was a failure. Described as “a self-blockade of the purest water,” the Embargo Act had prohibited departure of all vessels, American or foreign, from U.S. harbours for any foreign port. Stranded foreign ships could leave American waters only in ballast and with empty holds. This exception had been added to the act at the insistence of the always pragmatic secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, who feared that holding the few non-American ships would encourage other countries—particularly Britain and France—to retaliate in kind.
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Although the embargo was the brainchild of Jefferson and then Secretary of State Madison, enforcing the act had fallen on Gallatin's shoulders. By cutting Europe and European colonies off from the vast quantities of agricultural products they imported from America, Jefferson believed France and Britain could be brought to their knees without recourse to war. Madison asserted that “the power of this great weapon, the embargo,” would force the two countries to negotiate terms that would end the trade restrictions that had wreaked havoc on America's maritime trade.
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The fact that the two European powers had imposed the restrictions in order to wage economic war on each other rather than to harm the United States offered cold comfort to America's government and maritime traders. Although Britain had fired the first volley, it was Napoleon's retaliatory response that collaterally struck American shipping. On May 16, 1806, the House of Commons enacted its first order-in-council that proclaimed the coast of continental Europe from the Elbe River to Brest under a state of blockade. While this effectively closed all French ports, it did not curtail America's ability to trade with Europe, as all Iberian, Mediterranean, and Baltic ports remained open to shipping. Although inconvenienced, it was still possible for France to receive American imports through these routes.

France had not been quiescent before the blockade. Ever since 1793, the French had done their best to keep British goods out of the areas of Europe they controlled. During the Republic, the French Republic Directory had seized any ship known to have put into a British port and then sailed into French waters. The French Republic Directory believed it possible to defeat Britain—so reliant on trade for its survival—by cutting
off its exports, thereby forcing a reduction in its gold stock and ultimately bankrupting the government. Soon after Napoleon seized power, he introduced the continental system, whereby Britain was to be barred from any commercial activity with the rest of Europe and ultimately isolated from any world trade outside its own colonies. With his naval power greatly limited after the destruction of most of France's naval fleet at Trafalgar, Napoleon sought to conquer the oceans that he could not control through a war fought on European soil. The defeat of Prussia in the Battle of Jena gave him possession of much of the Baltic coast and provided the opportunity to put his economic strategy into force. On November 21, 1806, Napoleon's Berlin Decree imposed a blockade on the British Isles; any ships coming into French ports from either Britain or its colonies would be seized. Russia, demoralized by the defeat of the Prussians, agreed to adhere to the decree, and when Spain and Portugal fell to France in 1808 virtually all European ports were slammed shut to British ships and those from neutral nations that had entered her ports.

The British retaliated with another order-in-council, on January 7, 1807, forbidding ships from carrying out coastwise trade with France or her allies or from entering ports closed to her. Napoleon struck back with the Fontainebleau and Milan decrees of the same year that declared that any neutral ships conforming to the British orders-in-council would be subject to seizure. Britain's final retort came on November 11, 1807, with a proclamation that all French ports and those of her allies, and of all countries closed to British trade, were now blockaded. Further, all trade in goods from blockaded countries was forbidden, and any ships carrying such goods would be subject to capture and condemnation of both goods and ships. Any ship carrying a certificate of origin issued by France could also be taken by the Royal Navy as a prize. In an attempt to offset the economic losses sure to result from its inability to trade with Europe, the British government also declared that neutral ships entering its ports were to be considered under its direction and must purchase licences. This, it was hoped, would provide funds for the hard-pressed treasury.
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For Britain, the effect of the French measures was significant. In 1807, almost 44 percent of trade passing through British ports was aboard neutral ships, and many decided not to risk Napoleon's wrath or lose all
possibility of trade with continental Europe—including Russia—in order to have access to British ports and markets. Able to trade with only a few nearby countries, such as Sweden (until it fell within France's sphere of influence in 1811), Britain's exports fell by 10 percent within the year.

The American Embargo Act was more devastating. No sooner had it come into effect than nationwide shortages of timber, grain, and cotton caused inflation. Before the embargo the United States exported about 46 million pounds of cotton per year, with 80 percent of that going to Britain. The embargo slashed that source of cotton to nothing, and alternative markets for supply had yet to be developed. Across the country textile mills were forced to cut back or shut down, causing a surge of unemployment, which was only slowly alleviated by increasing cotton imports from Brazil.
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Meanwhile, the Royal Navy was hard hit by the timber shortage, as it was virtually dependent on Scandinavian and North American lumber and spars for shipbuilding.