For Honour's Sake (45 page)

Retiring to his estate in Buckinghamshire, Gambier set to gardening with a passion. He avidly oversaw efforts by head gardener T. Tomson, who made botanical history in about 1811 by producing the first pansies by hybridizing varieties of
Viola tricolor
with the yellow
Viola altaica
common to Crimea. Gambier was deeply immersed in this project when called by Castlereagh to head the peace commission.

Gambier, Adams, and Goulburn had all accepted their commissions in mid-May, but, despite the assurances to Gallatin that they would move promptly to Ghent, they remained in England after the promised departure date of July 1 had passed. In part this was due to Castlereagh's being in Paris concluding the final peace treaty with France and his insistence on personally drafting their final instructions. As the House of Commons spokesman for the War and Colonial Office, Goulburn had to be present to answer the many questions regarding the war with America and other colonial matters.
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The House would not rise until the end of the month, so it would be early August before Goulburn was free to depart for Ghent—a fact of which the American commissioners were not advised.

John Quincy Adams and Jonathan Russell had reached Ghent on June 24. Unwell, Russell immediately took to bed in the sumptuous Hôtel des Pays-Bas, while Adams dined alone in his room, strolled through the ancient city, and started a letter to his wife, Louisa, which he finished the next day.
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Adams was in foul temper, bitterly resenting the move to Ghent. Had the winds not delayed his departure from Reval, he would have been at Clay's side when the letter from Bayard and Gallatin was delivered “and in that case none of us would ever have come to Ghent …. I never would have consented to come here. If a majority of my colleagues had concluded upon the measure, I would have returned immediately to St. Petersburg, and left them to conclude the peace as they saw fit.” The negotiations, he believed, would either succeed or fail in three weeks, but the change of venue meant that discussions would not begin until mid-July. The move to Ghent had wasted two months, “to no useful purpose whatever.”
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Adams also feared that the British had successfully played the Americans for fools. In a letter to Monroe, he charged that by effecting the move from Gothenburg to Ghent the British were able to “remove us from neutral territory to a place occupied by a British garrison.” All the Allied powers covetedBelgium, Adams believed, but the presence of British troops on its soil and the influx of British gold into its economy made it inevitable that it would become a British province—a fate he considered
to have already befallen Holland. Although as yet no redcoats paraded through the streets of Ghent, Adams reported that both Brussels and Antwerp were under their occupation and troops were expected to move into Ghent any day.
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While Adams groused to Monroe and Louisa, he knew that to move the talks yet again would only delay matters. Bayard had arrived on June 27, Clay the following day. Gallatin was expected shortly. On the 30th the four met in Adams's hotel room. “The conversation was desultory,” Adams confided to his diary. They agreed only to soon send
John Adams
home and drafted a letter to acquire a British passport allowing her safe passage.

While they waited for Gallatin, the four did their best to treat each other cordially. They visited the city's mayor, walked its narrow cobblestone streets or strolled along the canals either singly or as a group, and shared meals together until Adams suddenly chose to dine alone at the hotel's midday table d'hôte. “They sit after dinner and drink bad wine and smoke cigars, which neither suits my habits nor my health, and absorbs time which I cannot spare. I find it impossible, even with the most rigorous economy of time, to do half the writing that I ought,” Adams grumbled. The next day, however, Clay took him aside and expressed regret that Adams had not joined them. He decided to henceforth make a point of sharing meals with his colleagues, no matter how unpleasant he found their behaviour.
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In early July his prophecy that the city would be garrisoned by British troops came true. When Gallatin's entourage arrived on July 7, young James noted how the many men in scarlet uniforms made “the streets very bright.”
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Albert Gallatin met with the other commissioners on the 9th. A major topic of discussion during the four-hour session was whether they should continue lodging at the hotel or lease a house. Adams alone wished to remain at the hotel because he thought their time in Ghent would “be very short; but the other gentlemen are all of a different opinion. They calculate upon passing the winter here. It is impossible to form a decisive opinion upon the subject until the British commissioners arrive.”
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Adams announced that the commissioners would meet daily at noon, a decision with which the others reluctantly agreed.

On July 11, Adams turned forty-seven and lamented: “Two-thirds of the period allotted to the life of man are gone by for me. I have not improved them as I ought to have done.” His personal disillusionment intruded on the day's meeting when he accused the others of having wasted government money sending special messengers about Europe on various unimportant diplomatic missions. Clay remarked that he had understood from Monroe that they should make use of special messengers as often as necessary rather than risk miscommunications. There the matter rested, but Adams was determined to raise it again at the first opportunity. “I should not have sent one of the messengers hitherto employed, neither were they … at all necessary.”
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That evening Adams was embarrassed when Bayard rose and offered a toast acknowledging his birthday. The Delaware Federalist, whom Adams had been predisposed to dislike because of his politics, was disarmingly polite and congenial.

The daily meetings quickly disenchanted everyone. Adams attempted to breathe vigour into the process by assigning each member to analyze how a particular part of their instructions might affect negotiations. It was a hopeless task, likely to be rendered irrelevant during the first meeting with the British.
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On July 15, James Gallatin recorded that there was “nothing to do. Mr. Adams in a very bad temper. Mr. Clay annoys him. Father pours oil on the troubled waters.”
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Gallatin generally sided with Adams while Russell tended to back Clay in a manner that bespoke a growing sycophancy.
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While struggling for days over the wording of a joint communiqué to Monroe, each man wrote his own private letter to the secretary of state. They concluded a protracted and delicate negotiation among themselves on July 19 that resulted in agreement to rent a house on a monthly basis. “Although,” Adams confided to Louisa, “we had all agreed … to live together, yet when it came to the arrangement of details, we soon found that one had one thing to which he attached a particular interest, and another another, and it was not so easy to find a contractor who would accommodate himself to five distinct and separate humors.” They settled on the Hôtel d'Alacantara, which despite being called a hotel was a private residence because of a quirk in Flemish expression.
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It was a large, three-storey house on the Rue des Champs that provided each commissioner
with a private apartment. Their landlord had trained as a professional cook and promised satisfactory daily meals. He was also to provide the best liquors to be found in Ghent. “This was the article that stuck hardest in the passage, for [Adams] was afraid that he would pass off upon us bad wine, and make us pay for it as if it was the best.” Finally the landlord agreed that if the wine provided was not acceptable “we shall look further, and draw the corks without paying him any tax or tribute for it at all.”
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Having resolved their housing issues, the commissioners idled about awaiting the British. The Americans soon read in the British newspapers a report that during Commons debate on July 20 Castlereagh had been asked “whether the persons sent to Gothenburg from the American government were quite forgotten by his Majesty's Ministers, or whether any one had been appointed to treat with them?” Castlereagh replied that the British commissioners would travel to Ghent immediately upon being informed that all the Americans were in place and that it was known that Gallatin was lingering in Paris. This was crock, Adams told Louisa, for the British papers had announced Gallatin's departure from Paris on July 4 and “Lord Castlereagh had special and precise information that he had been here at Ghent, a full fortnight, on the day of the debate.”

During the same Commons debate the chancellor of the exchequer, Nicholas Vansittart, argued that the delay was irrelevant as “the war with America was not likely to terminate speedily, and might lead to a considerable scale of expense.” There was in the Commons, Adams noted, a disposition to continue the war “to accomplish the
deposition of Mr. Madison.”
The Federalist Party was fuelling this notion, he believed, by claiming that Britain would not “treat with a person from who she has received such unprovoked insults, and such deliberate proofs of injustice.” Impeachment was likely, according to the British newspapers, because Madison “had deceived and misled his countrymen by gross misrepresentations [and] abused their confidence by secret collusion with the late Tyrant of France.”
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To a man the American commissioners worried that the British had no intention of coming to Ghent at all. Rather, they were stalling in the hopes that the United States would be so humbled by battle that the Federalists would succeed in ousting the president.

A
lthough many Federalists and New Englanders grumbled and postured, in fact no organized plan to impeach James Madison existed. While northerners remained ill disposed to support the war, there was little popular support for bringing Madison down.

There was also no forum for Federalists so inclined to argue their case. Congress was in recess until October. Despite the crisis posed by the British reinforcement, Madison had no intention of issuing an early recall. Doing so, he feared, would only “uselessly spread alarm.”
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Yet Madison was personally alarmed. At a July 1 executive meeting, he warned that the “fierce aspect which British military power now had” made it almost a certainty that “the capital would be marked as the most inviting object of a speedy attack.”
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He wanted 10,000 men, including at least 1,000 regulars, raised to defend the District of Columbia. Madison created a special capital military district commanded by Brig. Gen. William H. Winder of Maryland. A peacetime Baltimore lawyer and nephew of the state's Federalist governor, Winder's appointment was intended to facilitate cooperation between state and federal officials in developing the district's defences.
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Everyone except John Armstrong concurred. Armstrong countered that Baltimore more likely faced attack because of its strategic naval importance. Protect both cities, Madison replied. Clearly the British could strike anywhere along the eastern seaboard or even at New Orleans. Madison ordered the drafting of a defensive plan for all the ports from Boston to New Orleans and issued
a call to “invite” the state governors to raise an army of 93,000 militiamen to provide coastal defence.
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Armstrong had no intention of complying. He merely issued a circular inviting the governors to call out thousands of militia, left Winder to prepare Washington's defences while providing no resources to do so, and turned his attention to the campaign against the Niagara Peninsula, over which he could exert no meaningful control. Maj. Gen. Jacob Brown's northern army was too distant from Washington for Armstrong's furtive directives to influence events. News from this front was scant and generally weeks out of date by the time it arrived. Armstrong downplayed the threat to coastal cities, declaring that excessive “bustle” would convince the British that the populace was afraid. Panic must be avoided. Pleas from coastal city councils for federal assistance building fortifications were ignored. Repeatedly, the Washington mayor sought Armstrong's commitment to mobilize the local militia only to have his concerns dismissed by assurances that the city was not at risk.
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The secretary of war's attention remained firmly fixed to the northwest.

The campaign in Niagara had begun on July 3, when Brown bypassed Fort Niagara by crossing upriver of the falls, with Brig. Gen. Winfield Scott's brigade landing below Fort Erie and Brig. Gen. Eleazer Ripley just above. Brown's entire force consisted of only 3,400 men, of which about 2,400 were New England regulars divided evenly between the two brigadiers. The rest consisted of more than 300 artillerymen and some 600 Pennsylvania volunteers. There were also about 600 friendly Indians. Although small it outnumbered the fewer than 2,500 British troops divided into several garrisons. Most of the redcoats manned Fort George or Fort Niagara. Only 137 were posted to Fort Erie.
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