Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (110 page)

Fortunately for American trade, the economic sanctions imposed by both empires were never intended to starve their opponents into submission. Instead, they were exaggerated applications of traditional mercantilist principles designed to wreck each belligerent’s commerce and to drain each other’s specie. The British, for example, were happy to carry on trade with Napoleon as long as it was British goods in British ships. As the British prime minister declared, “The object of the Orders was not to destroy the trade of the Continent, but to force the Continent to trade with us.”
⁶³
Consequently, there were violations and loopholes everywhere, and trade continued to flourish. Still, the British and French trade restrictions did have some cost. Between 1803 and 1812 Britain and France and their allies seized nearly fifteen hundred American ships, with Britain taking 917 to France’s 558.
⁶⁴

T
HESE SEIZURES BY THE BELLIGERENTS
, however, did not do as much damage to American commerce in this period as the United States eventually did to itself. In a desperate attempt to break the stranglehold that Britain and France had on American trade, the United States launched what Jefferson called a “candid and liberal experiment” in “peaceful coercion”—an embargo that forbade all Americans from sending any of their ships and goods abroad.
⁶⁵
Perhaps never in history has a trading nation of America’s size engaged in such an act of self-immolation with so little reward. Not only did this experiment fail to stop the belligerents’ abuses of America’s neutral rights, but the embargo ended up seriously injuring the American economy and all but destroying the Jeffersonian principle of limited government and states’ rights.

Although the origins of this experiment in economic sanctions went back to the use of economic sanctions against the British in the 1760s and 1770s, the immediate precipitant of the embargo was the
Leopard
-
Chesapeake
affair.

On June 22, 1807, the American frigate USS
Chesapeake
sailed from Norfolk en route to the Mediterranean as part of a squadron sent to deal with the Barbary pirates. Not far out from Chesapeake Bay the fifty-gun HMS
Leopard
ordered the
Chesapeake
to allow a boarding party to search for British deserters. When the
Chesapeake
refused, the
Leopard
fired on the American warship, killing three American seamen, wounding eighteen others, and forcing it to lower its colors. The British boarded the American frigate and impressed four seamen as British deserters, only one of whom was actually a British subject.

Most Americans were outraged by this attack on an American warship. “This country,” President Jefferson observed, “has never been in such a state of excitement since the battle of Lexington.”
⁶⁶
The president looked for some honorable way of redressing the attack peacefully but made some preparations for war in case it came. He issued a proclamation barring all British warships from American ports unless the ships were on diplomatic missions or in distress. He recalled all of America’s ships from abroad, beefed up the country’s harbor defenses, recommended building more gunboats, secretly made plans for the invasion of Canada, requested the state governors to mobilize one hundred thousand militiamen, and convened a special session of Congress for October 1807. He declared the British ships to be “
enemies
,” who should be treated as such. By contrast, the French ships were “
friends
,” who should be extended every courtesy.
⁶⁷

Still, the president was anxious to avoid war with Britain and worried, with good reason, that his proclamation would not satisfy the patriotic ardor of his fellow citizens. He knew only too well that the United States was not ready for a war with Britain in 1807, but if a war had to come, he preferred it to be directed against England’s newly found and incongruous ally, Spain. In August 1807 he told Madison “our southern defensive force can take the Floridas, volunteers for a Mexican army will flock to our standard, and rich pabulum will be offered to our privateers in the plunder of their commerce and coasts. Perhaps Cuba would add itself to our confederation.”
⁶⁸

The British government did not want war either. Since the British government had never clearly claimed the right to impress from neutral warships, they disavowed the attack on the
Chesapeake
and recalled the naval commander who ordered it—though he was given another command. The British government offered to pay reparations and to return three of the four deserters, who were Americans; the fourth, who was a British subject, was summarily hanged, thus allowing the British government, Madison complained, to avoid “the humiliation of restoring a British subject” to America along with the other three seamen.
⁶⁹

Yet Jefferson wanted the British to disavow both the attack on the
Chesapeake
and the policy of impressment in general, and he thus considered the British response to be “unfriendly, proud, and harsh” and full of quibbles.
⁷⁰
Because he remained deeply suspicious of British intentions, he could not help but welcome Napoleon’s smashing victories over the armies of the British-led coalition that left the French emperor in complete control of the Continent. The President said in August 1807 that he had never expected to be “wishing success to Buonaparte,” whose assumption of an imperial crown had ended once and for all the fiction that France was still a republic. But the English were as “tyrannical at sea as he is on land, and that tyranny bearing on us in every point of either honor or interest, I say, ‘down with England.’ “The warnings by the British-loving Federalists of what Napoleon might do to Americans were about “a future hypothetical” evil; we were now, he said, experiencing at the hands of the English “a certain present evil.”
⁷¹

That evil was revealed in a number of new British actions. These included instigating Indian threats in the Northwest, the brutal seizure
of the neutral Danish fleet in Copenhagen (which seemed to make every neutral navy vulnerable to British confiscation), and the tightening up of the policy of impressment by allowing for impressments on neutral warships and by denying the validity of naturalization papers. The British duties now required on American goods bound for Europe seemed especially humiliating; they could only remind Americans of the former colonial regulations that they thought they had thrown off with the Declaration of Independence. William Cobbett, the irascible ex-Federalist journalist who had returned to England to become a vitriolic critic of the United States, summed up the hard-line position the British government was now taking: “Our power upon the waves enable us to dictate the terms, upon which ships of all nations shall navigate. . . . Not a sail should be hoisted, except by stealth, without paying a tribute.”
⁷²

With the international situation worsening, few Republicans wanted outright war, but at the same time they wanted to do something to deal with the hostility of the monarchical Old World toward the neutral American Republic. The Republicans were increasingly anxious that not only was America’s national independence at stake but their republican desire for a universal peace and their aversion to war’s horrors and expenses were creating a false impression among the European powers—an impression, as Jefferson put it, that “our government is entirely in Quaker principles, and will turn the left cheek when the right has been smitten.” This impression, he said in 1806, “must be corrected when just occasion arises, or we shall become the plunder of all nations.”
⁷³

With the Non-Importation Act of 1806 in effect after a long delay, the president on December 18, 1807, announced a new policy, which eventually became an expanded version of economic retaliation—perhaps, with the exception of Prohibition, the greatest example in American history of ideology brought to bear on a matter of public policy.

In his brief message to Congress Jefferson recommended an embargo to protect the “essential resources” of “our merchandise, our vessels and our seamen,” which were threatened by “great and increasing danger . . . on the high seas and elsewhere from the belligerent powers of Europe.”
⁷⁴
Although Jefferson had not fully explained to the Congress why the embargo was necessary, Congress acted immediately and in four days at the end of December 1807 passed the Embargo Act, which prohibited the departure of all American ships in international trade.
Although the act did not prohibit foreign ships, including British ships, from bringing imports to America, it forbade these foreign ships from taking on American exports, thus forcing them to sail away in ballast.

It was a very strange act, as self-contradictory as the Republican party itself. Although American thinking about the British vulnerability to economic sanctions had always emphasized the British need to sell their manufactured luxuries abroad, the embargo actually deprived the British of America’s exports, which was much less harmful to the British economy than the loss of markets for their manufactured goods would have been. Of course, the embargo was accompanied by the implementation of the long-suspended Non-Importation Act, but this act only restricted some British imports, not all; exempt from prohibition were such items as Jamaican rum, coarse woolens, salt, and Birmingham hardware.
⁷⁵
Throughout the life of the embargo Americans continued to import many British goods, which totaled at least half the volume of those they had imported in 1807 before the Republicans had invoked the NonImportation Act. Although the Republicans never fully explained America’s continued importation of British goods (carried on British ships, no less), Gallatin and others apparently felt that the federal government was so dependent on customs duties on its imports that cutting off all imports would have bankrupted it.

Barring American ships and goods from all overseas trade was a drastic act, but curiously neither Jefferson nor Republicans in the Congress made much of an effort to justify it to the country. This extraordinary measure went through Congress rapidly and with little debate. As Jefferson said, the choices were limited: it was either “war, Embargo, or nothing,” and war and nothing were not really acceptable alternatives.
⁷⁶
Certainly, the Republican supporters of the bill, knowing they had the votes, made little effort to defend the embargo; instead they kept calling for the question. The final vote in the House was eighty-two to forty-four. Jefferson said that half the opposition consisted of Federalists, the other half a mixture of the followers of the eccentric John Randolph, who thought the embargo was dictated by Napoleon and aimed at only Britain, and of “republicans happening to take up mistaken views of the subject.”
⁷⁷

Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin in the cabinet may not have had a mistaken view of the embargo, but he certainly had doubts about it. Because he sensed the possible consequences of the embargo—“privations, sufferings, revenue, effect on the enemy, politics at home,
&c.”—he wanted it to be temporary and designed only to recall America’s ships and get them safely into port; indeed, if the embargo were to be permanent, he preferred going to war. Perhaps because of his sophisticated understanding of how economies worked, an understanding not shared by Jefferson or Madison, he realized that momentous actions by governments often had unanticipated consequences. He warned Jefferson that “governmental prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated; and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should hazard to regulate the concerns of individuals as if he could do it better than themselves.”
⁷⁸
This was good Republican advice, but Jefferson ignored it.

It is not clear that Jefferson and Madison, who were the architects of the embargo, had thought through its implications. Although Madison was the more enthusiastic supporter of the measure, Jefferson certainly shared the Republican faith that almost anything was preferable to war, especially if that war had to be fought against a vigorous and powerful enemy and not a feeble Spain or a petty Barbary rogue-state. “As we cannot meet the British with an equality of physical force,” as Jefferson later put it, “we must supply it by other devices”—whether those devices were Robert Fulton’s submarine torpedoes or the withholding of America’s exports.
⁷⁹
With the belligerents’ orders and decrees putting America’s neutral commerce in an impossible situation, he thought that the embargo might buy time for something to be worked out diplomatically.

Instead of the president himself explaining to the country and the Congress the rationale for such an extreme act, Secretary of State Madison took on the task in three anonymous articles published in the Washington
National Intelligencer
, a pro-administration paper, several days after the enactment of the embargo. The embargo, Madison wrote, was “a measure of peace and precaution,” without “a shadow of a pretext to make it a cause of war.” It was a kind of test of America’s republican character amidst a world of hostile monarchies. “Let the example teach the world that our firmness equals our moderation; that having resorted to a measure just in itself, and adequate to its object, we will flinch from no sacrifices which the honor and good of our nation demand from virtuous and faithful citizens.” Relying on his Republican understanding of the contrasting political economies of America and Britain, Madison argued that while an embargo would deny Americans some British-made
“superfluities,” the British “will feel the want of necessaries.” America was blessed. It did not have to choose, as other injured nations did, “between graceful submission or war.” With the embargo, a benign providence had given to America “a happy recourse for avoiding both.” This experiment might even bring about a commercial world that Americans had dreamed about ever since the model treaty of 1776. The “embargo,” said Madison, “whilst it guards our essential resources, will have the collateral effect of making it to the interest of all nations to change the system which has driven our commerce from the ocean.” Madison, in other words, seems to have envisioned the embargo as an opportunity to initiate the enlightened dream of transforming the character of international relations.
⁸⁰