Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (113 page)

Misled by Erskine into believing that Britain would repeal its trade restrictions, President Madison in April 1809 proclaimed that trade with
the former mother country was now open. When in the summer of 1809 the United States learned that the British government had recalled Erskine and repudiated his agreement, the country had no choice but to reimpose non-intercourse with Britain. When Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin complained that the Non-Intercourse Act was hurting the duties from trade and creating a federal deficit, Congress was forced to turn its policy inside out and once again reopen trade with the belligerents.

Republican policy was always caught in a dilemma. If the government restricted trade with Britain, which Madison and other Republicans wished to do, it lost considerable revenue from the duties on imports. With such a loss of revenue the government would be compelled to raise taxes or borrow money, which no good Republican wanted to do. As a way out of this dilemma, Madison at first sought an old-fashioned navigation act, Macon’s Bill No. 1 (named for Congressman Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina), which allowed British and French goods to enter American ports as long as they were carried in American ships. When an unlikely combination of Republican dissidents who wanted war and Federalists who feared it defeated this bill, a still much divided Congress passed Macon’s Bill No. 2 in May 1810. This bill once again opened trade with both Britain and France, with the provision that if either belligerent revoked its restrictions on neutral commerce, the United States in ninety days would restore non-intercourse against the other. Madison, who yearned to restore the embargo, was disgusted with the bill; though named for him, even Macon voted against it. As trade with Britain flourished, many Republicans, as one congressman complained, thought the new policy was simply offering “up the honor and character of this nation to the highest bidder.”
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Madison’s only hope for this awkward policy was that its bias in favor of Britain might inspire Napoleon to remove his restrictions on American trade, which by 1810 were actually resulting in more French than British seizures of American ships and goods. Thus the president was primed to receive favorably an ambiguous note from France’s foreign minister, the ducde Cadore, issued in the summer of 1810 declaring that Napoleon would revoke his decrees after November 1, 1810, but only on the condition that the United States first reestablishes its prohibitions on British commerce. Since this conditional declaration did not actually fulfill the provisions of Macon’s Bill No. 2, the Cadore letter, as it was called, generated much controversy, with the Federalists denouncing it as trickery and the most rabid Republicans hailing it as France’s penance for its violations of American rights.

Ambiguous as the Cadore letter was, it was enough for Madison, who was eager to escape from his awkward situation. On November 2, 1810, he publicly proclaimed that France had met the requirements of the Macon Bill and that if Britain failed to revoke its orders-in-council over the next ninety days, non-intercourse would be reimposed on Britain on February 2, 1811. Chief Justice Marshall could scarcely believe what was happening and declared that the president’s claim that France had revoked its decrees was “one of the most astonishing instances of national credulity . . . that is to be found in political history.”
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Although Madison well understood the equivocal nature of the Cadore letter, he felt he had to grasp at the opportunity to pressure the British into some sort of relaxation of their commercial restrictions. At any rate, he was only too eager to resume the policy of commercial sanctions against Great Britain that he had dreamed of implementing since the Revolution.

Madison, however, confronted a Republican party in the Congress that was breaking apart, and the resultant factions always threatened to coalesce in opposition to the administration. There were the Old Republicans of ‘98, or Quids, led by John Randolph; the supporters of New Yorkers George Clinton and his nephew DeWitt Clinton, who was challenging Madison for the presidency; and the Invisibles in the Senate, led by William Branch Giles of Virginia and Samuel Smith of Maryland, the brother of the secretary of state, Robert Smith. Robert Smith’s mounting indiscretions at last gave Madison the opportunity to dismiss him from the cabinet and install his old opponent and fellow Virginian James Monroe as secretary of state. But the Smith family of Maryland in opposition only added to the disarray of the Republicans. Jefferson became so fearful of the disorder that he pleaded for unity. “If we schismatize on men and measures, if we do not act in phalanx,” he told the Republican journalist William Duane in the spring of 1811, “I will not say our
party
, the term is false and degrading, but our
nation
will be undone. For the Republicans are the nation.”
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Whether the Americans, never mind the Republicans, were really a nation was the issue. Was the United States an independent nation like other nations with an explicit and peculiar tribal character? Could Americans establish their separate identity only by fighting and killing Britons to whom they were cultural kin and whom they so much resembled?

In July 1811 Madison called Congress to meet in an early session in November in order to prepare the country for war, which seemed to be
the only alternative if commercial sanctions failed. Despite the Cadore letter, Napoleon continued to enforce his various decrees making all neutral ships that brought goods from Britain to the Continent liable to confiscation. But the French emperor seized only some American ships but not all, thereby hoping to create sufficient confusion to prevent the British from repealing their own commercial restrictions, which they had always justified as acts of retaliation that would last only as long as Napoleon’s Continental System.

In February 1811 Congress had passed a new Non-Importation Act that turned away British ships and goods coming to America but allowed American ships and produce to go to England. At the same time, the act required American courts to accept the president’s proclamation as conclusive evidence that France had indeed repealed its decrees—a strange stipulation that suggested the widespread doubts that Napoleon was behaving honestly. In fact, declared John Quincy Adams from his post in St. Petersburg, Napoleon’s conduct was so blatantly deceptive as “to give sight to the blind.”
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When the British government declared that it was unconvinced that France had abandoned its Continental System and that it would therefore not relax in any way its own commercial restrictions, Madison’s policy collapsed in failure. Other than throwing up the country’s hands in surrender, the United States had no choice now but war.

Although some suggested that the United States might have to fight both belligerents simultaneously in what was called a “triangular war,” it was virtually inconceivable that the Republicans would go to war against France. Although Madison was well aware of “the atrocity of the French Government” in enforcing its “predatory Edicts,” he, like Jefferson, always believed “that the original sin against Neutrals lies with G.B.”
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It seemed to the Republicans as if the Revolution of 1776 was still going on. The United States was trying to establish itself as an independent sovereign republic in the world, and Britain, much more than France, seemed to be denying that sovereign independence. As one congressman put it in 1810, “The people will not submit to be colonized and give up their independence.”
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Even British concessions were now viewed suspiciously. When the British government in May 1812 offered to give the Americans an equal share of the ten thousand licenses it issued to merchants trading with the continent, Madison rejected the offer outright as degrading to American sovereignty. Most alarming to the Republicans was the quisling-like
behavior of the New England Federalists, who endlessly harassed the Republicans for their timidity and inconsistencies all the while supporting continued ties and trade with Great Britain. Just as the Federalists in 1797–1798 had accused the Republicans of being more loyal to France than to America, so now the Republicans accused the Federalists of aiding and abetting the former mother country. Just as the Federalists in 1797–1798 had thought that the Republicans were trying to bring the Jacobinical French Revolution to America, so now the Republicans thought the Federalists were seeking to reverse the results of not just the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800 but the original Revolution of 1776. In the eyes of many Republicans this threat of the Federalists’ undoing the Revolution and breaking up the Union seemed real, perhaps more real than the threat of invasion by the French had been to the Federalists in 1797–1798.

The New England Federalists continually worried about their declining political fortunes even as the administration’s unpopular policies of commercial coercion gave them false hopes of regaining power. By 1809 many citizens of Massachusetts were looking to their state to protect them from the machinations of the Republicans in Washington. Some even began talking of New England seceding from the Union. Fear and dislike of the Republicans and what they represented in the spread of democratic politics made many Federalists rethink the significance of America’s break from Great Britain. Compared to Catholic France or that country’s atheistic revolutionaries, Britain seemed more and more to be, in the words of Timothy Pickering, “the country of our forefathers, and the country to which we are indebted for all the institutions held dear to freemen.”
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Because most Americans were anxiously trying to establish their distinct national identity, such Anglophilic sentiments were bound to be misinterpreted and used against the Federalists. The leader of the Federalists in the House of Representatives, Josiah Quincy, realized only too keenly the mistakes many of his colleagues were making in professing an emotional attachment to Great Britain. Not only did such professions do “little credit to their patriotism,” but they did “infinitely less to their judgment. The truth is,” he said in 1812, “the British look upon us as a
foreign nation
, and we must look upon them in the same light.”
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Confronted by a Napoleonic tyranny and the democratic rumblings at their feet, the New England Federalists could scarcely restrain their affection for England, which seemed to them to be a rock of stability in a revolutionary world gone mad. This was why their Republican opponents,
like Joseph Varnum, Republican congressman from Massachusetts and Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1810, believed that they could not trust the Federalists, even in Varnum’s case those from his own state. Varnum had “for a long time been convinced,” he told a colleague in March 1810, “that there was a party in our Country, fully determined to do everything in their power, to Subvert the principles of our happy government, and to establish a Monarchy on its ruins; and with a view of obtaining the aid of G.B in the accomplishment of their nefarious object, they have Inlisted into her service, and will go all lengths to Justify and support every measure which she may take against the Nation.” Establishing America’s separate identity as a nation was difficult enough, the Republicans believed, without having a large segment of the society yearning to reconnect with “a foreign nation, whose deadly hate has pursued us from the day when America said she would be free.”
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With many Republican leaders holding these sorts of opinions, the war in their minds became both a second war for independence and a defense of republicanism itself. In this sense the Federalists helped contribute to the Republicans’ move toward war; they made many Republicans feel that not only was the Union in danger but further vacillation—talking of war and doing nothing—had become impossible. A few Federalists, like Alexander L. Hanson of Maryland, even welcomed the possibility of war, confident that the Republicans would so mismanage it as to discredit their party and bring the Federalists back into power.
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The Republicans offered a variety of reasons why they felt they had to move toward war, most having to do with saving both republicanism and the nation’s honor; but ultimately they were compelled to go to war because their foreign policy left them no alternative. America had been engaged in a kind of warfare—commercial warfare—with both Britain and France since 1806. The actual fighting of 1812 was only the inevitable consequence of the failure of “peaceful coercion.” Wilson Cary Nicholas of Virginia put his finger on the problem early in 1810. The failure of “every mode of coercion short of war,” he told Jefferson, now left little room for choice. “We have exhausted every means in our power to preserve peace. We have tried negotiations until it is disgraceful to think of renewing it, and commercial restrictions have operated to our own injury. War or submission alone remain.” In deciding between these alternatives, Nicholas, along with many other Republicans, could not “hesitate a
minute.” By June 1812 the need to go to war with Great Britain, declared Secretary of State James Monroe, had become inescapable. “We have been so long dealing in the small way of embargoes, non-intercourse, and non-importation, with menaces of war, &c., that the British government has not believed us. We must actually get to war before the intention to make it will be credited either here or abroad.”
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Perhaps some good would come out of a war. Some predicted it would destroy the parties and bring the country together. “The distinction of Federalists and Republicans will cease,” declared Felix Grundy in May 1812; “the united energies of the people will be brought into action; the inquiry will be, are you for your country or against it?”
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Some Republicans even came to see the war as a necessary regenerative act—as a means of purging Americans of their pecuniary greed and their seemingly insatiable love of commerce and money-making. They hoped that the war with England might refresh the national character, lessen the overweening selfishness of people, and revitalize republicanism.
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“War,” said the enterprising Baltimore journalist Hezekiah Niles in 1811, “will purify the political atmosphere. . . . All the public virtues will be refined and hallowed; and we shall again behold at the head of affairs citizens who may rival the immortal men of 1776.” When told that a war might be expensive, a Maryland congressman responded with indignation. “What is money?” he said. “What is all our property, compared with our honor and our liberty?” Americans must put aside their partisan divisions and concern for profits, urged the editors of the
Richmond Enquirer
. “Forget self,” they said, “and think of America.”
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