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HISTORY 1801-1829] began to disregard transhipment and to condemn American vessels which made the voyage from a European colony to the mother country by way of the United States. This was really a restriction of American commerce to purely American productions, or to commerce with Great Britain direct, with the payment of duties in British ports.

139. The question of expatriation, too, furnished a good many burning grievances. Great Britain maintained the

old German rule of perpetual allegiance, though she had modified it by allowing the right of emigration. The United States, founded by immigration, was anxious to establish what Great Britain was not disposed to grant, the right of the subject to divest himself of allegiance by naturalization under a foreign jurisdiction. Four facts thus tended to break off friendly relations: (1) Great Britain's claim to allegiance over American naturalized subjects; (2)

her claim to the belligerent right of search of neutral vessels; (3) her claim of right to impress for her vessels of War her subjects who were seamen wherever found; and (4) the difficulty of distinguishing native-born American from British subjects, even if the right to impress naturalized American subjects were granted. British naval officers even undertook to consider all who spoke the English language as British subjects, unless they could produce proof that they were native-born Americans. The American sailor who lost his papers was thus open to impressment. A particularly flagrant case of seizure of Americans occurred in 1807. On the 27th of June the British ship “Leopard” fired upon the American frigate “Chesapeake,” which, after having lost 3 men killed and 18 wounded, hauled down its flag; the British commander then seized four of the “Chesapeake's” crew. This action aroused intense anger throughout the country, and but for the impotence of the government would undoubtedly have led to immediate war. The American government in 1810 published the cases of such impressments since 1803 as numbering over 4000, about one-third of the cases resulting in the discharge of the impressed man; but no one could say how many cases had never been brought to the attention of a government which never did anything more than remonstrate about them.

140. In May 1806 the British government, by orders in council, declared a blockade of the whole continent of Europe

from Brest to the Elbe, about 800 m. In November, after the battle of Jena, Napoleon answered by the “Berlin decree,” in which he assumed to blockade the British Isles, thus beginning his “continental system.” A year later the British government answered by further orders in council, forbidding American trade with any

country from which the British flag was excluded, allowing direct trade from the United States to Sweden only, in American products, and permitting American trade with other parts of Europe only on condition of touching in England and paying duties. Napoleon retorted with the “Milan decree,” declaring good prize any vessel which should submit to search by a British ship; but this was evidently a vain fulmination.

141. The Democratic party of the United States was almost exclusively agricultural and had little knowledge of or

sympathy with commercial interests; it was pledged to the reduction of national expenses and the debt, and did not wish to take up the responsibility for a navy; and, as the section of country most affected by the orders in council, New England, was Federalist, and made up of the active and irreconcilable opposition, a tinge of political feeling could not but colour the decisions of the dominant party. Various ridiculous proposals were considered as substitutes for a necessarily naval war; and perhaps the most ridiculous was adopted. Since the use of non-intercourse agreements as revolutionary weapons against Great Britain, an overweening confidence in such measures had sprung up, and one of them was now resorted to—the embargo of the 22nd of December 1807, forbidding foreign commerce altogether. It was expected to starve Great Britain

into a change of policy; and its effects may be seen by comparing the $20,000,000 exports of 1790, $49,000,000 of 1807 and

$9,000,000 of 1808. It does not seem to have struck those who passed the measure that the agricultural districts also might find the change unpleasant; but that was the result, and their complaints reinforced those of New England, and closed Jefferson's second term in a cloud of recognized misfortune. The pressure had been slightly relieved by the substitution of the Non-Intercourse Law of the 1st of March 1809 for the embargo; it prohibited commercial intercourse with Great

Britain and France and their dependencies, leaving other foreign commerce open, prohibited the importation from any quarter of British and French goods, and forbade the entrance of British or French vessels, public or private, into any port of the United States. Madison, Jefferson's secretary of state, who succeeded Jefferson in 1809, having defeated the Federalist candidate C. C. Pinckney in the election of 1808, assumed in the presidency a burden which was not enviable. New England was in a ferment, and was suspected of designs to resist the restrictive system by force; and the administration did not face the future with confidence.

142. The Non-Intercourse Law was to be in force only “until the end of the next session of Congress” and was to be abandoned as to either belligerent which should abandon its attacks on neutral commerce, and maintained against the other. In 1810 the American government was led to believe that France had abandoned its system. Napoleon continued to enforce it in fact; but his official fiction served its purpose of limiting the non-intercourse for the future to Great Britain, and thus straining relations between that country and the United States still further. The elections of 1811-1812 resulted everywhere in the defeat of “submission men” and in the choice of new members who were determined to resort to war against Great Britain. Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, William H. Crawford and other new men seized the lead in the two houses of Congress, and forced Madison, it is said, to agree to a declaration of war as a condition of his renomination in 1812 when he defeated De Witt Clinton by an electoral vote of 128 to 89. (See .) Madison sent to Congress a confidential

“war message” on the first of June and on the 18th war was declared. The New England Federalists always called it “Mr Madison's war,” but the president was about the most unwilling participant in it.

143. The national democracy meant to attack Great Britain in Canada, partly to gratify its western constituency, who

had been harassed by Indian attacks, asserted to have been instigated from Canada. Premonitions of success were drawn from the battle of Tippecanoe, in which William Henry Harrison had defeated in 1811 the north-western league of Indians formed by (q.v.). Between the solidly settled Atlantic states and the Canadian frontier was a wide stretch of unsettled or thinly settled country, which was

itself a formidable obstacle to war. Ohio had been admitted as a state in 1802, and Louisiana was admitted in 1812; but their admission had been due to the desire to grant them self-government rather than to their full development in population and resources. Cincinnati was a little settlement of 2500 inhabitants; the fringe of settled country ran not very far north of it; and all beyond was a wilderness of which little was known to the authorities. The case was much the same with western New York; the army which was to cross the Niagara river must journey almost all the way from Albany through a very thinly peopled country. It would have been far less costly, as events proved, to have entered at once upon a naval war; but the crusade against Canada had been proclaimed all through Kentucky and the West, and their people were determined to wipe out their old scores before the conclusion of the war. (For the military and naval events of the war see .)

144. The war opened with disaster—General William Hull's surrender of Detroit; and disaster attended it for two years. Political appointments to positions in the regular army were