Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 3.djvu/440

428 and told one member of the Cabinet after another that "at a moment when Europe, leagued together against the maritime tyranny of England, was laboring to throw off the yoke of that Power and to secure for all navigating nations freedom of commerce and the seas," it was particularly improper for the United States to accept any treaty which did not expressly secure all disputed points, and that no treaty would be observed by England unless made under the auspices and by the guaranty of Napoleon.

In view of the recent fate that had overtaken Powers like Switzerland and Venice, which had put themselves under the auspices of Napoleon, this argument produced no conviction. Turreau might better have left to the English the task of repairing Napoleon's mistakes; but these mistakes had accumulated until it depended upon England alone whether the United States should join her in the war. Not only had the Emperor offended Jefferson and Madison by his peremptory stoppage of the Florida purchase,—he had also declared war upon American commerce in a decree which Jefferson and Madison could not but suspect to be in some mysterious way connected with his sudden change of front toward Spain and Florida; while in the face of these difficulties he left his own minister at Washington in such discredit that Turreau was reduced to beg sixty thousand dollars from the American Treasury to meet consular expenditures