American Experiment (37 page)

James Wilkinson, the man Burr conspired with, was an even stranger combination of opposites. At the age of twenty a brevetted brigadier
general in the War of Independence, he was implicated in a move to unseat Washington as commander in chief. He nevertheless rose to the top of the American military establishment, winning appointment as military governor of Louisiana in 1803. He was also a paid secret agent of Spain—the “most consummate artist in treason,” Frederick Jackson Turner called him, “that the nation ever possessed.” If Burr’s weakness was women, Wilkinson’s was gold, gold from any source, English, Spanish, or American. He was also a faithless ally. At the climactic moment, after Burr had organized men and boats all along the Ohio River for a rendezvous in New Orleans and the presumed attack on Mexico, Wilkinson decided to sell Burr out in order to maintain his own standing with both the American and Spanish governments.

Burr had talked with so many persons—politicians, soldiers, rivermen, adventurers—that Jefferson had long known he was up to something—but what? Only on receiving from Wilkinson a report filled with horrendous portents and alarums did the President issue a proclamation warning of a “military expedition or enterprise against the dominions of Spain,” though saying nothing of secession. He issued a blanket order to federal and state officials to search out and apprehend the villains. A few weeks later Burr arrived in Natchez with a ragtail collection of men and boats, only to learn that Wilkinson had denounced him and ordered his arrest. Burr surrendered, then jumped bail and raced toward Spanish Florida, but was intercepted and taken to Richmond, there to await trial on a charge of treason.

Burr had tried to draw scores of western politicos—Ohioans, Kentuckians, Tennesseeans, Louisianans—into his conspiracy. The fact that so few had responded—indeed, state and local officials had tried to thwart his boat-collecting efforts and to indict Burr himself—showed the durability of a young republic in the face of the kind of adventure that had brought earlier republics to ruin. Burr had also tried to lure Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Spaniards into his web. If he had attacked Mexico, Washington’s relations with Paris and London, as well as Madrid, would have been affected. The mobiles were separate but interdependent. But by now the Jeffersonians were in far more direct confrontation with the colossi of Europe.

By 1806 Britain and France were locked in deadly embrace, but they could not find a place to fight. After Trafalgar the French crocodile could not venture into the water; after Austerlitz the English sea lion could not
venture out of it. For a time the two powers fought a mainly economic war. British naval might had swept much of France’s shipping off the high seas, while Napoleon tried every means of stopping neutral trade into England. The French allowed American shippers to trade with the West Indies, while Britain sought to cut off the economic lifelines between the islands and France. Yankee skippers battened on this arrangement by bringing cargos from the French West Indies into American ports, “Americanizing” the cargo by landing it and paying duties on it, and then reloading it and carrying it to ports still under French control.

For a time, the English tolerated this subterfuge of the “broken voyage.” But, as pressure mounted from British shippers furious over the fast-rising profits and trade monopolizing of the rapacious Yankees, and as the English economic war against the French faltered, a London admiralty judge conveniently ruled that the non-continuous voyages were actually continuous; shortly British warships seized scores of American merchantmen, especially in the West Indian trade. The British sought to settle another grievance. For hundreds of years the Royal Navy had manned its “floating hells” by sending out press gangs to snatch able-bodied young men out of grog shops and off the streets. British seamen fled from their vile living conditions and the cat-o’-nine-tails by shipping in the American naval or merchant services. At times His Majesty’s ships could not leave port because of desertions. Ordered to fetch the fugitives, English sea captains hung off Atlantic ports, boarded American ships, and searched for English deserters. Quarterdeck justice was often harsh, as officers ruled that some seaman pronouncing “peas” as “paise” was an Irishman and hence a British subject, while if he talked through his nose he was probably a Yankee.

Inevitably, these incidents set off explosions of rage in American ports. When a British warship fired a careless shot across the bow of an American sloop and splintered the main boom instead, killing the mate, the victim’s mangled body was carried to New York and paraded through the streets on a raised platform. Washington and London exchanged protests, but the English public was so angered by the Yankees “stealing” both trade and sailors, and the Royal Navy was concentrating so single-mindedly on its economic war against France, that no basis of compromise could be found. James Monroe, resident minister in London, backed up by William Pinkney, a Maryland lawyer, extracted a treaty from the Foreign Office that was so weak on the question of impressment that Jefferson refused to submit it to the Senate.

Slowly Britain and France tightened their economic nooses on each other. When London declared a blockade of the European coast from
Brest to the river Elbe, Napoleon counterattacked by establishing, under the so-called Berlin Decree, a complete blockade of the British Isles. As decree followed decree, zealous English captains pressed their efforts against American commerce and English “deserters.”

Then occurred
the
incident. When on July 2, 1807, the American frigate
Chesapeake
was hailed off the Virginia coast by the British frigate
Leopard
, the American commander, assuming the
Leopard
was bent on an innocent errand, allowed her to draw near without piping his own men to quarters or bothering to have the loggerheads heated red-hot for firing his guns. The English captain requested permission to board and search the
Chesapeake
, but its commander refused—the English were allowed to search merchantmen, not warships. The
Leopard
promptly poured three broadsides into the defenseless
Chesapeake
, hulling her twenty-two times and killing or wounding twenty-one seamen. The search party found only one genuine deserter, who was court-martialed and hanged from the yardarm. Three other sailors, two of them black and all three American citizens, were seized and held by the British.

Anger swept the Atlantic coast after the
Chesapeake
labored into Norfolk. British stores were destroyed and seamen roughed up, as editors and mass meetings declared war on the enemy. The
Chesapeake
seemed to symbolize innocent, defenseless America. Not since the battle of Lexington, Jefferson said, had he seen the country in such a state of exasperation. “The British had often enough, God knows, given us cause of war before; but it has been on points which would not have united the nation,” he wrote William Duane. “But now they have touched a chord which vibrates in every heart.” But what to do?

For a while the President temporized, hoping that London would offer some concessions on impressment in the wake of the
Chesapeake.
But by the end of 1807 he knew he must act. Many still called for war, but Jefferson quailed at the prospect. While no pacifist, he dreaded the bloodshed and waste inevitable in a war against Britain, the financial cost for the government, the divisions it would cause between Anglophiles and Francophiles. Another alternative was arming American warships or merchantmen, or both, to protect trade. But these half-measures would have mixed results and might precipitate a war in any event. The only other course was an embargo on all trade with Britain, thus putting the English on short rations. By December the President had concluded that the choice lay among “War, Embargo, or Nothing.”

In mid-December the President asked Congress for an embargo act, and both House and Senate responded quickly and enthusiastically. The Embargo Act prohibited virtually all land and seaborne trade with foreign
nations. American vessels were forbidden to leave for foreign ports; coasters were required to post a huge bond as guarantee that cargos would not be shipped abroad. Foreign vessels could not carry goods out of American ports. It was a desperate, sweeping measure—but even more remarkable was Jefferson’s almost fanatical effort to make the act work. When widespread smuggling and other evasions and violations occurred along the thousands of miles of Canadian border and Atlantic coast, the President’s response was to tighten the act and to strengthen executive control to the degree that he was wielding unprecedented presidential power.

The Embargo Act was designed to cut and batter the British economy but to be tolerable to the American. It had virtually the reverse effect. The impact on Atlantic ports was immediate and severe, as hundreds of ships and thousands of seamen were idled. “Ships rotted at the wharves; forests of bare masts were silhouetted in the harbors; grass grew on hitherto humming wharves; bankruptcies, suicides, and crimes increased; soup kitchens were established,” Thomas Bailey noted. Ironically, many Yankee sailors sought employment in the British merchant marine, thus easing the need for impressment. The political effects were also emphatic, as the coastal cities in particular rallied against the “dambargo.” Sang a New Hampshire poet in Dover:

Our ships all in motion,

Once whiten’d the ocean

They sail’d and return’d with a

Cargo;

Now doom’d to decay

They are fallen a prey,

To Jefferson, worms, and

EMBARGO.

The sluggish Federalist party came to life in protest against Jefferson’s “Quaker-gun diplomacy.” Even high Federalists could now appear to be friends of jobless sailors and other workers.

The strategy of the embargo was that the hurting English economy would cause public opinion to pressure the ministry into compromises. But the persons most affected—workers reduced to pauperism in the English textile industry dependent on American cotton, and people suffering privation in Newfoundland and the West Indies—were the ones with least influence on British policy. The military and business establishments, intent on challenging America’s rising mercantile power, pressed the ministry to stand firm.

Jefferson had uncharacteristically launched the embargo without full support from his colleagues; Gallatin, for one, preferred war to a permanent embargo. Republican state leaders, especially in the Northeast, were
thrown on the defensive. Yet the President pursued his policy with relentless determination, and at cost to some of his basic principles of government. As evasions mounted, he received power to employ the militia freely in enforcing the law. Authority to call out the regular army and navy was granted to collectors, who were placed under the President’s direct policy control. Under the pressure, something of the spirit of “Jeffersonianism” seemed to escape from Jefferson himself, as he verged on embracing guilt by association, condemning whole communities instead of individual violators, and, on one occasion, supporting an effort to indict some embargo violators on the charge of treason; the case was thrown out of court by a Jeffersonian judge.

An impervious Britain, a stubborn President, a restive party and Congress, a mounting opposition—something had to give. The tightened embargo rules set off new paroxysms of rage in New England. The Massachusetts legislature threatened to disobey the law, amid talk of secession. The President was pictured as both arbitrary and weak. In Massachusetts a budding thirteen-year-old poet, William Cullen Bryant, touched on all of Jefferson’s vulnerabilities, including his alleged black mistress:

When shall this land, some courteous angel say,

Throw off a weak, and erring ruler’s sway?…

Oh wrest, sole refuge of a sinking land,

The sceptre from the slave’s imbecile hand!…

Go, wretch, resign the presidential chair,

Disclose thy secret measures foul or fair…

Or where Ohio rolls his turbid stream,

Dig for huge bones, thy glory and thy theme,

Go scan, Philosophist; thy ****** charms,

And sink supinely in her sable arms.

A group of Republicans unexpectedly broke the impasse by a vote to repeal the embargo. A “sudden and unaccountable revolution of opinion took place the last week, chiefly among the New England and New York members,” the President wrote his son-in-law early in February 1809. The defectors set the date of repeal on the day of Jefferson’s retirement. Thus was a deeper quagmire averted. The President was bitter about the desertions. The “hurricane which is now blasting the world, physical and moral,” he wrote a friend “has prostrated all the mounds of reason as well as right.” But he made no great effort to save the embargo. He too seemed to feel the game was played out. Certainly
he
felt played out; sixty-five years old in his last year in office, he was desperately eager to return to Monticello for good.

Jefferson had staked so much on the success of the embargo that he seemed to leave office a defeated man. Some said that he had “fled” Washington. This was the view of many contemporaries. As years passed, it became clear that in most respects his presidential leadership had been as effective in his second term as in his first. Save for the embargo, he had continued to demonstrate, in his close collaboration with Madison, Gallatin, and other administration officials, that collective executive leadership was possible under the Constitution. Again save for the embargo, he had exercised firm, though unobtrusive, direction of the Republicans in Congress and, to a lesser extent, of the Republican party through the nation. While he had seen no need to present Congress with a comprehensive program of proposed legislation, the measures he did support usually passed smoothly through the two houses. Often the President had to draw on the resources of his personal leadership—especially on the infinite respect and love Republican leaders had for him—in order to mediate factional disputes among Republicans.