The United States of America Part 14

It was claimed in the commercial States that the power "to regulate"

commerce, bestowed by the Const.i.tution, did not cover an embargo or prohibition of commerce. In advancing this argument, the New England people quoted the opinion of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions that "an unconst.i.tutional law is not binding on the people." In reply to this point made by the loose constructionists, the strict constructionists could do nothing more than quote the implied power.

"To regulate" meant to keep the enemy from seizing. Time had wrought a strange transfer of doctrines.

Rhymesters exercised their wit in ridiculing both Jefferson and the embargo. Said one:

"Our ships all in motion once whitened the ocean, They sailed and returned with a cargo; Now doomed to decay, they have fallen a prey To Jefferson, worms, and embargo."

Another paid his respects to the President in stanzas, one of which will suffice:

"Like the Tyrant of fame, he embargoes his ports, And to measures that ruin his subjects resorts; By fools he is flattered--by wise men accursed, For "No trade" is the maxim of Thomas the First."

These squibs ill.u.s.trate the dominance which politics held over the composition of the day. The discussion over the adoption of the Const.i.tution had long since given way to newspaper and pamphlet writing on political issues. These writings, frequently scurrilous and abusive, were caused by the rise of parties and, in turn, aided in forming parties. None of the wretched stuff survived. _Peter Porcupine_, the _Aurora_, and the much loftier _Columbiad_ are alike forgotten. Yet it is indicative of the extent to which politics ruled the day to note that in _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, Washington Irving turns aside from the ostensible object of a humorous sketch of early New York to ridicule President Jefferson. William the Testy, a dreamer, a speculative philosopher, an impractical inventor, with a smattering of all knowledge, was easily recognised as the President of the United States. His suggestion of windmills as a means of defence was a burlesque on Jefferson's little gunboats, and his government by proclamation a parody on the embargo and its proclamations.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PRESIDENT JEFFERSON'S SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS.]

This isolated work of Irving, written ten years before the beginning of his literary career, finds a counterpart in a long "poem" on the embargo, advertised extensively in the newspapers of New York and New England. It was composed by William Cullen Bryant, aged thirteen, no doubt gladly forgotten in later years and to be found in few editions of his works.

"Go, wretch! resign thy Presidential chair, Disclose thy secret measures, foul or fair,"

was the gentle manner in which the young rhymester addressed the author of the hated embargo. The following orthographic puzzle went the rounds of the Federalist papers. By beginning at the central letter, the phrase "Embargo will ruin us" may be read in countless directions.

S U N I U R L L I W I L L R U I N U S U N I U R L L I W O W I L L R U I N U N I U R L L I W O G O W I L L R U I N I U R L L I W O G R G O W I L L R U I U R L L I W O G R A R G O W I L L R U R L L I W O G R A B A R G O W I L L R L L I W O G R A B M B A R G O W I L L L I W O G R A B M E M B A R G O W I L L L I W O G R A B M B A R G O W I L L R L L I W O G R A B A R G O W I L L R U R L L I W O G R A R G O W I L L R U I U R L L I W O G R G O W I L L R U I N I U R L L I W O G O W I L L R U I N U N I U R L L I W O W I L L R U I N U S U N I U R L L I W I L L R U I N U S

The friends of the embargo attempted to rally the home spirit of the people in order to support the measure. President Jefferson ordered sufficient dark-blue cloth from Colonel Humphreys to make himself a coat, saying: "Homespun is become the spirit of the times. My idea is that we shall encourage home manufactures to the extent of our own consumption of everything of which we raise the raw material." The Legislatures of Virginia, North Carolina, Vermont, and Ohio fixed a day, after which no imported clothing should be worn by members.

Pennsylvania used the proceeds of a dog tax to introduce a better breed of sheep into the State. Clay, offering a resolution in the Kentucky Legislature to use only homespun, was denounced by a fellow-member as a demagogue, the affair ending, quite naturally, in a duel. A rally of Americanism which would support the embargo was denied to Jefferson, but Clay reaped the full benefit of these early efforts at a later time.

The closing days of Jefferson's administration were not the most pleasant he had to remember. Like the husband who, at his own request, a.s.sumes direction of the household expenditures with high ideas of reform, he found theory and practice far removed from each other. His policy of retrenchment, it was true, had scaled down the army, navy, and consular service nearly two million dollars a year, and the pension list had been reduced to the lowest point in the history of the nation.

The public debt was lowered from eighty-three million dollars to fifty-seven million, and could have been reduced still more if it had been redeemable. Whatever pleasure the retiring President might have derived from contemplating these facts was lost sight of in the demoralising effects of the embargo. The exports had been reduced to one-fifth their normal amount, the customs cut in half, and the entire income of the nation had decreased from seventeen to seven million dollars.

No American statesman before Greeley believed so confidently in the goodness of the people and none so much desired their happiness. Nor was ever altrurian more bitterly disappointed. The frustration of a high hope and the selfishness of interests alike find exemplification in the eight years of Jefferson. a.s.suming office with an aversion to coercion in any form, a.s.suring the people that the energies of the nation should be used for the improvement of man and not wasted in his destruction, he had been forced before leaving office to exclaim: "Where is the patriotism of the people?" The individual had long since been lost sight of in compelling the whole people to obey the law. It was as impossible for Jefferson to carry the people to the thinly populated plains of individualism as it had been found impossible to transfer them to the elect city of centralisation. Defeated in his attempts to avert war by commercial restriction, disheartened by his failure to rally the patriotism of the people without recourse to war, he confessed on leaving the Presidency that no prisoner, on being released from his chains, felt such pleasure as he did in shaking off the shackles of power.

CHAPTER XVI

AMERICAN NEUTRALITY LOST IN WAR

The United States, as a maritime nation, could scarcely expect to escape the maelstrom of war induced by the task of suppressing the French Revolution and Napoleon, a task which occupied the legitimists of Europe for a quarter of a century, and involved every civilised nation of the Old World. President Washington had early laid the course of the ship of state on the medium way of neutrality. He maintained the course, although at the penalty of such abuse as we gladly forget at the present day. To continue that policy, President Adams wrecked his party, cut himself off with one term, and became a vicarious sacrifice when he chose negotiations with France instead of war.

President Jefferson spent eight unhappy years for the same object. He endured national humiliation, was forced into coercive measures from which his soul revolted, and brought his country to the verge of commercial ruin to avoid war. President Madison, during his first four years, was made the tool of British diplomatic equivocation and the plaything of Napoleonic strategy to maintain the position chosen nearly two decades before; so great was the task and so fearful the cost of founding a neutral nation.

This delay of war proved most fortunate in the end. Those twenty years allowed the American merchantmen to increase in numbers until they were able to work such devastation on British commerce as marked the course of the War of 1812. The period allowed the new nation to acquire the strategic mouth of the Mississippi, and to make such inroads of settlers in the debatable land of the Floridas that Britain was unable to secure a permanent footing in them during hostilities. Twenty years carried forward the Old World struggle to a point so near its close that the Americans were able in the end to make surprisingly good terms in the general European demand for a world-peace.

As if to put the strict constructionists to the test on every side, the twenty years for which the Hamilton bank had been chartered expired in the midst of a conviction that war was inevitable. The bank, as a means of securing loans, would be indispensable during a war. The liberal-minded Gallatin brought in a report to Congress advocating a re-charter of the bank for another term of years. His arguments were much like those of Hamilton twenty years before. Is it given to the departed to know such a mortal pleasure as vindication?

Gallatin's recommendation evoked a storm of dissent from those members of the party who adhered to early principles. They would not give a new lease of life to this monopoly, unconst.i.tutional in its origin and abused in its administration. State banks, if given an opportunity, could care for the United States money as well as an aristocratic, exclusive inst.i.tution, seven-tenths of whose stock was held in England.

This plea for the individual was the argument by which the opponents of re-charter met the predictions of financial ruin with which the advocates of Gallatin's suggestion filled the air. The withdrawal of twenty-four million dollars from circulation would mean a national panic, it was claimed. Arguments of expediency were heard where const.i.tutionality had held twenty years before.

The unionising process which the former individualists had undergone in ten years of administration is ill.u.s.trated by the speech of Crawford, of Georgia, a lifelong adherent to the principles of Jefferson in the main, but too liberal to be bound to a dead past. A rational a.n.a.lysis of the Const.i.tution, he thought, would show that it was not perfect in language as commonly supposed, but that it occasionally gave a general power followed by a specific power.

"This a.n.a.lysis," said he, "may excite unpleasant sensations, it may a.s.sail honest prejudices; for there can be no doubt that honest prejudices frequently exist and are many times perfectly innocent. But when these prejudices tend to destroy even the object of their affection, it is ostensibly necessary that they should be eradicated."

In pleading that the Const.i.tution should not be held down to a construction which would render it "wholly imbecile," he took as advanced ground on the implied powers as had any Federalist in the olden days. Ridiculing those who clung to the old restrictive theory, he cited numerous actions of the party during the ten years it had been in power which could be justified only by const.i.tutional implication. Among these, he said, were laws for the punishment of counterfeiters, pa.s.sed under the power to coin money; the erection of lighthouses under the power to regulate commerce; the prohibition of offences against the post-office department under the power to establish post-offices and post-roads; and the acceptance of sites for a.r.s.enals, forts, and dockyards under the power to control them. Even the acceptance of the District of Columbia depended upon the implied instead of the direct language of the Const.i.tution. Nor did he fail to point out that in 1802, when removing the judges of the circuit courts established by the Federalists in their last hours, the party was proceeding entirely upon the a.s.sumption that the expressed power to create inferior courts contained the implied power to abolish them.

Pet.i.tions both for and against a re-charter of the Hamilton bank poured in from merchants in various cities and from branches of the bank.

Instructions against the bank came from the State Legislatures of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. So nearly was opinion divided that a new lease of life for the bank was prevented in the House by only one vote, and in the Senate by the deciding vote of Vice-President Gerry, of Ma.s.sachusetts, who chose to abide by party principles rather than to listen to the voice of the majority of people in his own State.

The predicted extension of State banks and the disorder in the finances of the country were alike experienced after the expiration of the United States Bank in 1811. More than two hundred of these private inst.i.tutions were chartered in the various States to take the place of the branches of the old bank. They were to be found especially in the newer portions of the country, where banking facilities had been previously unknown. Flooding the land with their bank-notes, they speedily drove coin out of circulation. The latter was h.o.a.rded. When the war began, banks found it impossible to secure this h.o.a.rded coin to redeem their notes and were compelled to suspend specie payment completely. The National Government, having made these banks depositaries for the revenue collectors, according to the individualistic demands, suffered loss and disarrangement of its funds.

The lesson was severe, especially in the face of an impending war.

In the final struggle of the giants, which began, near the close of Madison's first term, with Napoleon's preparations for the invasion of Russia, every offensive and defensive principle known to English commercial history (and few are abandoned) was revived in the attempt to starve out the French and prevent the long-antic.i.p.ated invasion of England. The seizure of American goods on the high seas had long been a source of complaint from the commercial interests; but it never affected the ma.s.ses or so aroused them to the point of fury as did the practice of taking seamen from American vessels. Britain was the worst offender in both forms of reprisal, not alone because she was the greatest maritime power, but also because a common speech characterised the sailors of Britain and the United States. Yet it was largely a matter of different views of citizenship. That a man should voluntarily exile himself from British protection and citizenship was as offensive to British pride as injurious to British strength. That an allegiance could exist better than that of England was incomprehensible to the British public; that a man deluded into so thinking should be set right was a natural duty. "Once a subject, always a subject," gave the sovereign a right to the services of every man born under the British flag or having sworn fealty thereto. The subject could be taken by a press-gang on sh.o.r.e or could be impressed from the deck of any vessel on which he had taken refuge. Such doctrine was especially objectionable to Americans, who depended largely upon aliens to people their vast domain, and who placed so much stress upon individual freedom of motion.

Perpetual allegiance of the subject was as obnoxious as perpetual ownership of the land to a people who were all aliens once, twice, or thrice removed.

On the other hand, the British complained that their seamen were seduced from their allegiance to fill up the American merchant marine. Formal naturalisation papers were said to be given to men who sailed two years from American ports. These deserters were engaged, for a large part, in the neutral trade. Thus the enemies of Britain were being served by British sailors. Not only was her trade injured and the enemy strengthened, but this was being done by the loss of blood from her own navy. Her writers called upon the Government to sacrifice even the good-will of the Americans rather than to submit to the imposition of neutrals on British trade and the loss of British sailors.

The Americans were forced by public sentiment to take a stand for national citizenship. A broad patriotism was rallied which overcame all scruples about the differences between national and State citizenship. The matter manifestly belonged to the central rather than the individual governments. When threatened by foreign powers, Federal citizenship a.s.sumed a new value in the eyes of the Jeffersonians, much akin to that which it had long borne in the opinion of the Federalists.

The party which ten years before was endeavouring to distinguish between State and national citizenship was now compelled to take action to protect sailors who were not residents of any State. Many of them had no homes. They could look to no protector except the Union, under whose flag they sailed.

It is questionable whether the Federalists, had they remained in power, could have avoided a war with Britain when once the people had become fully aroused by the continued attacks of Britain on American commerce and American citizenship. Long-suffering and patient toward British offence, that party had avoided war for at least ten years. Jefferson and Madison, more devoted to maintaining neutrality than restrained by love of Britain, postponed the inevitable war for twelve years more.

But Madison's was a gradually waning power. The end of his first administration marks the termination of the one-man era. Hamilton and Jefferson by turn had dominated national affairs. Perhaps no man could have continued the monopoly. The day of many counsellors was at hand.

Revolutionary statesmen and warriors alike were to be cast aside by a second generation, which knew not the horrors of war. The supremacy of the Atlantic coast in national affairs had begun to wane. Political power was moving westward with the people.

This war element, which practically took matters from Madison's hands, was composed of men who were to measure their careers by decades instead of years. Its const.i.tuents had been reared in the strenuous life of the frontier. Separated from Old World influence by the Allegheny barrier, they felt the first impulses of true Americanism. A continuation of dominant foreign influence under them was impossible.

Instead of seceding to a foreign power, as their fathers had threatened, these trans-Allegheny frontiersmen had now been absorbed by the Union and were to secure their long-delayed rights by controlling their own government, which had once been disposed to neglect them. They were, for the most part, country-bred lawyers, belonging to the agricultural and borrowing cla.s.s rather than the bank-founding, lending Federalists.

In this respect, they would be in accord with Jefferson and Madison, but totally at variance with them in their inland att.i.tude toward ocean commerce.

Like true Democrats, they breathed the air of the individual rather than the ma.s.ses. Clay was the son of a dissenting clergyman in aristocratic Virginia, which was still under the spell of an establishment of religion. By removing to Kentucky, he not only exemplified the movement of national power, but freed himself from all disadvantages of caste. The only aristocracy on the frontier was that of worth. Calhoun came of equally humble birth and inherited his individualistic principles. His father had been a country member of the Virginia Convention and had opposed the adoption of the Federal Const.i.tution. Much of Calhoun's bias toward democracy was derived, as he confessed, from an early conversation with the sage of Monticello.

Bred in the upland district of South Carolina, a region more akin to Tennessee than to the seaboard, Calhoun may have had in mind the ma.s.sacre of his grandmother by the Indians as he arose in the war session of Congress to make his report as chairman of the important Committee of Foreign Affairs. He arraigned the British agents from Canada circulating among the American Indians, and charged them with the outrages committed on the American frontier. Members from the Ohio valley did not hesitate to attribute the recent outbreak, culminating in the battle of Tippecanoe, to intrigues of the British in Canada, whereby the profitable fur trade would be diverted to their posts. "If we are to be permanently free from this danger," said one speaker in the debate which followed the report, "we must drive the British from Canada. I, for one, am willing to receive the Canadians themselves as adopted brothers." Grundy, of Tennessee, who, like Clay, had been born on the Atlantic slope and had followed the advance of population across the Alleghenies, arose to declare that the whole Western country was eager to avenge their fallen heroes, and awaited but the word of Congress to march into Canada.

The frontiersmen, never free from the hostility of the savage, sought to explain it by every cause except the true one--their constant invasion of the lands reserved to him by the National Government in treaties made with him. Here lies at least one explanation of the long endurance of British commercial wrongs by the United States before war was declared. The West, with its grievance of Indian tampering, had not yet come into control of national affairs. The frontiersmen, by their conquests of nature, had come to despise the strength of all enemies. With no commerce to be endangered by a foreign war, safe in the almost roadless interior from the peril of invasion, the Western representatives were able to carry by storm in Congress their temporising, commercial brethren of the coast. When discussing the embargo bill as a preliminary war measure in 1812, Clay, made Speaker during his first session in the House, scorned the appeal of New York for peace, in her defenceless condition, as her representatives described her. "I do not wish to hear," said Clay, "of the opinion of Brockholst Livingston or any other man. I consider this a war measure, and approve of it because it is a direct precursor of war." Fourteen Legislatures of the South and West, he said, had put themselves on record as wishing to avenge the insults of Britain. The Legislature of his own State had supported Jefferson's embargo four years previously with such zeal that they almost pa.s.sed a measure abolishing the English common law in Kentucky courts.

Perhaps it was an accident that this twelfth Congress was composed almost one-half of new members; but more likely it was the result of popular impatience with the compromising foreign att.i.tude of the National Government. It was an incipient political revolution, without involving a change of administration, a form of rebuke not infrequent in the history of the Republic. The fact that these new and inexperienced members, known as "war-hawks," were able to secure the leadership may have been due to the accidental conjunction of natural leaders; but a larger view would see in it a shifting of political power with the advance of the people. The grievance of these Southern and Western people against the Indians could neither be appreciated nor believed by the New England and Middle Atlantic States, far removed from the frontier and the savages. To their minds, the broader accusation of preying upon American commerce was more real. Yet so profitable had grown the monopoly of trade secured by them as neutrals in the Napoleonic wars that they could well afford to lose occasionally by foreign orders and decrees for the sake of the profit as a whole.

The War of 1812 from a sectional standpoint presents, therefore, the unusual aspect of an inland, agricultural people forcing a war upon the country for the protection of a marine, commercial people, who were for the most part opposed to it. When Clay, in the lofty style common to the time, declared the Americans unconquerable, and that if the enemy should lay in ashes New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and should devastate the whole Atlantic coast, the people would retreat beyond the Alleghenies to live and flourish there, a member from New Jersey protested that this was too high a price for him; that he had no inclination to go beyond the Alleghenies; and that even the Mississippi valley would be a poor consolation to him after everything that was near and dear to him and his people had been destroyed.

The desire for commercial independence, which had been growing steadily since political independence had been gained, was responsible for some of this defiant att.i.tude. Speaker after speaker described the spirit of our forefathers who used only homespun in the rising Revolutionary days. The career of the United States, if commercially independent of Europe, was compared with her present situation, a victim of foreign oppression on the highways of the world. One speaker thought we should never be true Americans so long as we had to go to Europe for our national airs. It was not admitted generally that England's restrictive measures were due to her desire to starve out Napoleon, but as prompted by jealousy of "her new commercial rival," the United States. "England sickens at your prosperity," said Clay, "and beholds in your growth the foundations of a power which at no distant day is to make her tremble for her naval superiority." A foolish pride, characteristic of youth, urged on the war spirit. It was said that a few years before we had resolved for war, retaliation, or submission. The retaliatory measures had been withdrawn; war or submission was the only choice left.

Beneath the hostility arising from Britain's war measures lay, in the American mind, the irritation caused by her patronising air. The Americans had chafed under British social as well as commercial intolerance ever since the birth of the Republic. In the British thought, the Americans were still colonists in that they were not to the manor born. The Declaration of Independence and the severance of political ties had left them still dependent upon Britain in the higher aspects of life.

"The Americans a.s.serted their independence," said the _Edinburgh Review_, "upon principles which they derived from us. They are descended from our loins, they retain our usages and manners, they read our books, they have copied our freedom, they rival our courage, and yet they are less popular and esteemed among us than the base and bigoted Portuguese and the ferocious and ignorant Russians."

When an English statesman suggested that his Government would do well to cultivate the new Republic for the sake of trade if for no higher motive, Lord Brougham ridiculed the proposition of paying heed to "a people whose armies are as yet at the plough, or making awkward attempts at the loom, whose a.s.sembled navies could not lay siege to an English sloop of war." These sneers, although containing a large proportion of truth, exasperated the young nation beyond control. The provincialism of the day writhed under any suggestion that the New World was not the rival of the Old in every intellectual particular. A broader spirit would have confessed that time is required for the development of genius and the surroundings which conduce to a high development of intellectual and artistic life. Two decades later, Lowell satirised this American tendency in the _Fable for Critics_ by saying that while the Old World has produced barely eight poets, the New World begets a whole crop each year.

"Why, there's scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shanties, That has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes; I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Sh.e.l.leys, Two Raphaels, six t.i.tians, (I think) one Apelles, Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens, One (but that one is plenty) American d.i.c.kens, A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons,-- In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons, He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain Will be some very great person over again."

These extravagant claims incited fresh attacks. One British writer insisted that Federal America had done nothing either to extend, diversify, or embellish the sphere of human knowledge, and could produce nothing to bring her intellectual efforts into any sort of comparison with those of Europe. "Noah Webster, we are afraid," said he, "still occupies the first place in criticism, Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow in poetry, and Mr. Justice Marshall in history." Another p.r.o.nounced the celebrated Philosophic Hall in Philadelphia a "meeting house" for the society, where its transactions were "scooped together" in the "genuine dialect of tradesmen." Not only the published papers of the Philosophic Society were held up to ridicule, but also John Quincy Adams's _Letters from Silesia_, Marshall's _Life of Washington_, Barlow's _Columbiad_, Dwight's poetry, and Lewis and Clark's history of their expedition.

"But why should the Americans write books," asked the _Edinburgh Review_, "when a six weeks' pa.s.sage brings them in their own tongue our sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads. Prairies, steamboats, grist-mills are their natural objects for centuries to come."