1812: The Navy's War (7 page)
IF THERE WAS no need for Britain to impress and brutalize her own subjects, there was certainly no need to impress citizens of the United States, particularly when the number of Americans involved was so small. No one has an exact figure, but it is generally agreed that the number of Americans impressed into the British navy from the start of the Wars of the French Revolution in 1793 until 1812 was probably less than 6,000, although some scholars have it as high as 9,000.
Rather than addressing its manpower shortage by improving conditions for seamen, however, the Admiralty adopted a severe punishment code, including death, for any man caught leaving his ship without permission, particularly one found aboard an American warship. “We must on no account shrink from the duty of putting to death every British subject caught fighting against his country,” the
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lectured, never once mentioning that conditions aboard the ships themselves might be to blame and could be easily corrected. Instead, they continually asserted that British seamen left their ships because the Americans had seduced them.
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lectured, never once mentioning that conditions aboard the ships themselves might be to blame and could be easily corrected. Instead, they continually asserted that British seamen left their ships because the Americans had seduced them.
Neither terror nor impressment solved the Admiralty’s manning problems, however. In desperation, their lordships tried a variety of expedients, such as offering five pounds for any able seaman under fifty who signed up, three pounds for anyone who informed the press of where they could lay hands on an able seaman, and a guinea for a landsman who volunteered. The Admiralty swept the prisons and even took impoverished orphans. Youngsters who were orphaned and found themselves taken in by parishes were often sent to merchant ships when they were twelve or thirteen (and sometimes younger). After training, they would be taken into the Royal Navy, which then became their life. The Admiralty employed any device, fair or foul, to man its ships, save the most obvious one: improving the lives of those who served. The Royal Navy had done so spectacularly well against all competitors that changing methods of recruitment seemed ludicrous to an Admiralty steeped in tradition, particularly when change was demanded by America, a nation that seemed to annoy the British more than any other.
THE PASSIONS IMPRESSMENT unleashed on both sides were not easily tamed. The British saw themselves in mortal danger from a French enemy who ought to have been America’s foe as well, while, even as Napoleon threatened to extinguish the very liberties Americans insisted were the foundation of their society, the United States was acting as if she had no stake in the outcome of the struggle in Europe. The Royal Navy, as far as the British were concerned, was the only force preventing Napoleon from realizing his dream of a North American empire, uniting Louisiana with Canada. And to think he would stop there was naïve: Bonaparte would never rest until he had destroyed the republican regime in America; it was a living rebuke to everything he stood for.
The British, then, fighting what they saw as America’s fight, found it strange indeed that the sympathies of Jefferson and Madison remained with a dictator openly hostile to their professed ideals. Even more galling, America’s insistence on the right of neutrals to trade freely with both belligerents looked as if shortterm profits were more important than European liberty. Surely America’s moral sense had been deadened by gross materialism, as Yankee merchants sought to profit from Europe’s misery.
Deserters from the Royal Navy, the British believed, were necessary for the American merchant fleet to carry on its burgeoning wartime trade, which in turn supported the revenues of an American government financed largely by customs duties. By insisting on carrying on their international commerce, then, regardless of the consequences, Americans were endangering British liberty—and ultimately their own—for the sake of money. Even worse, the British felt that the real reason Jefferson and Madison wanted to do away with impressment was to destroy Britain’s maritime power, regardless of the consequences.
Given this attitude, it is not surprising that Britain refused to alter an official policy hallowed by three centuries of practice in order to appease American demands. The Royal Navy had trebled in size since the war with France began in January 1793, and the Admiralty needed every seaman it could lay its hands on. Volunteers alone were not enough. For every citizen of the United States in the Royal Navy, their lordships estimated, there were ten Englishmen in American ships, private and public. The ministry wanted them back—or at least hanged as a deterrent.
The United States, for her part, could not suffer ships flying her flag to be boarded and seamen impressed and still call herself an independent country. Allowing such an outrage to continue would be to submit to colonial status again. In the eyes of Jefferson and Madison, accepting impressment was unthinkable. Britain had no right whatever, they insisted, to seize anyone from a vessel flying the American flag, no matter what the pretext.
In America a seaman could obtain citizenship by being naturalized after a period of five years, no matter where he’d been born, whereas Britian now maintained, as most countries did at the time, that if you were born a British subject, you remained one for life. The British conveniently overlooking their own laws, dating back to Queen Anne and George II, which stipulated that any foreigner who served two years in a British warship or merchantman automatically became a naturalized British subject without the need for an oath or any other requirement.
Regardless of these old laws, Great Britain, faced with the Napoleonic menace, was not about to change her ways, and Americans, with vivid memories of how hard they had fought for independence, were not about to accept them.
CHAPTER THREE
Jefferson’s Embargo and the Slide Toward War
A
T THE END of 1807 Jefferson decided to counter Britain’s Orders in Council and its practice of impressment, as well as Napoleon’s decrees, by instituting a wide-ranging embargo. Jefferson believed that Britain and her West Indian colonies were so dependent on American trade, particularly in raw materials, that London would be forced to withdraw her Orders in Council and to put a stop to impressment in a matter of weeks. He hoped that, faced with an Anglo-American entente, Napoleon would follow suit. Jefferson liked to think of the embargo as a form of “peaceful coercion,” an alternative to either war or submission, and he had the enthusiastic support of Madison, who also believed that the embargo was the only way to avoid having to choose between a costly war or abject surrender to colonial status.
T THE END of 1807 Jefferson decided to counter Britain’s Orders in Council and its practice of impressment, as well as Napoleon’s decrees, by instituting a wide-ranging embargo. Jefferson believed that Britain and her West Indian colonies were so dependent on American trade, particularly in raw materials, that London would be forced to withdraw her Orders in Council and to put a stop to impressment in a matter of weeks. He hoped that, faced with an Anglo-American entente, Napoleon would follow suit. Jefferson liked to think of the embargo as a form of “peaceful coercion,” an alternative to either war or submission, and he had the enthusiastic support of Madison, who also believed that the embargo was the only way to avoid having to choose between a costly war or abject surrender to colonial status.
In December 1807, Congress passed the Embargo Act by a wide margin. The legislation prohibited all exports to any foreign port and required a bond for coastal traders. Foreign ships could still bring goods to American ports, but they had to return in ballast. Albert Gallatin, the Treasury secretary whose job it would be to enforce the act, did not like it, but he dutifully took on the nearly impossible task of implementing it.
Jefferson’s hope was that by sacrificing America’s trade for a short period the embargo would save the nation’s ships and men from British and French depredations. Meanwhile, to defend the coasts, he dramatically increased the navy’s fleet of gunboats—small craft ranging in size from forty-five to seventy feet and carrying one to two heavy guns. By the end of 1807 the Republican Congress had authorized construction of 278 of these boats, though by the time the War of 1812 broke out, just 165 were available.
Jefferson viewed this fleet of gunboats as defensive in nature and far less expensive than building frigates or ships of the line. He thought the navy’s larger ships contributed almost nothing to the nation’s defense. In a war with Britain, he assumed the Royal Navy would quickly seize them. Gunboats, on the other hand, could “withdraw from the reach of the enemy,” he argued, and be “formidable . . . in shoally waters.” Not a single officer in the navy agreed with him, however. None thought the gunboats could protect the coasts. They viewed Jefferson’s mosquito fleet with scorn, and when war came, the gunboats proved nearly useless.
F
OR NEW ENGLAND Federalists, the embargo was the last straw. Shutting off the region’s seagoing commerce would wreak havoc on its economy. And so the Federalist Party, moribund since Jefferson’s stunning reelection in 1804, came back to life, invigorated by opposition to the embargo. Flouting of the law was widespread. Jefferson, surprised by this level of resistance, grew more tenacious in his attempts at enforcement. He should not have been shocked that so many Americans despised the embargo, however. Despite widespread evasion, exports plunged from over one hundred million in 1807 to just twenty two million the following year.
OR NEW ENGLAND Federalists, the embargo was the last straw. Shutting off the region’s seagoing commerce would wreak havoc on its economy. And so the Federalist Party, moribund since Jefferson’s stunning reelection in 1804, came back to life, invigorated by opposition to the embargo. Flouting of the law was widespread. Jefferson, surprised by this level of resistance, grew more tenacious in his attempts at enforcement. He should not have been shocked that so many Americans despised the embargo, however. Despite widespread evasion, exports plunged from over one hundred million in 1807 to just twenty two million the following year.
Even more maddening, while the law proved exceptionally hard on the United States, it appeared to have little effect on Britain or France. Foreign Secretary Canning ridiculed it. But this was just a pretense. The British were indeed hampered by their inability to import American raw materials, and the embargo played a role in causing Britain’s depression in 1809–10. Nevertheless, London and Paris ignored the embargo and steadfastly refused to change their maritime policies, forcing Jefferson to keep the increasingly unpopular law in force far longer than he anticipated. Week after week the economy declined, and increasingly strident calls for relief came from across the country, particularly from New England. By the winter of 1809 a civil war was brewing over the domestic distress caused by the stoppage of trade. “The evils which are menaced by the continuance of this policy,” the Massachusetts legislature informed Congress, “. . . must soon become intolerable, and endanger our domestic peace, and the union of these states.” Finally, on March 1, 1809, just three days before Jefferson left office, Congress repealed the hated embargo. The president, with great reluctance, signed the bill, bequeathing to his successor the problem of what to do about British and French provocations.
It was not a legacy President Madison coveted. Despite his strong support for the unpopular embargo, he had been elected handily in 1808 with 122 electoral votes to 47. He was furious with the New England Federalists for doing everything they could to thwart a policy he believed could have achieved American goals without war or submission. Like Jefferson, Madison was convinced that if the country had persevered with the embargo just a while longer, the British would have relented. That may have been true, but politically the embargo was dead.
On March 15, 1809, immediately after Madison took office, Congress replaced the embargo with the Non-Intercourse Act, which permitted trade with all nations except Britain and France. The legislation unintentionally favored the British. Despite the law, goods flowed freely to Britain through a number of channels, while the Royal Navy enforced the blockade of Napoleonic Europe.
The British, of course, did not feel favored by the new law, and their ambassador in Washington, David Erskine (the only British ambassador who genuinely liked America), sought ways to prevent Anglo-American relations from deteriorating further. He approached Madison in April 1809 for talks about easing tensions between the two countries. The president was receptive, and in a short six weeks he and Erskine negotiated an agreement whereby Britain would revoke the Orders in Council if the United States would end non-intercourse against Great Britain. Both Erskine and Madison felt they had achieved a genuine breakthrough. In the end, however, Canning rejected the agreement, recalling Erskine and replacing him with a hard-line, anti-American Tory, Francis J. Jackson, who went out of his way to sour relations between the two countries. Federalists, particularly in Massachusetts, supported Jackson against their own government, which only encouraged Perceval and Canning, to suppose that with the United States so hopelessly divided, Madison could never act effectively against them. With the end of the Embargo Act, American ships reappeared on the high seas, and the British again went right after them, exacerbating relations between the two countries. Perceval and Canning were showing no restraint whatever.
On May 1, 1810, in order to revive the revenue stream flowing to the cashstarved Treasury, Congress replaced the Non-Intercourse Act with Macon’s Bill #2, which restored trade with the entire world, including Britain and France. Moreover, the bill stipulated that if either Britain or France ceased interfering with neutral trade, the United States would stop trading with the other nation. This provision moved Napoleon to notify the United States that he was removing his Berlin and Milan decrees, although, in truth, he had no intention of doing so. Madison, choosing to believe him, asked Britain to rescind the Orders in Council, or be faced with the prospect of having trade with America cut off. London was quick to point out that Napoleon had not actually done what he said and so refused.
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