For Honour's Sake (8 page)

Madison sent a dispatch on July 6 to James Monroe, then the U.S. minister in London, demanding that the British government formally disavow the attack on
Chesapeake
and return the four seamen. That the entire incident had been the misguided inspiration of one man was increasingly clear, and there was every reason to believe that the British would agree to this demand, but Jefferson and Madison were not content to limit discussions to the incident that had brought the nation to
the brink of war. Jefferson, Madison later explained, had decided to convert “a particular incident into an occasion for removing another and more extensive source of danger to the harmony of the two countries.”
¹⁶
Monroe was to wrest from the British a far greater concession than an admission that America's national sovereignty had been violated by the attack. “As a security for the future,” Madison wrote, “an entire abolition of impressment from vessels under the flag of the United States … is also to make an indispensable part of the satisfaction.”
¹⁷

Gallatin realized that Monroe was being sent on a fool's errand. “Great Britain will not, I am confident, give either satisfaction or security,” he commented.
¹⁸
Jefferson, too, doubted the wisdom of the ultimatum. He confided to a friend: “Although we demand of England what is merely of right, reparation for the past, security for the future, yet as their pride will possibly, nay probably, prevent their yielding them to the extent we shall require.”
¹⁹
The only recourse when the British refused his demands would be war. More administration meetings followed through July in rooms so scorching hot that clarity of thought was almost impossible. Gallatin's plans to attack Canada were reviewed in detail and his plans for funding the war discussed.

All this time, nearly three weeks, the dispatch to Monroe rested on Madison's desk as if there was no urgency in sending it. Finally Madison passed it to a courier, who boarded the USS
Revenge
on July 28 for the cross-Atlantic journey. Four days later, with nothing decided about how to, when to, or even whether to declare war if the demands were not met, Jefferson fled the steam bath of the capital for his beloved plantation, Monticello. Decisions about how to prepare for war could, it seemed, be left to the cooler days of fall.

Three days before
Revenge
sailed, the British secretary for foreign affairs, George Canning, had told Monroe the basic facts of the
Leopard
and
Chesapeake
incident. Shocked by the affair, Canning expressed regret and assured the American minister that if British officers were found in the wrong, his government would offer a “most prompt and effectual reparation.” Thinking Canning's comments a sign of weakness, Monroe demanded that Britain admit the incident had been an attempt
“to assert and enforce the unfounded and most unjustifiable pretension to search for deserters.” The British government must, he said, immediately renounce the principle that the Royal Navy had used to justify the search and agree to punish the officers responsible.
²⁰

Although not yet having received Madison's instructions to tie the
Chesapeake
incident inextricably to the issue of impressment, Monroe had seized on precisely the same strategy. Irritated by Monroe's strident language, Canning snapped back that Great Britain would make reparations only when all the facts were known. Somewhat more calmly he assured the American that His Majesty's government did not assume any right to search ships of war for deserters. If an investigation revealed that this had in fact taken place, Great Britain would disavow the act and discipline the responsible officers.

Word of Jefferson's proclamation barring British ships from American ports reached Britain well before
Revenge
brought Monroe his instructions. A powerful lobby of ship owners, Royal Navy officers, East and West India Company merchants, and leading politicians clamoured for immediate declaration of war on the United States. The president's actions, Canning advised Monroe, “without requiring or waiting for any explanation” were unwarranted and dangerous.
²¹

There matters lay until Monroe, now with Madison's terms in hand, sent Canning a note on September 7. America demanded by way of reparations that Britain restore the seamen taken, punish the officer who ordered the attack, abandon all impressment from merchant vessels, and send a special mission to Washington to announce its compliance with these demands. Knowing Britain would not readily accept tying impressment to the
Chesapeake
incident, Monroe argued that whether the act was carried out on a ship of war or a merchant ship was irrelevant. The simple fact was that impressment, in either case, was a violation of the individual rights of seamen and that a citizen of America was justly entitled to his country's protection from it.
²²

Canning fired back that the
Chesapeake
incident and the matter of impressment from merchant vessels were “wholly unconnected.” Impressment was a right exercised by Great Britain since it first built a navy and the practice was legally legitimized. Monroe offered the faint
compromise that he was willing to discuss impressment informally while settling the
Chesapeake
matter formally. Canning declined, saying that there would be no discussions of impressment until after the
Chesapeake
issue was settled. With Canning refusing to tie the two matters together and Monroe equally adamant that they could not be separated, the negotiations came to an abrupt end.
²³

Fitful attempts were made by both the American and British governments to get negotiations going again in either London or Washington, but all met the same result. Each side remained adamant about the terms and so neither budged. In America, the initial fervour for war had begun to decline by the fall of 1807. Although the slight that Americans declared had been inflicted upon their national honour by
Leopard's
attack on
Chesapeake
remained a festering sore, nobody but the most diehard pro-war advocates, like Henry Clay, were ready to resort to violence by way of cure.

As the orders-in-council and decrees by Napoleon made it ever more difficult for American merchantmen and traders to operate freely wherever they chose, Jefferson moved from barring British ships access to U.S. ports to a full-scale embargo. This in turn was weakened by the House and the Senate into a Non-intercourse Act that was only fitfully and ineffectually applied. By 1810, it was clear that these measures had failed and neither the French nor the British, locked as they were in a death struggle, were about to accommodate America's desire to trade with each and thus profit from its neutrality.

That the orders-in-council and the
Chesapeake
affair seemed insufficient cause to justify war posed a major hurdle to the loose coalition of politicians that constituted the pro-war lobby. Still, by the winter of 1810, when Henry Clay rode into Washington to assume his seat in the Senate, this group remained undaunted. If maritime issues were insufficient to rally public outcry and force the government's hand, then additional reasons must be found. And for Clay and the other westerners among their number there was a need to look no further than the wilderness beyond their own doorsteps. In those dense woods lurked Indians, who, rumour had it, were being incited by British agents operating out of Upper Canada to rise up and slaughter American settlers.

I
ndependence had freed America to concentrate on expanding its frontiers, and one result was a long, brutal struggle between whites and Indians over supremacy in the Ohio River country. Every time the frontier settlers pushed into fresh Indian territory they met stiff resistance, particularly from the Shawnee, who considered this their native land. The fighting was vicious, with atrocities ruthlessly committed by each side. Warriors and soldiers both took scalps, butchered women and children, burned settlements down upon their inhabitants, and hunted down and killed any enemy that happened across their path. This was war without quarter, each side bent upon purging the land of the other.

The pioneers leading the western expansion had an insatiable thirst for new territory. They were part of “an agricultural society without skill or resources,” noted one observer, who “committed all those sins which characterize a wasteful and ignorant husbandry.” Working with crude tools and even less agricultural knowledge, they cleared only the land in their parcel essential to growing food to meet personal needs or to trade with neighbours. The rest was left in timber through which farm animals roamed in search of forage. Not realizing that soil required rebuilding with compost or manure, these pioneers, whom contemporary American folklore hailed as the advance guard bringing civilization to the wilderness, soon exhausted their fields. Faced with sudden crop failures and looming starvation, they could think of no other option but to move farther west, where virgin country could be had. This
explained, the same observer reflected, “why the American frontier settler was on the move continually. It was not his fear of a too close contact with the comforts and restraints of a civilized society that stirred him into a ceaseless activity, nor merely the chance of selling out at a profit to the coming wave of settlers; it was his wasting land that drove him on. Hunger was the goad …. He could succeed only with a virgin soil.”
¹

A second wave of far different pioneers followed close on the heels of these frontier settlers. As often as not, these were European immigrants with farming experience in their old countries, who understood the benefits of crop rotation and the need for adequate holdings. From the land speculators, who had happily bought up the depleted plots abandoned by the first settlers, these new farmers assembled parcels from what previously constituted a half-dozen or more crude homesteads. They planted orchards, vegetables, hemp, and other crops that could yield commercial value. And they set about building a society that resembled that to be found in the eastern United States. Roads, even though often rough, connected farms and the small villages and towns that cropped up to provide the stores, banks, offices for doctors and lawyers, churches, courthouses, and other services necessary to the conduct of a relatively civilized agrarian society.

This process of frontier settlement, soon followed by settler displacement and reclamation by a true agrarian class, fuelled America's rapid territorial expansion. Inevitably, each westward push brought the frontiersman up hard against those peoples already dwelling within the forests that lay just over the hill or across the river from the recently settled territory. Disease and war had decimated the Indian peoples of the eastern seaboard. When the expansion inland reached the Appalachians, white settlers faced a better-organized and more determined foe—the many Indian nations who lived there and had formed a series of loosely organized confederacies. Most had been heavily involved in the French-Indian wars, had gone on to fight for one side or the other during the wars fought by France and Britain on North American soil, and had engaged in a series of conflicts with the Americans from the moment the first shots of the revolution of 1776 were fired.

Between 1784 and 1789, American representatives attempted to legitimize the pioneer incursions into the Ohio by imposing four treaties on the Indians who were being forcibly displaced. None of these documents were signed by Shawnee chiefs. Instead, chiefs from other native tribes, such as the Iroquois, who lacked historic claim to the land, accepted cash and guarantees of the security of their own territories in exchange for great swaths of the Ohio. The Shawnee denounced these treaties even as the white pioneers quickly moved beyond the boundary that each had set as the limit of American expansion. As the ink was drying on the parchment of these worthless documents, the fighting continued. Treaties or not, slowly and inexorably the Shawnee and other Indian nations living west of the Appalachians were forced to cede more ground to the settler.' relentless advance.

Among their number the Shawnee counted a warrior with a reputation for courage and wisdom that increased with each passing year. Tecumseh, which in his own language meant “Shooting Star,” stood five-foot-ten at a time when most whites rarely exceeded five-six. The straightness of his bearing added to the impression that here stood a man of great height. Powerfully and athletically built, uncommonly handsome, articulate, and keenly intelligent, Tecumseh engendered both respect and fear in the hearts of the Americans he met. Likely born in March 1768 at Old Piqua on the banks of western Ohio's Mad River, he was the fifth child in a family that would eventually number nine, including triplets. Although one of the triplets died soon after birth, the rest of the family survived infanthood.