Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (122 page)

But the British prime minister has all but put the Indians out of his mind in the interests of ending the conflict:

“Goulburn and our other commissioners evidently do not feel the inconvenience of the continuance of the war. I feel it strongly, but I feel it as nothing now compared with what it may be a twelve-month hence, and I am particularly anxious, therefore, that we should avoid anything, as far as may be in our power, which may increase our difficulties in concluding it.”

In the international game of Brag, it seems, Henry Clay, the loose-limbed Kentucky gambler, holds all the cards.

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, OCTOBER 3, 1814

Henry Clay, after three days of sightseeing among the Gothic spires and cobbled squares of the Flemish capital, is surprised on this autumn Monday to receive from Henry Goulburn a graceful, if uncharacteristic, little note accompanying a packet of newspapers from the United States.

“If you find Brussels as little interesting as I have done,” Goulburn writes sweetly, “you will not be sorry to have the occupation of reading the latest Newspapers which I have received, I therefore inclose them to you and shall be glad to have them back by tomorrow evening. I take this opportunity of mentioning that I do not propose leaving this late
[sic]
Tuesday morning in case you should be desirous of extending your excursion.…”

But Clay’s excursion as well as his disposition is ruined as soon as he opens the papers, which Goulburn, on specific instructions from Lord Bathurst, has so charitably sent him.
Washington in flames!
In the days that follow, Clay’s normal optimism gives way to despair. He trembles whenever he picks up a late newspaper. Everything seems to be going wrong: Chauncey’s refusal to co-operate with Jacob Brown at Fort George; Drummond (whom he believed captured) threatening Gaines’s army and consequently Chauncey’s fleet; and now this!

It is not the destruction of public property that wounds him “to the very soul”; it is his country’s disgrace—“that a set of pirates and incendiaries should have been permitted to pollute our soil, conflagrate our Capital, and return unpunished to their ships.”

Adams is equally downcast. “We must drink the cup of bitterness to the dregs,” he writes to his wife, Louisa. Bayard is wrought up to such a pitch of fury that, he declares to Adams, the desecration of Washington should “make every American take his children to the altar and swear them to eternal hatred of England.”

In this heated atmosphere the negotiations continue at Ghent, never face to face, always by diplomatic note, both sides giving a little, the British still “arrogant, overbearing and offensive,” in Adams’s
view, and the Americans never as bold or spirited as he thinks they ought to be. The British send off their draft notes to be re-drafted by the real negotiators in England; the Americans spend days arguing over grammar, phraseology, style, tone, length, punctuation. When Adams tries to moralize, peppering each missive with references to God, Providence, and Heaven, Clay cries “Cant!” and Russell, who is in Clay’s shadow, laughs openly. Gallatin, the conciliator, ends up writing most of the final drafts.

Not being faced with such wrangles, the English messenger-boys find time heavy on their hands. They have taken up headquarters in the former convent of Chartreux on the outskirts of the town, and here, in John Quincy Adams’s observation, they live “as secluded as if they were monks.” Lord Gambier, whom Adams quite likes (he appears “an excellent and well meaning man”) asks if the Americans have made many acquaintances. Indeed they have, attending a continual round of theatres and dinner parties. The old admiral, who is not much of a mixer, has made only one—the Intendant and his family. Goulburn, who has brought over his wife and small son (the latter recovering from “infantile fever”) spends his time with his family. Both he and Dr. Adams are, to the Americans, typical snobbish Britishers who dislike everything that is not English and make no secret of their tastes. The latter, whom Bayard considers “a man of no breeding,” boasts that he has not been to the theatre in ten years and reveals that his real enthusiasm is for Indian jugglers. The Americans greet this with a slight sneer; they, too, are not immune to snobbishness.

By late October, the exchange of paper and the instructions from London and Washington serve to clarify and pare down the real issues between the two countries. The backing and filling is accompanied, as always, by long ideological arguments, legalese, appeals to morality, and charges, both imagined and real, of perfidy, greed, lack of principle. But all that is for the public record. The real differences between the antagonists can be described by two Latin phrases:
status quo ante bellum
and
uti possidetis
. The Americans are prepared now to settle for the same conditions that existed before
the war—to act, in short, as if the war had never taken place. The British, flushed with success and expecting momentary news of the fall of Sackets Harbor and Plattsburgh, want to keep what they have conquered by right of possession.

The news of Prevost’s defeat and the failure of the British attack on Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, coming at the end of October, puts a new complexion on the negotiations. Liverpool is furious over Prevost’s incompetence. The war in North America has cost ten million pounds, and now this! Stalemate! Is there no end to it? Liverpool grasps at a straw: why not send the Duke of Wellington to Canada to take charge of the army? Such a gesture might easily speed up negotiations; the Duke is known to be anxious for peace with America if the terms are honourable. “Honour” has become a key word.
Peace with honour
. Both sides are more interested in saving face than they are in clinging to bits of real estate or keeping promises to obscure native chieftains. If honour can be satisfied, blood will cease to flow on the morrow. Financially, the Americans are more desperate than the British. Gallatin has just informed Monroe that not a dollar can be obtained in Europe to finance the war. Nonetheless, among the spires of Ghent the rival commissions must continue their diplomatic ritual dance. It has seven more weeks to go.

Three months have passed since the two teams first faced each other. Since that date, Mackinac Island has been relieved,
Tigress
and
Scorpion
captured, Fort Erie attacked, defended, and abandoned, Washington burned with all of Jefferson’s papers, Baltimore and Plattsburgh besieged. Francis Scott Key has written “The Star Spangled Banner,” John Armstrong has been fired as Secretary of War, and Duncan McArthur’s mounted Kentuckians have laid waste the valley of the Thames. Thousands have been killed including William Drummond, Hercules Scott, George Downie, Joseph Willcocks, Robert Ross, and an innocent old Loyalist farmer, William Francis, murdered for no good reason in his bed at Long Point by American partisans.

Along the thousand miles of embattled border, from Montreal to the western margins of Lake Huron, everything is as it was when the year began. The Americans hold Amherstburg. The British occupy Michilimackinac and Fort Niagara. In Ghent there is progress of a sort. The American mission, with British agreement, is actually composing the outline of a peace treaty.

Shortly after five on these raw November mornings, John Quincy Adams pulls himself out of bed, lights a tallow candle, stokes the fire in the grate, warms his numbed fingers, and starts to work on a draft of the document, knowing from bitter experience that his colleagues are waiting to tear it to pieces.

Almost immediately he runs into a confrontation with Henry Clay. Since the Peace of 1783, New Englanders have enjoyed the right to catch and dry their fish in British territory in return for free access, by the British, to the Mississippi. Adams, the New Englander, wants to retain that right; Clay, the Southerner, is opposed.

It would be difficult to find two statesmen more unlike in temperament, habit, or conviction than John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. By an ironic coincidence, their rooms adjoin one another so that as Adams rises at daybreak, he can often hear Clay preparing to go to bed. Clay loves to linger over dinner, drawing on strong cigars and fortifying himself with table wine before his customary late night card game. Adams bitterly begrudges these wasted moments; at one point he even decided to take dinner by himself, only to be dissuaded by a surprisingly persuasive Clay. Adams is a sour pessimist devoid of humour; Clay has a gambler’s optimism. Adams’s features are so arranged that he seems to be perpetually scowling. Clay’s high cheek bones, long face, and winsome mouth make him appear forever good humoured.

Adams finds it difficult to curb his anger when Clay dismisses the fisheries question as trifling. The Kentuckian will on no account permit the Mississippi to be turned into a British waterway. If that means giving up New England’s fishing rights, so be it. In the end, however, Clay proposes an ingenious way out of the impasse: the matter of the fisheries, he says, is linked irretrievably to the recognition of American independence; it does not require negotiation. Adams does not demur.

As usual, John Quincy discovers, to his chagrin, that three-quarters of his draft is struck out by the others. One paragraph, however, he is determined to include. Monroe has instructed the commission that peace can be concluded if both sides will agree to return to the prewar situation—
status quo ante bellum
—leaving the sticky points about boundaries and commerce to future negotiation. Adams believes that the time has come to face the British with this proposal.

It is now November 10. What Henry Clay and his colleagues do not know is that only the previous day the Duke of Wellington put a damper on Lord Liverpool’s hopes. What is the point of his going to Canada, he asks Castlereagh, until the British control the lakes? There is worse: the Duke does not believe that Britain has a right to demand any cession of territory from the United States. The war has been successful: the Americans have not succeeded in their plan to seize Canada. But neither have the British been able to carry the war to the enemy’s territory.

“Why stipulate for the
uti possidetis?”
Wellington asks. “You can get no territory; indeed, the state of your military operations, however creditable, does not entitle you to demand any: and you only afford the Americans a popular and creditable ground, which I believe their Government are looking for, not to break off the negotiations, but to avoid to make peace.”

That does it. Goulburn, blissfully unaware of this turn of affairs, is prepared to break off negotiations in Ghent because of the American insistence on a return to pre-war status. As far as he is concerned it is only a matter of tactics. But Liverpool knows the game is up. France is in a turmoil; the preparations over the coming Congress of Vienna are unsatisfactory from a British point of view; the revolt in England against continuing the property tax is becoming alarming; rents are depressed. Great Britain has larger concerns—the balance of power in Europe being one—than the border war in North America. It is “desirable to bring the American war if possible to a conclusion,” Liverpool tells Castlereagh. Parliament would violently oppose its continuance “upon what is called a new principle.”

On November 26, the British commissioners inform the Americans in a series of marginal notes to the draft treaty that
uti possidetis
has been abandoned and that the “new principle,”
status quo ante bellum
, is accepted. The original questions—impressment, blockade—are tossed aside, although the British still want access to the Mississippi and assurance that the Indians will be restored to their pre-war privileges.

It is a difficult document for Henry Goulburn to swallow. He does not like giving way to the Americans and is especially reluctant to do so now since almost everything he originally demanded on behalf of his government has been abandoned. But orders are orders. His conscience pricks him on the matter of the Indians: “I had till I came here no idea of the fixed determination which prevails in the breast of every American to extirpate the Indians and appropriate their territory,” he tells Bathurst, “but I am now sure that there is nothing which the people of America would so reluctantly abandon as what they are pleased to call their natural right to do so.”

It is all over but the wrangling. “We have everything but peace in our hands,” Adams reports to his wife. The remaining obstacles are so trifling that neither nation would tolerate a war over them. Yet these obstacles, which Adams calls insignificant, occupy another month.

On December 1, the two commissions meet officially face to face for the first time since August 18, talk for three hours, settle little. The talks go on, the notes fly back and forth, hairs are split, words stricken, phrases expunged, concessions made, until by December 10 only two points of contention remain: the whole matter of the Mississippi River and the American fisheries, together with British insistence on hanging on to Moose Island, an obscure pinpoint in Passamaquoddy Bay.

The real argument is not with the British. It is, again, between Clay and Adams. Adams is convinced that the British are sticking in order to cause a split in the Union. If New England loses its fishing rights in Newfoundland, Massachusetts will be at loggerheads with Kentucky.

But Clay stalks back and forth across the room shouting over and over again:

“I will never sign a treaty upon the
status quo ante bellum
with the Indian article, so help me God!”

This acrimony spills over the next morning at the old Chartreux convent, when Adams, on behalf of his colleagues, rejects any British right to Moose Island. At that Goulburn loses control, and for two hours the verbal battle seesaws to no solution. Yet both sides are fully aware that neither country will continue the war over these minor debating points.

It is this awareness and the sheer weariness induced by the long bitter arguments that, in the end, produce a peace treaty. Like the exhausted troops stalemated along the Niagara frontier, the negotiating teams are worn out, dispirited, ready to agree to almost anything. In the end, all five agree to say nothing at all about the fisheries or the Mississippi or anything else; all these disputed points can be settled by others after peace is proclaimed. The British agree to everything, with some minor reservations, but even that does not satisfy Clay, who suggests breaking off negotiations then and there. At that, Albert Gallatin, whose clear mind, good humour, and calm mien have guided the five-man ship through some rough shoals, becomes uncharacteristically impatient. He has no objection, he says, to Mr. Clay amusing himself as long as he thinks proper, but as soon as he chooses to be serious he will propose a conference with the British tomorrow.