The Embargo of 1807:

Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, Randolph, and the Wreck of Republican Ideology

1. Prologue: a View Across the Atlantic

Let’s begin with a simple thought experiment. Imagine the following situation in world affairs: all of continental Europe is under the domination of a dictatorial military conqueror, who has used a combination of threats, bribes, and naked force to bring the entire continent under his control with startling quickness. The conqueror’s armies have recorded a string of crushing victories and acquired a reputation of terrifying invincibility. The last constitutional government left across the Atlantic is England, standing alone in defiance of the conqueror—who openly plans to invade Britain in short order and force his only foe into submission. Here in America, opinion is mixed. Cultural, commercial, and linguistic ties bind us much more strongly to England than to her enemies—but perhaps a majority of Americans simply want to be left alone, avoiding all involvement, and a significant minority even profess some affinity for the European conqueror.

If you are a typical American of my generation your mind has traveled to the year 1940, when Franklin Roosevelt began a massive program of financial and industrial assistance to Great Britain—a program that proved a fundamental foundation for the stubborn British resistance to Hitler and the Nazi aggressors. FDR ran ahead of public and congressional opinion to do this, and pushed the envelope of executive power, because he foresaw that in the long run neutrality was not an option. Vindication came in December 1941, when Pearl Harbor pushed the U.S. from economic to military warfare against the Axis powers. We still live, some sixty years later, in the world that FDR and Churchill built: a world where we maintain a “special relationship” with England, often casting ourselves in the role of joint defenders of liberty, and where American interventionism is most commonly the rule and not the exception.

It is therefore a bit surprising to travel back to 1807, and find that the above-outlined situation has actually occurred twice in the past two centuries—and that the American reaction, the first time, was almost the opposite of what it was in 1940.

The President was Thomas Jefferson, and the conqueror of Europe was not Hitler but Napoleon Bonaparte. Jefferson’s stance toward the world war raging across the Atlantic oscillated, over the first six years of the 19^th century, from determined neutrality to contemplated alliances with both belligerents and back to neutrality. The system his administration ultimately chose was conceived not so much by Jefferson as by his Secretary of State, James Madison. It was a system not of economic support of Britain, but of economic coercion against Britain; and its eventual culmination, three years after Jefferson left office, was not alliance against Napoleon, but war with England. The system went by the name of the Embargo Act, and it has had the dubious distinction of being generally considered one of the most disastrous policies ever undertaken by the United States government.

As inconceivable as it may sound in this era of global commerce, the Embargo Act ultimately shut off all overseas trade to and from the United States for well over a year. That year had, of course, catastrophic economic effects throughout the nation. In the geographic region where Jefferson was politically weakest—then referred to as the “Eastern states”—the result was widespread defiance of the law bordering on open insurrection, and a resurgence of the New England secession movement. The unrest in the Northeast led the President to impose what one historian called “a fifteen-month reign of oppression and repression that was unprecedented in American history and would not be matched for another hundred and ten years, when Jefferson’s ideological heir Woodrow Wilson occupied the presidency.”[1] Even in Jefferson’s political home base, the South, the Embargo and its related controversies had the effect of splitting his Republican party into competing factions and transforming the administration’s most important Congressional ally into an avowed enemy.

The Embargo cost Thomas Jefferson his most treasured possession, his personal popularity, cultivated assiduously over the years and seemingly cast in stone after the political coup of acquiring Louisiana in 1803. Memories in politics are short, and Jefferson left office embittered and frustrated, a political pariah even within the party he had created. Meanwhile, in spite of the Embargo’s repeal—a repeal vindictively scheduled, by a peevish Congress, to occur on Jefferson’s last day in office—the damage done to Anglo-American relations proved irreversible, and finally produced the pointless conflict of 1812, generally known at the time simply as “Mr. Madison’s War.”

By any reasonable standard the 1807 Embargo was a flop, a botch, a damp squib; historical judgments have been generally scathing. One Jefferson biographer bills it as “an unadulterated calamity that virtually wrecked the American economy [and] had no discernible effect on either the policies or economies of England or France;” another typical characterization is “a policy of pusillanimity and bungling, billed as a noble experiment in peaceful coercion.”[2] Perhaps the most comprehensive denunciation comes from the master historian of the early republic, the great Henry Adams:

Financially, it emptied the Treasury, bankrupted the mercantile and agricultural class, and ground the poor beyond endurance. Constitutionally, it overrode every specified limit on arbitrary power and made Congress despotic….Morally, it sapped the nation’s vital force, lowering its courage, paralyzing its energy, corrupting its principles, and arraying all the active elements of society in factious opposition to government or in secret paths of treason. Politically, it cost Jefferson the fruits of eight years painful labor for popularity, and brought the Union to the edge of a precipice.[3]

It is true that Embargo has not been without its occasional defenders, but these are mostly confined to one of two rhetorical paths: 1) defending the Embargo on the grounds that its ill effects were not as catastrophic as commonly believed, and 2) conceding that the Embargo was an unsatisfactory policy, but maintaining that the nation was trapped by international affairs in a situation where there were simply no good alternatives. To the first of these there may be some merit; to the second there is none. Alliance with England, and possibly war with France, was a logical alternative, infinitely preferable to the Embargo policy. Though British government policies from 1805 to 1808 in some respects made this more difficult than it need have been, it was Jeffersonian Republican ideology and rhetoric that made it truly impossible.

From whence do disastrous government policies originate? Popular cynicism aside, most governments are not staffed by idiots or incompetents; and even in those cases where the talent is less than distinguished, the process of group decision-making should, theoretically, safeguard against horrendous choices. And certainly there were none but first-rate minds in the Republican governing trio of Jefferson, Madison, and Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin.

Yet no mind is any better than its collection of axiomatic suppositions, not subject to critical questioning. Those collections of unquestioned suppositions may be conveniently referred to as ideology; and the Embargo of 1807 was a clear and inescapable result of the cloud cast by ideology over the minds of intelligent men. More accurately, it was the outward manifestation of an irreconcilable inner conflict at the heart of the political psyche of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican party: the unbridgeable gap between the opposition ideology that had brought them to power, and the practical exigencies of governance that confronted them once they attained it. This gap would grow and widen like a schizophrenic disconnect throughout Jefferson’s eight years in power, eventually expanding into an overt breach in the nation’s consciousness that, like analogous traumatic episodes in France in 1793 or Germany in 1919, would only be healed by the nationalistic balm of mindless militarism.

2. The Revolution That Wasn’t

For the party that came to power in 1800, in only the second truly contested election of the nation’s history, electoral victory represented the culmination and vindication of ten bitter years of mostly futile opposition. The forces which they had opposed, like Hamilton, Adams, the Federalists and the “anglomen”, were sometimes real, and sometimes illusory, sometimes unified, and more often divided—but in the imagination of the opposition, which had devoted its genius, while shut out of power, to the embroidery of a powerful political narrative, they were an all-powerful conspiracy bent on undoing the achievements and freedoms won by the Revolution two decades before. Hamilton was the villainous mastermind, Washington his earnest but slow-witted dupe, and the moneyed class that supported the new financial scheme were “tories”, “monocrats”, “stock-jobbers” and “paper men” bent on undoing the ideals of 1776.

The still-unfinished Capitol Building in 1800, ready for Jefferson and the Republicans.

The origin of partisanship in American political life can be accurately traced to May of 1791, when Jefferson (then Secretary of State) brought Madison (then a legislative leader in the House of Representatives) along on the celebrated “botany expedition” through the Northern States. Whether or not the two Virginians collected many samples of butterflies or hardy perennials, what they were really interested in was samples of Northerners willing to join them in their opposition movement. These they found in abundance, in men like James Sullivan of Massachusetts, George Clinton of New York, and of course Aaron Burr, the eventual Vice-Presidential candidate whose ingenious manipulation of the Manhattan state legislature elections would tip New York State into the Republican column and thus provide the margin of victory in the election of 1800. These ambitious Northerners listened with open ears to the embryonic core of the budding Jeffersonian ideology—that Alexander Hamilton and the “anglomen” were betraying the American Revolution—and surely men as canny as Burr and Clinton realized the power this narrative could exercise in the popular consciousness.

The recruiting was covert, under the “botany” ruse, because it defied the prevailing prejudice against “factionalism” (a prejudice reinforced by Madison himself in the Federalist).[4]  The resulting coalition was the first true political party in America’s history; their opponents, the Federalists, never really rose to the level of organization that we associate with organized parties today. To make matters confusing for modern readers, the Jefferson party was referred to interchangeably as the Republican or Democratic party—the latter appellation being more often than not intended as derogatory. But whatever their label it was clear that the new party, despite being the brainchild of Virginian planter-aristocrats, was the logical political home for the misfits and have-nots of the new Republic. The Scotch-Irish of trans-Appalachia, who wanted land free of the strictures placed on it by Eastern legislatures, the Southerners suspicious of Northeastern finance and commerce, the rent strikers from Upstate New York and Western Massachusetts, and generally speaking, all those who felt passed left out of Alexander Hamilton’s neo-Walpolian financial system, were its natural constituents. The British opposition writers like Trenchard, Gordon, and Bolingbroke, who had resisted the original Walpole system, furnished it with the kernel of its worldview and the best of its rhetoric.

More specifically, that worldview was passed from the British oppositionists through the medium of the Anti-Federalists, who had opposed the adoption of the Federal constitution of 1787—and to a man, political figures prominent in the Anti-Federalist cause would find a congenial home in the new Jeffersonian coalition. Defeated in the matter of the Constitution’s ratification, the Anti-Federalists were not finished in American politics; having failed to curtail by statute the dangerous powers of the central authority, their faction “rapidly transformed itself into a party organization with hands stretched out to seize for itself these dangerous governmental powers.”[5] (They would be neither the first nor the last to discover that their opposition to central authority softened considerably once they were in control of that authority.)

But the Anti-Federalists as a political force had been heterogenous, scattered, often incoherent, and their objections to the work done in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 generally provincial and quibbling. As Jeffersonians they would be, in the beginning at least, unified and disciplined, and their laundry list of grievances thematized into an ideology that is recognizable even today as classic small-government conservatism: deeply suspicious of centralized authority, defensive of states’ rights, and righteously resentful of moneyed elites. Meanwhile the Federalists, unified and invincible in 1787, would lose their standard-bearer Washington, and have to move divided between the choleric John Adams and the divisive and arrogant Hamilton—whose many talents did not include political abilities.

Jefferson’s party did not find the route to power easy, or quick. In 1796 the Democrat-Republicans would lose decisively in the Presidential contest; in 1800, with the Federalists in complete disarray, Alexander Hamilton openly endorsing an alternative to John Adams, and Aaron Burr masterfully swinging the votes of New York decisively in Jefferson’s favor, they would barely eke out a victory. Even this, though, was tainted: as Garry Wills, most recently, has shown, and as Federalists were not shy about pointing out at the time, it was almost certainly Adams who won the popular vote in 1800.[6] The presidency went to Jefferson because of the three-fifths clause in the Constitution, which allowed slaveholding states to count 60% of their slave populations for the purpose of apportioning electoral votes.

Then, because of the clumsy way in which Vice-Presidents were chosen at the time, Jefferson had to endure the indignity of a tie with his own running mate, Burr—a tie which ended up throwing the election into a deadlocked House of Representatives, where some Federalists felt that the moderate New Yorker Burr might be the lesser of two evils, and where Jefferson was only chosen in exasperation when Burr refused to cut a deal.

But in spite of these trials, once installed in the Executive Mansion, Jefferson chose to see his election not as a close shave but as an earth-shattering mandate for radical change: the “Revolution of 1800”. After years of Federalist conspiracy and corruption—the only plausible explanation, in the Jeffersonian worldview, for previous political disappointments—the peoples’ choice had prevailed: “[n]ever did any party or any administration in our country begin a career of power with such entire confidence that a new era of civilization and liberty had dawned upon the earth.”[7] The new President saw his ascent as the completion of the Revolution begun in 1776, but held back by Hamilton: internal taxes would be repealed, the budget would be balanced and the hated national debt paid off, and armed forces would be reduced to nothingness in accordance with the Anti-Federalist dread of standing armies.

The armies would not be required, because the nation would now follow Jefferson’s prescription, as he had expounded it in 1785, “to practice neither commerce nor navigation, but to stand with respect to Europe precisely on the footing of China. We should thus avoid wars, and all our citizens would be husbandmen.”[8] The new president’s time in the diplomatic service in Europe had shown him that international relations were rife with corruption and hypocrisy, and his party’s ideology held that American virtue depended on standing apart from such vicious connections. He would thus avoid involvement with any major European power

“as he would avoid a vile and fatal contamination; he used such words as “cankers” and “sores” in talking of Europe’s society, and “madmen” and “tyrants” to describe its rulers; he thanked “an overruling Providence” for being “separated by nature and a wide ocean” from a Europe that he described as “the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe.”[9]

But if the Republicans’ ideology included a general contempt for all European powers, it reserved a special layer of loathing for one in particular: Great Britain. That country was then pursuing a policy of liberal trade regulations in the hope of currying American sympathy—a policy destined to founder on the peculiar rock of the Republicans’ worldview, which “included a naïve, secularized form of demonology in which certain groups were rigidly typed as evil; and high on their list of devils was the government of Great Britain.”[10] This was, after all, the party of the man who, in the rather intemperate language of the document which kicked off the Revolution, had called the British monarch a “tyrant”, guilty of “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations”, responsible for “works of death, desolation and tyranny”, and “Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages”. The object of these unflattering characterizations was, of course, still occupying the British throne when Jefferson became America’s third President.

It was a fundamental axiom for the Democrat-Republicans that their political opponents were in league with the British government. This was by and large a lie, rooted in paranoia, but it contained at its core a seed of truth: most Federalists were, like their leader Hamilton, Anglophiles to some degree, and generally sincere admirers of the English constitutional system. But they were certainly not treasonous; most, like Hamilton, had taken leading roles in the War of Independence. This was a paranoid though sincere delusion, which led to the myth of the “Essex Junto”, the alleged cabal of arch-Federalists based in Massachusetts, led by Timothy Pickering, who, in Madison and Jefferson’s view at least, colluded with the British government to undermine the Embargo.

The Federalists, of course, were not without their own ideology, and in this area it was a perfect mirror image of that of their opponents. They always considered Jefferson and his party to be the pawns of Bonaparte: Federalist newspapers depicted Jefferson and Madison as being in league with the Corsican just as often as James Cheetham’s American Citizen and William Duane’s Aurora portrayed the Federalist leaders as being King George’s toadies. This too was a slander: Jefferson was no more taking orders from Paris than John Adams was receiving instructions from Whitehall. Nevertheless, as we shall see, events and rhetoric conspired, throughout the Jefferson years, to give at least the appearance of truth to the Federalist accusations, and to make it politically easier to oppose Great Britain and accommodate France than vice versa—even when this was directly contrary to the nation’s best interests.

3. The Triumvirate

Thomas Jefferson’s first major accomplishment as President was what we might refer to today as “changing the tone”. Diplomatic protocol was dispensed with, and the dispensing was just as ostentatious as the observance had been previously. The British minister in particular, Anthony Merry, found cause to take offense at several early state functions; the Republican press gleefully noted the new lack of deference.

But some observers wondered whether Jefferson was simply changing the style of government in lieue of changing its substance. The hard-liners among Republican ideologues, led by the party’s legislative leader, John Randolph, were watching Jefferson closely to make sure he delivered the “Revolution” he had promised.As Randolph summed up the feeling in a letter to his friend Joseph Nicholson on July 18, 1801, “in this quarter we think the work is only begun, and that without a substantial reform we shall have little reason to congratulate ourselves on the mere change of men.”[11]

Thomas Jefferson in 1804.

What Randolph and others would come to realize over the next eight years was that a fondness for style over substance was a core Jeffersonian quality. The Sage of Monticello was a genius of rhetoric, and a master politician; the actual dry and tedious business of government, which was bread and butter for the temperaments of Hamilton and Madison alike, failed to stimulate him—and Jefferson needed constant stimulus. So the Jefferson administration became, far more than many others, a committee affair, as the new chief executive, candidly perceiving that the business of government was not his forte, attached to his presidential persona, in the form of Cabinet members, two appendages to specialize in day-to-day operations. These were Albert Gallatin of western Pennsylvania, whose forte was the financial realm, and Virginian neighbor James Madison, whose natural element was the legislative chamber. The three men governed virtually as a Triumvirate, which is what some historians have called them; Madison and Gallatin freely consulting each other on each others’ turf, while Jefferson exercised constant oversight yet was largely content to trust his chosen subordinates in almost everything.

The arrangement also fit in with the President’s emotional tendency toward compulsive fathering. Jefferson’s most comfortable social role was that of patriarch; benevolent but detached guidance of talented younger men (who did quite a bit of the actual work) suited him perfectly. His own description of his harmonious, collegial Cabinet meetings seemed to parallel his idealized recollections of family gatherings:

There never arose, during the whole time, an instance of an unpleasant thought or word between the members. We sometimes met under differences of opinion, but scarcely ever failed….to produce an unanimous result.[12]

One reason for this unanimity was the remarkable ability of the Treasury Secretary, Albert Gallatin, to sublimate his own views when they did not accord with those of the President and Secretary of State—an ability Gallatin would have to exercise, on a constant basis, throughout the Embargo drama. Garry Wills has described the Triumvirate as “Jefferson the otherworldly, Madison the provincial, and Gallatin the outvoted”.[13] This description may be a bit misleading, in the sense that Gallatin often did more work and wielded more power on a day-to-day basis than the other two men; but it does accurately describe the policy-making relationship of the Swiss-born financial specialist to the two Virginia politicians: often disagreeing in private, yet staunchly willing, like a good company man, to carry out in public policies he had argued against in private.

4. The Company Man

“Circumspect” is one word that comes naturally to mind to describe the nation’s second Treasury Secretary; “methodical” is another. These two adjectives combine to suggest a third, more prosaic one: “boring”, which is pretty much how historians have found Albert Gallatin. Yet it says something quite interesting about the nature of political and personal opportunity in the early Republic that this awkward youth, homely in appearance, short on funds despite a patrician background, speaking English with a heavy accent he never managed to overcome, should become one of Pennsylvania’s most prominent politicians less than a decade after his arrival and one of the most powerful men in the country a decade after that. And if Gallatin’s public persona was a bit boring, his personal biography is anything but.

Gallatin as Treasury Secretary. Though he ran away from Geneva in search of adventure, historians have generally found him boring.

A French-Swiss immigrant from an aristocratic Genevan clan, which claimed a tenuous lineage traced to Roman times, and was described by no less than Voltaire as “la plus ancienne famille de Géneve,”[14] Gallatin rather remarkably chose at the age of nineteen to forgo financial security, certain local prominence, and a choice of possible careers, and instead run away—with no particular plan in mind, in complete defiance of his wards, and in most un-Swiss fashion, to a far country in the midst of ruinous civil strife. To join the American cause and take up arms against the British was the last thing on his mind at the time, and he always took care, in his later career, to debunk that impression.[15]

The young Genevan was simply looking for something Geneva could not provide: adventure. He found it, after short stays in Boston and New Hampshire, in the wild counties along the Monongahela River: Monongalia County in what is now West Virginia and Fayette County in Pennsylvania, where he first began to speculate in land and commerce, and then became involved in politics in the midst of the battle over Pennsylvania’s ratification of the Federal Constitution. His fellow frontiersmen elected him to the Pennsylvania Legislature in 1790; his district was most notable for being the seat of the Whiskey Rebellion, which forced the young legislator to walk a fine and delicate path between the virulence of his most militant constituents’ opinions and the measured moderation to which his nature inclined him. This he did with aplomb, and in 1793 he was elected to the United States Senate. In that same year, his thirty-third, he joined George Washington and Alexander Hamilton in making a marriage of extreme political fortuitousness, when met his second and longtime wife, Hannah Nicholson —daughter of Senator Joseph Nicholson of New York, one of the most respected Democrats in the Senate.

Despite tying his political fortunes to what was essentially a faction of Virginians, the young Gallatin showed views on some topics that we might characterize as Northern—writing in 1794 to his friend Jean Badollet, about the Saint Domingue insurrection:

….I see nothing but the natural consequence of slavery. For the whites to expect mercy either from mulattoes or negroes is absurd, and whilst we may pity the misfortune of the present generation of whites of that island, in which, undoubtedly, many innocent victims have been involved, can we help acknowledging that calamity to be the just punishment of the crimes of so many generations of slave-traders and slave-holders?[16]

Considering slave rebellion as “just punishment” for slaveholders was an opinion the Genevan would have to tone down considerably during his service with the Jefferson and Madison administrations. But this was easy: moderation and bipartisanship were key tenets of Gallatin’s political creed throughout his career. As he wrote to Hannah early in their married life, “I am happy to see you are a tolerable democrat, and, at the same time, a moderate one. I trust that our parties at this critical juncture will as far as possible forget old animosities, and show at least to the foreign powers who hate us that we will be unanimous whenever the protection and defense of our country require it.”[17] In this respect Gallatin went against the tenor of those fractious times, and against the common position of both parties—who were all too apt to see empathy with their opponents as fatal weakness.

At the same time Gallatin proved himself almost unique among prominent Republicans in not only condemning Hamilton’s financial system, but actually comprehending it as well. During his first term in Congress he came forth with meticulously documented charges that Hamilton had padded the national debt by as much as $10 million: “while his Republican colleagues had been able to combat the Hamiltonian system only with seventy-year-old Bolingbrokean epithets, Gallatin had bedazzled them all by taking the system apart piece by piece.”[18] Thus to Jefferson’s egalitarian rhetoric and the conservatism of the Anti-Federalists Gallatin added another crucial component of Republican ideology—financial probity—and another politically convenient promise familiar to observers of modern conservatism: reduced taxation. 

Like many would-be reformers, the Republicans had assumed power with the rock-solid conviction that the previous Administration’s finances were full of waste, and that a modicum of governmental frugality would drastically reduce expenditures. When this proved not to be true, Gallatin, their designated finance expert, had little choice, if he wanted to fulfill his party’s objectives of paying down the national debt and eliminating internal taxes, but to start paring down the military. Legislation passed in March 1802 trimmed the army to one artillery and two infantry regiments, and a total of 3,350 men; while the Navy, having increased in size during the Quasi-War period, saw all its frigates laid up and its annual budget cut from $3 million to $1 million.[19]

When the Administration leaped at the chance to acquire the Louisiana Territory in 1803, even this was not enough to balance the budget, and by the second Jefferson term Gallatin found himself reduced to defending Hamilton’s debt system. Meanwhile, as we shall see, the evisceration of the military dramatically reduced the nation’s options in foreign policy—with predictably lamentable consequences.

More often than not, as the Jefferson presidency unfolded, Gallatin found himself having to enforce policies he himself had fruitlessly argued against—the Embargo being only the most dramatic example. As a good Company Man he never wavered in his efficient and loyal efforts once he had lost the argument. The true driving engine behind Jeffersonian policy was politics; pragmatic appeal to particular realities took a back seat to abstract consideration of ideological dogmas. Gallatin was always the outsider of the Triumvirate, bound to be in the minority due to both his natural inclination for compromise and his inveterate practicality. And the all-time champion when it came to favoring the abstract over the pragmatic was Jefferson’s fellow Virginian and personal political protégé, James Madison.

5. The Brain

It is an all too typical story in American politics. A politician goes through the early part of his career experiencing a mixed bag of successes and setbacks, and developing as a reaction a number of pet theories; later in his career, the politician achieves national power, and proceeds to act by rote on his cherished pet theories—developed out of some controversy of a dozen years before, with no relevance whatever to the present situation. James Madison was the all-time godfather of this type. He managed to advocate policy, as Secretary of State, based on abstract concepts he had argued for as far back as his college days; and the irony was that although these concepts could only have come from a mind of extraordinary intelligence, the resulting policy was nothing short of idiotic.

A tobacco plantation, depicted in an anonymous woodcut of the 1790's; scenes like this were everyday reality for both Madison and Jefferson during their formative years.

The eldest of ten children, the diminutive James became “Jemmy” at an early age to distinguish him from his father, James Sr., a successful Piedmont plantation owner in whose house little Jemmy would live contentedly until he became his country’s Secretary of State at the age of 50.[20] Madison’s small stature—apparently just over five feet—did not hinder his rise to political prominence, and neither did his apparent hypochondria, which formed in his mind a sincere early conviction that his constitution was fragile and his lifespan destined to be brief (he eventually lived to eighty-six). But both factors must have adversely affected his social confidence. With his eventual mentor Thomas Jefferson, little Jemmy shared a painful awkwardness around the opposite sex and the crushing experience of early romantic setbacks. Only at the age of forty-three would Madison finally marry the widow Dolley Todd—to whom he effectively delegated his social obligations for the rest of his career. Dolley’s hand was only secured with the help of Aaron Burr, always willing to help the Republicans any way he could, who acted as “spokesman” for the nervous Madison.

Madison first met Burr as a college student at Princeton, where even as a teenager the precocious young Virginian displayed a penchant for abstract theorizing. As tensions heightened between England and the colonies he had maintained that a system of non-importation agreements would guarantee American rights—but only if strictly adhered to in spite of the economic pain they would inevitably inflict.[21] Garry Wills has pointed out that the young Madison seemed to embody “a touch of Robespierre” and “displayed a paradox not rare in revolutions, an authoritarian rebelliousness.” Disinclined for war service himself, the young plantation heir nonetheless took unconcealed pleasure in the tarring and feathering of those unfortunates whose Revolutionary fervor was suspect, and supported the most punitive anti-Tory measures at the 1776 Virginia Convention.[22]

In the 1780’s, as the new loosely constituted nation seemed on the brink of foundering under debilitating fiscal pressures and widespread popular dissatisfaction, Madison became one of those representatives to the increasingly powerless Continental Congress who argued that a stronger central government was essential. When the subsequent Annapolis Convention eventually became the Constitutional Convention, Madison became one of the most if not the most important voice in the Convention itself, and, during the ratification phase, one of the most able advocates for the new Constitution, joining Alexander Hamilton to write the influential Federalist essays.

Forrest McDonald points out that as early as the Constitutional Convention Madison was “an ideologue in search of an ideology….a man of doctrinaire temperament, ” already vulnerable to “a preference for the untried but theoretically appealing, as opposed to the imperfections of reality.”[23] In this light it is worth considering the Virginia Plan, Madison’s own blueprint for the Constitution, which the Convention took as a starting point for its work. His later advocacy of a mixed system in the Federalist notwithstanding, the Plan showed Madison to be a far stronger advocate for untrammeled Federal power than almost anyone else in Philadelphia: “his government would have been purely national, the states having no agency in it whatsoever.”[24]

It is reasonable to wonder how Madison, one of the two most important men in both writing the Constitution and advocating for its ratification, became one of the leading lights of a political movement that for all intents and purposes inherited the mantle of the Anti-Federalists. How could the co-author of The Federalist become Secretary of State and then President under the auspices of a party whose opposition to strong central government was central to its ideology?

One part of the answer is quite simple: the doings of the Constitutional Convention were secret, and Madison spared no effort throughout the rest of his career to ensure that they remained so.[25] He knew all too well that the arguments of the Virginia Plan—in favor of a Federal veto power over all state legislation, for instance—would not sit well with Republican voters. When George Washington, who had been personally entrusted with the minutes of the Convention, later revealed portions of them to justify his stance on the Jay Treaty, Madison was furious.

The other part of the answer is that by the time of Madison’s own presidency, Republican ideology was a shadow of its former self. The die-hards like John Randolph who took it seriously to the last gasp did in fact oppose Madison, supporting James Monroe instead. But the majority of Jefferson’s party were either opportunistic supporters of its ideology from day one, or had found that their opposition to strong central government power somewhat softened by eight years of actually sharing in the enjoyment of that power. In 1803 they had made a Faustian bargain, trading in their principles for 828,000 square miles of Western wilderness and the immense boost in political popularity it brought. After the Purchase it was hard for Jeffersonians to mouth the old Anti-Federalist shibboleths with a straight face, and the pro-Constitution skeletons in Madison’s closet were no longer an issue.

And if Madison was by nature an unlikely banner-carrier for the Anti-Federalist aspect of Jeffersonian ideology, he was more than willing to make up for it with his natural predilection for another aspect: its natural Anglophobia. Madison’s antipathy towards Great Britain continued from his early Tory-baiting days and his deep suspicion of the established Anglican church in Virginia up into the Washington administration, which he began to feel, was far too accommodating in its dealings with the nation’s former colonial masters. After 1796, when Madison went to battle against the Jay Treaty on the floor of the House, in plain defiance of his own Constitution, his relationship with Washington suffered a permanent breach. “Washington would never rely on him again, never consult him, never invite him to a private meeting in the Executive Mansion where Madison had been the trusted confidant, never receive him at Mount Vernon….He had concluded, after a long sad experience, that Madison was duplicitous and dishonorable.”[26]

For Madison’s part the feeling was mutual, though he lay the blame for the breach not on Washington but on the (alleged) Anglophile, Hamilton, his erstwhile Federalist collaborator. In an essay attacking Hamilton’s stance he revealed the depth of his hostility when he sunk uncharacteristically from reasoned argument to personal attack: “Several pieces with the signature of Pacificus were lately published, which have been read with singular pleasure and applause, by the foreigners and degenerate citizens among us, who hate our republican government, and the French revolution.”[27] Hamilton, for his part, never nurtured a corresponding hostility to Madison, though he did spot the Virginian’s provincialism, delicately warning the British Minister in 1801 that Madison was “very little acquainted with the world”—indeed, the new Secretary of State had never been outside the United States.[28]

Madison in 1792; already one of his country's legislative leaders, but "very little acquainted with the world".

But Madison, like many a talented introvert, made up for his lack of knowledge of the outside world by constructing compelling worlds within his own mind—where his own power to theorize was absolute and his remarkable capacity for abstract reasoning could run unfettered by the unsystematic particulars of day-to-day reality. And one of his favorite themes of abstract thought was the potential for coercive economic action, in place of or in conjunction with conventional military action, as an instrument of foreign policy.

We are used, nowadays, to the idea that economic sanctions are a fairly conventional tool of the statesman in dealing with hostile foreign nations when something short of war is required—though some might point out that they are a notoriously ineffective tool, and cynics might claim that sanctions tend to be more a face-saving gesture than an effective policy instrument. (Both of these were certainly true of the Embargo of 1807.) But to James Madison, coercive economic pressure was quite literally the answer to everything. He had supported non-importation agreements against Britain in the pre-Revolutionary years, and as a member of Congress advocated retaliatory trade regulation against Britain in the years 1789, 1791, and 1793.[29]

In the latter year Madison had written dreamily of using an embargo not just to combat restrictive British navigation laws, but to reshape the entire globe along American lines: “In this attitude of things, what a noble stroke would be an embargo? It would probably do as much good as harm at home, and would force peace on the rest of the world, and perhaps liberty along with it.”[30] In 1794, a 30-day embargo championed by Madison was actually carried out, and when Congress refused to renew it Madison regretted that “its expiration will save the West Indies from famine” and end the pressure on England. “Measures of this sort,” he wrote grumpily to Jefferson, are not the fashion. To supplicate for peace, and by the uncertainty of success, to prepare for war by taxes and troops is the policy which now triumphs under the Executive.”[31]

When James Madison became Secretary of State he was just reaching the age at which human beings, all too often, stop subjecting their convictions to constant scrutiny, and ideas become calcified into principles that will be maintained reflexively until death. The struggles of the 1790’s had imprinted in Madison’s political consciousness the indelible impression that a) British commercial restrictions must be resisted at all costs and b) that embargo was a perfect tool for this purpose. His own personality inclined him to believe that his abstract ideas had the power to shape the world for the better—note the desire to “force” peace and liberty on the rest of the world in the citation above! Now he was being given the most powerful position in the Cabinet—under a President who openly expected his Cabinet to run the nation in accordance with his benevolent and remote guidance, who implicitly trusted him to be like a second mind in policy matters, and whose close personal friendship Madison had enjoyed for more than a decade.

Seen in that light, the debacle that ensued has an air of inevitability.

6. The Gadfly

Before we move on to the actual events of 1805 and onward there is one more character to introduce. If Thomas Jefferson was his party’s political genius and chief rhetorician, Gallatin its resident pragmatist and financial wizard, and Madison its leading intellectual theorist, then John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia was its unbridled Id, the purest proponent of its militant Bolingbrokean oppositionism. Randolph was the most prominent Republican in the House of Representatives during the Jefferson years, and it was he, not the President or the Secretary of State or of the Treasury, who was the ultimate Republican ideologue—and his eventual, inevitable break with the governing branch of his party was analogous to the irreconcilable conflict between Republican ideology and Republican governance.

In Randolph the spirit of oppositionism found its purest possible expression. Acrimony was like oxygen to him, and bitter debate his life’s chief pleasure; his party’s eventual metamorphosis from resistance movement to the main wielder of central government power was a psychological trial almost too much for Randolph to bear. Henry Adams portrayed Randolph as

….a representative of the extreme school of Virginia Republicans, whose political creed was expressed by the Resolutions of 1798. Dread of the Executive, of corruption and patronage, of usurpations by the central government; dread of the Judiciary as an invariable servant to despotism; dread of national sovereignty altogether, were the dogmas of this creed.[32]

John Randolph of Roanoke: "a kind of boy preserved in amber", acrimony and argument were his life's chief pleasures.

In an era where colorful characters abounded John Randolph still stood out. Struck by a serious disease at the age of nineteen—possibly scarlet fever or syphilis—Randolph bore its effects throughout his life. He was legendarily impotent, and so devoid of secondary sexual characteristics as to resemble “a kind of boy preserved in amber, immature of face, lean and lank to the point of grotesqueness,” according to one biographer.[33] Day after day he filled the sound of the House Chamber with his eerie, piercing voice, often dripping with sarcasm and always filled with contempt for those who disagreed—a voice so high that one Senator’s wife remarked “you would think….that he belonged to the female gender.”[34] His enemies accused him of drunkenness on the House floor but in fact his flair for invective needed no artificial stimulation. If there was no acid controversy at hand Randolph would invent one; in Henry Adams’ words he “wasted without the least compunction more public time than any public man of his day in discursive and unprofitable talk.”[35]

Politically, in spite of his bizarreness, he was a force to be reckoned with. His home district was rock-solid and he rarely had to concern himself with the matter of getting re-elected. Newly installed House Speaker Nathaniel Macon was in awe of him, and promptly made him Chair of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. This put Randolph according to the precedents of the day “in the direct line of promotion to the Cabinet and the Presidency,” and he for the next eight years he “ruled over the House with a hand so heavy that William Pitt might have envied him.”[36]

Like many others of his party Randolph found it hard to get interested in the myriad mundane details of day-to-day governance. As Ways and Means Chairman he “was obliged to master Gallatin’s financial scheme; to explain and defend his economies, the abolition of taxes, and operations in exchange,—details of financial legislation which were as foreign to Randolph’s taste and habits of mind as they were natural to Gallatin.”[37] The Gadfly needed an issue he could get worked up over, and he found it, much to the Administration’s annoyance, in the Yazoo compromise of April 1802.

The Yazoo saga began in 1795 when the corrupt Georgia Legislature, bribe-takers to a man, sold off millions of acres to speculators, only to have the sale voided a year later in the midst of widespread outrage. The mostly Northeastern speculators who lost their shirts in the repeal eventually came hat in hand to the Federal government in seek of redress; the issue bounced around Congress for a few years until in 1801 Jefferson appointed Madison, Gallatin, and Attorney General Levi Lincoln to work out a settlement. The compromise the trio came up with involved Georgia getting $1.25 million in exchange for the present-day regions of Alabama and Mississippi, and the Yazoo land speculators, who had the solid support of New England’s Congressmen, being forced to settle for less than one-sixth of the acreage that they had originally purchased.[38]

It was a pragmatic settlement in a sticky situation where there could be no real winners. But Randolph, and by extension the extreme wing of the Republican party, did not see it that way; he saw it as complete capitulation to monied Eastern interests, and tyranny by the Federal government. The phrase “Yazoo Men” joined “moneygrubbers” and “stockjobbers” in the demonology of the Democratic worldview—while on the House floor Randolph railed against the compromise:

….I trust we shall hear no more of the crimes and follies of the former administration….I should disdain to prate about the petty larcenies of our predecessors after having given my sanction to this atrocious public robbery.[39]

The Yazoo issue would not go away, either. The various appeals dragged on through Madison’s second presidential term, and the issue became a political albatross for both Lincoln, whose nomination to the Supreme Court was quashed because of his involvement in the Compromise, and Gallatin, who found himself denied the chance to become Secretary of State under Madison.[40]

But this was only the beginning of Randolph’s disillusionment. Eventually his faction of die-hard Southern ideologues would be labeled Quids, and continue to be a thorn in the side of the Jefferson and Madison presidencies. Randolph himself was mercurial and inconsistent, supporting his party one day, abandoning it the next—often over the same issue. But no one more clearly embodied the ideology of the Jeffersonians, distilled into its most extreme and concentrated form; and Henry Adams’ summary of Randolph’s contradictions could also have served, by the end of the Embargo debacle, as an epitaph, not so much for the party itself, since power would not be relinquished by the Virginia Dynasty anytime soon, but for its original professed principles:

….between his Anglican tastes and his Gallic policy he was in a false position, as he was also between his aristocratic prejudices and his democratic theories, his deistical doctrines and his conservative temperament, his interests as a slave-owner and his theories as an ami des noirs, and finally in the entire delusion which possessed his mind that a Virginian aristocracy could maintain itself in alliance with a democratic polity.[41]

7. The Bargain and the Obsession

If your average American remembers one accomplishment of the Jefferson administration it is the purchase of the vast Louisiana Territory from France. The price, $15 million, was rock-bottom even in 1803 dollars; the bargain was only possible because Napoleon was temporarily strapped for cash and needed a quick infusion in preparation for his planned invasion of England. The American negotiators, James Monroe and Robert Livingston, had been trying to purchase not Louisiana but West Florida—the narrow strip along the Gulf Coast connecting New Orleans to Mobile and Tallahassee—and the port of New Orleans.

It is not difficult to imagine that the Purchase was incredibly popular on the domestic front: for a relatively minor amount of money it nearly the doubled the nation’s geographic area. Less intuitive for modern Americans, raised considering a land “from sea to shining sea” as their national birthright, is the notion that the Purchase might have raised a few objections in its day—not only from the Spanish, who had only recently and reluctantly ceded their own claims to the region, but from Americans—and even from members of the President’s own party.

The problem was that, as we have seen, that party came to power on a platform of smaller government and resistance to excessive centralized power. Now with one action, the party that had triumphed in the self-styled “Revolution of 1800” by vowing to undo the “monarchical” excesses of Federalism, had increased the size and scope of the Federal government further than Alexander Hamilton ever dared propose—or as Henry Adams put it:

….it was plain that the Louisiana purchase, in every possible point of view, was fatal to states’ rights….No one doubted….that it completely changed the conditions of the constitutional compact; rendering the nation, independent of the States, master of en empire immensely greater than the States themselves; pledging the nation in effect to the admission of indefinite new states; insuring an ultimate transfer of power from the old original parties in the compact to the new States, thus forced on their society; and foreboding the destruction of states’ rights by securing a majority of States, without traditions, history, or character, the mere creatures of the general government, thousands of miles from the old Union, inhabited in 1803, so far as the territory was populated at all, only by Frenchmen, Spaniards, or Indians, and fitted by climate and conditions for a people different from that of the Atlantic seaboard….No federalist measure had ever approached it in constitutional importance. The whole list of questionable federal precedents was insignificant beside this one act.[42]

No one was more troubled than Thomas Jefferson himself by the philosophical and legal inconsistencies of the Purchase. The President wasted undue hours trying to concoct a Constitutional amendment that would legitimize the whole affair, before realizing it was more practical simply to justify the acquisition under the executive treaty-making power. New England’s representatives in Congress unanimously opposed the treaty, but with Republicans outnumbering Federalists 26 to 6 in the Senate, there was little question of any difficulty in the final ratification.[43]

The political triumph of the Louisiana acquisition, in addition to laying bare some of the emptiness of Republican small-government rhetoric, whetted the administration’s appetite for more of the same. In particular, the West Florida territory, which was of more immediate practical value than Louisiana, and which had been Livingston’s original object in the negotiations, was now more coveted than ever. It is no exaggeration to say that the acquisition of West Florida became an obsession that lasted through the remaining Jefferson years and both Madison administrations—and influenced United States policy in unfortunate ways.

There were four possible ways the Republicans saw to bring West Florida under the American flag, each of which would be pursued over the next few years:

1. To insist somewhat tendentiously that West Florida was included in the lands ceded by the Louisiana purchase.
2. To simply buy the territory from Napoleon in a second cash transaction.
3. To occupy the territory on the pretext of “defending” it on France’s behalf from the British.
4. To simply annex the territory outright with U.S. forces—possibly preceded by the incursions, which were in fact numerous, of various filibusterers and private adventurers.

Of these, 3) and 4) were problematic due to the military cutbacks that resulted from the administration’s program of fiscal rectitude, as well as due to Jefferson’s innate disinclination for military solutions. 2) was problematic as well, since the real owner of West Florida was not France but Spain, who had no desire to let go of it, and Bonaparte’s stranglehold on Spain would loosen considerably over the next few years.

This left 1), which was pursued with relentless but futile tenacity by the American representatives to France through the rest of the Jefferson presidency. There began an ongoing farcical saga involving U.S. diplomats hounding the French conqueror across the battlefields of Europe, pestering him with picayune points of legal doctrine intended to prove that West Florida now belonged to the United States. Napoleon, of course, never had the least intention of ceding the territory, but liked to dangle it occasionally when he needed something from the Americans: “from the first, Florida had been used by Napoleon as a means of controlling President Jefferson.”[44]

As U.S. foreign policy options dwindled over the next few years down to an increasingly stark choice between alignment with either Britain or France, the continued, quixotic hope of acquiring West Florida acted as an unnatural thumb pressing on the scale in France’s favor. It was this, just as much or more than any Republican ideological affinity with France, that caused American policy to tilt too much in favor of the Corsican conqueror—but the fact that this dovetailed conveniently with Republican Anglophobia helped lubricate the path of least resistance.

Jefferson himself was by no means invariably pro-France. In an uncharacteristic moment of daring in 1804, he nearly made his mind up to finally seize West Florida by force—but the phlegmatic Gallatin spit forth a wordy memo entitled Spanish Affairs, “which was filled with legal and moralistic philosophizing but came down to an argument that attacking Spanish possessions would cost too much money.”[45]

Meanwhile, the government in London had changed: the relatively placid ministry of Henry Addington had given way to the vigorous one of William Pitt. Pitt was dubious of the backbone of the Jefferson administration and decided to put it to the test, by seizing twelve U.S. merchant vessels under the long-ignored Rule of 1756. In spite of the popular outrage that followed, Jefferson played down the incident, since his new plan of attacking West Florida required the tacit consent of the British. Unfortunately the Pitt government knew nothing of the Florida scheme and simply interpreted Jefferson’s passivity as confirmation of American weakness—and began forthwith a get-tough policy versus America.[46]

French foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand: sold Louisiana to Livingston and Monroe for a song, then tantalized America's envoys for years with the vain hope of gaining the West Florida Territory.

But new hints of French willingness to sell the Floridas (cynically dangled by Napoleon and Talleyrand, who were alarmed at the chance of an Anglo-American rapprochement) predictably sapped Jefferson’s resolve. The President reversed course again in late 1805, asking Congress in secret session to appropriate funds to purchase the Territory, and vowing to resist Pitt’s instransigence. There could not have been a worse moment to take this harsher new anti-British stance: on October 21^st, Horatio Nelson destroyed the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar, making the British undisputed masters of the seas for the foreseeable future.

At the same time, the erratic John Randolph, already alienated by the Yazoo compromise, chose this moment to appoint himself the guardian of national honor, and rose to condemn Jefferson’s secret request for Florida purchase funds as “delivering the public purse to the first cut-throat that demanded it.”[47] The political battle Jefferson fought to win passage of the Florida funds not only opened a breach in Republican unity that plagued the President for the next two years, but it also had the effect of irrevocably committing Jefferson to his new position of hostility to England and closer ties to France. And in the meantime, Napoleon had triumphed at Austerlitz, easing his financial situation and obviating his need to sell the Floridas—the circumstance which had caused Jefferson to change tack in the first place.

8. The Fungus of War

The rising American prosperity under the Jefferson Administration was due in no small part to the commercial opportunities inherent in being the only neutral nation in a world at war. The reason was simple: England and France’s trading vessels were legal prizes for each others’ warships; only neutral U.S. ships were inviolate. The belligerent nations still possessed considerable colonial holdings in the Americas, which both produced and demanded a steady stream of goods—goods which only U.S. merchants could reliably transport.

This was, it is hardly necessary to say, a major bonanza for U.S. shippers. It was the reason Gallatin was able to balance the budget and cut taxes despite unexpected expenditures. It was also a constant annoyance to both England and France, each of whom sought to hinder the U.S. from trading with their adversary.

The two European powers were not equivalent in terms of their importance to American commerce. Not only was the volume of trade with England far greater than that with France, but language, custom, and culture bound the American merchants, largely New England-based, closer to the mother country. In time American officials examining ships’ papers would discover “a pervasively fraudulent collusion between American shipowners and British exporters”, and the French government would move towards the position that “every American ship’s company….should be deemed British until proven otherwise.”[48]

The American shippers who profited from the neutral trade were disproportionately from New England port towns. They were not Jefferson people: a President who wanted the country to “practice neither commerce nor navigation, but to stand with respect to Europe precisely on the footing of China” could hardly expect much support among them. Southerners, on the other hand, saw the carrying trade as unnatural, a freak circumstance; John Randolph, unsurprisingly, railed against the possibility of going to war to defend it:

What is the question in dispute? The carrying trade. What part of it? ….it is not for the honest carrying trade of America, but for this mushroom, this fungus, of war—for a trade which as soon as the nations of Europe are at peace will no longer exist. It is for this that the spirit of avaricious traffic would plunge us into war.[49] 

This “mushroom” was, of course, responsible in large part for the nation’s recent prosperity—and for the popularity of the incumbent party that resulted, as seen in Jefferson’s landslide re-election victory of 1804. But it was not just the Randolph Republicans who wanted to put an end to it: public opinion in England was growing increasingly outraged by the carrying trade. After Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar and Napoleon’s triumph at Austerlitz shortly thereafter, the situation in Europe took on a stark clarity: England was master of the seas, while Napoleon and his satellites held the entirety of the Continent. England’s survival at this point depended on her making the most of her naval power, with an unbreakable blockade—which the American traders went on gleefully shirking.

At the end of 1805 a long pamphlet seized the British public imagination. Written by a Scottish lawyer and former supporter of American independence named James Stephen,  War in Disguise, or the Frauds of the Neutral Flags purported to show that American traders were de facto collaborators with Bonaparte and called for stricter enforcement of the Rule of 1756 (which would outlaw trade between America and France).[50] The author attributed to neutral trade the fact that Britain enemies were not commercially ruined, in spite of British dominance of the seas:

The commercial and colonial interests of our enemies, are now ruined in appearance only, not in reality. They seem to have retreated from the ocean, and to have abandoned the ports of the colonies, but it is a mere ruse de guerre—They have, in effect, for the most part, only changed their flags, chartered many vessels really neutral, and altered a little the former routes of their trade.….There are few political subjects more important, and few, perhaps, less generally understood by the intelligent part of the community, then the nature of that neutral commerce, which has lately in some measure excited the public attention, in consequence of the invectives of Bonaparte and the complaints of the American merchants.[51]

War in Disguise was an apt representation of British opinion at both the popular and government levels. At particular issue was the legal notion of the “broken voyage,” whereby American shippers, merely by “touching” at a U.S. port, would be considered as carrying only American goods—even if their holds were stuffed with goods from Havana or St. Domingue. This tortuous concept was indulged by the pre-Pitt administrations as they attempted to curry American favor in the first phase of the Napoleonic Wars. But under Pitt’s more aggressive leadership, starting with the Essex decision of July 23, 1805, England repudiated the doctrine of the “broken voyage” and returned to the full and literal enforcement of the Rule of 1756.

James Madison’s foreign policy was nothing if not the antithesis of realpolitik. The Secretary’s reaction to the Essex decision and its implied support for the Rule of 1756 was to author a 204-page “pamphlet” entitled An Examination of the British Doctrine, Which Subjects to Capture a Neutral Trade, Not Open in Time of Peace. Madison would score an intellectual triumph over the armed powers of Europe, as he “quoted the standard theorists, Grotius, Pufendorf, Bynkershoeck, Martens, and especially Vattel, corrected the translations of Grotius’ Latin, employed a translator suggested by Duponceau for German books, and otherwise indulged his scholarly bent.”[52] His circuitous five-point argument was backed up by no less than 62 pages of citations from British court decisions, and concluded by assailing the British for following a “might-makes-right” philosophy:

Finding no asylum elsewhere, it at length boldly asserts, as its true foundation, a mere superiority of force. It is right in Great Britain to capture and condemn a neutral trade with her enemies, disallowed by her enemies in time of peace, for the sole reason that her force is predominant at sea….The law of nations, the rights of neutrals, the freedom of the seas, the commerce of the world, are to depend, not on any fixt principle of justice, but on the comparative state of naval armaments.[53]

Take that! No doubt Madison felt he had scored a scathing legal triumph with his Examination; it seemed not to occur to him that the British might place a higher priority on their own dire military situation than on his unassailable legal reasoning. But it was obvious to any observer that his conclusion merely obviated the entire point of his tendentious production. England was involved in a world war for her own survival; that survival depended above all on naval superiority; to have placed Grotius, Pufendorf, Bynkershoeck, et al above immediate concern for national survival would have been reckless folly. To have considered otherwise was absolute quintessential James Madison.

In the House, John Randolph underscored the naïveté of Madison’s reaction when he crumpled his copy of the Examination, which had been distributed to all members of Congress, hurled it to the floor, and denounced it as “a shilling pamphlet hurled against eight hundred ships of war.” In the Senate, the always circumspect William Plumer was more charitable to Madison’s opus, finding that it indeed “very justly exposes the fallacy and inconsistency of the British Courts of Admiralty”—though he had to admit, as well, that “I never read a book that fatigued me more than this pamphlet.”[54]

9. The First Fractures

As international pressures increased during the first two years of the second Jefferson administration, and U.S. foreign policy built towards the calamitous diplomatic failures of 1806, the spectacular domestic popularity and unity built by Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans during his first term was beginning to crumble. We have already seen how John Randolph and most of the radical southern “Quids” were alienated by the Yazoo compromise, which led Randolph to accuse the administration of “a classical, over-towering love of rule,”[55] and how the Louisiana Purchase gave the lie to Jeffersonian pretensions to the Anti-Federalist mantle. Now a further series of setbacks, mishaps, and divisive controversies would plague the party of Jefferson—some matters of chance, but more inevitable consequences of decisions made earlier on.

Those apt to lament the loss of civility in today’s politics might want to take a look at Jefferson’s second term, when all social intercourse between Federalists and Republicans ceased, and both sides of an increasingly virulent partisan press hurled invective and slanders that remain shocking. The Federalist New York Evening Post wrote of the President as “piling together the bodies of Hamilton, Morris, Bayard, Adams, and Tracy to the amount of one or two hundred and burning them on the altar of democracy, and lighting the funeral pyre with the defaced leaves of the Constitution.” Innuendoes about Gallatin’s foreign birth and alleged lack of national loyalty, Jefferson’s peccadilloes with slaves and mulattoes, and the both men’s complicity with and allegiance to Napoleon were commonplace.[56]

One episode definitely not in the original script for the Revolution of 1800 was Aaron Burr’s shooting of Alexander Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey, in July 1804. Burr had been effectively dropped by Jefferson from the inner circle of the administration shortly after the standoff of 1800, then embarked on a run for New York State Governor which was undercut by Hamilton’s whispering campaign. The Vice-President would find himself two years later raising a small private army and venturing westward in hopes of a war with Mexico—or in hopes of founding his own breakaway republic in the West, as Jefferson eventually alleged, putting his former running mate on trial for treason in Richmond, Virginia, in a legal drama that transfixed the nation’s attention until Burr was finally acquitted in the fall of 1807.

Aaron Burr as Vice-President. When he and Hamilton eliminated each other from American politics on the cliffs of Weehawken, the field was cleared for a generation of Republicans.

The shocking tragedy at Weehawken suited Thomas Jefferson’s purposes perfectly; it removed his two most talented potential adversaries from the American political scene forever. Purged of its leading Federalist, and its only credible “centrist”, the American political scene now became the province of the purest Republican ideologues. And the first step for the ideologues was to try to extend their influence into the one branch of government where they previously held no sway: the judiciary. Impeachment was their weapon; they tried it first against Judge John Pickering, in a partisan show trial against a defendant too mentally incompetent to take the stand. Emboldened by their impeachment of the helpless Pickering, the House managers turned their attention to Justice Samuel Chase, longtime lightning rod for controversy, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and lately, a judge high on the list of Jeffersonian villains for his prosecution of Republican journalists Thomas Cooper and James Callender under the Sedition Act.[57]

The Chase impeachment trial took place in early 1805, with Aaron Burr, then under indictment for murder in New Jersey, still presiding over the Senate. It was a political disaster for the prosecution, who could not win a conviction despite the fact that the 34 senators consisted of 14 Southern Democrats, 11 Northern Democrats, and 9 Federalists.[58] Henry Adams found the Chase impeachment to be a turning point: “it was here that the Jeffersonian Republicans fought their last aggressive battle, and wavering under the shock of defeat, broke into factions which slowly abandoned the field and forgot their discipline.”[59]

Jefferson himself had told William Plumer that the removal of judges by impeachment was “a bungling way,” yet he clearly set the process in motion and egged Randolph and the other House managers forward.[60] It was a poor calculation; Randolph’s conduct was an embarrassment, Chase and the other Federalist judges were now inviolate, and even Burr won widespread praise for his evenhanded and graceful handling of the trial. Everyone won except those who had initiated the whole unfortunate affair.

From here on Jefferson, like many second term Presidents, would turn increasingly to foreign policy—when he was not disengaging himself from the presidency altogether. But, predictably, he would find his options drastically limited by the demobilization he had begun in such a sanguine spirit during his first term. The year 1806 would see tensions with England increase and a complete failure of American diplomacy. This would culminate in the totally inadequate policy of the Embargo and the debacle of Jefferson’s last two years in office.

10. The Diplomats

In November 1804 there arrived a newly installed French minister to Washington, General Louis Marie Turreau, whose “huge mustachios, fierce red face and fiery eyes” inspired Senator Plumer to write “I have never yet beheld a face so cruel and sanguinary.”[61] Turreau notoriously whipped his wife, who for her part was said to have clubbed him with a flatiron on at least one occasion,[62] and oozed macho contempt for what he saw as the pacific national temper of the Americans: during the disarmament phase of the Jefferson Administration, he sent to Paris a stream of dispatches reporting “an American distaste for armed combat bordering on national cowardice.”[63]

A distasteful character he may have been, but as emissary to a nation all too vulnerable to being browbeaten by the Bully of Corsica Turreau was an inspired choice. Did his macho antics threaten the manhood of the 5 foot, 100-pound Madison, whose own wife was his acknowledged boss in the social aspects of his life? In any case it seems to have been his strategy to egg on the Secretary of State each time there came news of some new high-handed decree from Whitehall.

Bonaparte as First Consul, still passing himself off as a Citizen crusader--before the world wised up.

National honor was an important notion in the early 19^th century, nowhere more so than in an adolescent nation fresh with the memory of its colonial past and still subject to a nagging social inferiority complex. Add this to the fact that the young nation’s defining struggle had been its defiant triumph over Great Britain and it is not hard to understand why demagogic attacks against British “arrogance” made for successful politics. As early as December 1804 John Randolph, forgetting for the moment that the demobilization called for by the “Republican Revolution” had deprived the nation of meaningful military options, struck a belligerent pose in a speech in Congress, swearing that even if America should be crushed in a naval war “we should not lose our national honor; though we should not beat [England] on the ocean, we should save our reputation; but to suffer insult to be added to injury is indeed a degradation of national honor, and ought never to be borne with, let it come from any nation whatever.”[64]

But Randolph was never one for consistency; a year and a half later he joined the Federalists in opposing Gregg’s Resolution curtailing trade with Great Britain, and ridiculed in typical acid style those who thought America could contend with England in a naval war: “It is mere waste of time to reason with such persons. They do not deserve anything like serious refutation. The proper arguments for such statesmen are a strait waistcoat, a dark room, water, gruel, and depletion.”[65]

Gallatin, as so often the Administration’s voice of reason, was never sold on dubious medieval notions of national honor. He summed up the pros and cons of naval demobilization in 1805, writing that

An efficient navy would have a favorable effect on our foreign relations….So long as we have none, we must be perpetually liable to injuries and insults, particularly from the belligerent powers, when there is a war in Europe; and in deciding for or against the measure, Congress will fairly decide the question whether they think it more for the interest of the United States to preserve a pacific and temporizing system, and to tolerate those injuries and insults to a great extent, than to be prepared, like the great European nations, to repel every injury by the sword.[66]

“Pacific and temporizing” was, of course, the administration’s guiding philosophy. The year 1806 saw two major new diplomatic initiatives, both of which ended in failure. The one in France, which we have alluded to already, in which ministers John Armstrong and James Bowdoin were unable to convince Bonaparte to fork over West Florida, failed because it never had a realistic chance of succeeding. The mission to England failed only because James Madison did not really want it to succeed.

James Monroe had been transferred to London from Paris in 1803, replacing the retiring Rufus King, a Washington appointee whose eight years of service had done much to soothe Anglo-American relations in the post-revolutionary period.[67] When in the wake of the Essex decision, and the debate which followed over the “broken voyage” and the Rule of 1756, Congress decided a special envoy should join Monroe, Jefferson appointed William Pinckney of Baltimore.[68] There were two main items on the agenda for Monroe and Pinckney in the London negotiations. One was America’s right to engage in unrestricted neutral trade under the old doctrine of the “broken voyage”; the other was the issue of impressments.

For some years prior it had been common practice for British sailors to desert in U.S. ports, where they would typically be granted U.S. citizenship in a matter of hours, and go on to take work on board American merchantmen, where the pay was better and the discipline less stringent than in Her Majesty’s Navy. A tranquil acceptance of this practice was obviously out of the question for the British Navy in wartime, and so it became routine for English warships to detain U.S. traders and search their holds for deserters—who were promptly “pressed” back into service. This practice accelerated dramatically during the first Jefferson administration, as the emasculation of the U.S. Navy emboldened British captains to impress more freely and more often.[69] When American sailor John Pierce was killed by a broadside from the H.M.S. Leander off the coast of Long Island in early 1806 a flurry of public indignation swept the U.S.;[70] now the impressments issue had been linked to the cause of national honor, and Madison forbade the envoys to conclude any treaty that did not include a British renunciation of the right of impressment.

This was simply unrealistic. The British armed forces were fighting a world war, and facing their own recruitment crisis. Moreover, Gallatin had made a thorough study of the American merchant marine—being perhaps a bit more efficient than Jefferson and Madison might have liked—and found, what could hardly have bolstered Madison’s arguments, that about half the able seamen in the foreign trade were, in fact, British subjects.[71] By legalistically insisting that impressments be the first order of business for Pinckney, and a sine qua non for any potential agreement, Madison made it virtually impossible for the venture to succeed; he was probably not anxious for diplomatic success in any case, being already convinced that a preferable alternative lay in his own brainchild, coercive embargo.[72]

For a while, nonetheless, things seemed to be tending towards an Anglo-American détente. Pitt died in January of 1806 and was replaced by the pro-American Charles Fox; the Grenville-Fox government changed its policy that spring, in a direction “which incidentally satisfied all the practical wants of the United States, if none of the theoretical.”[73] (That was definitely not the way to deal with James Madison!) And by that winter, Monroe and Pinckney had negotiated a treaty in London which, while lacking a substantive agreement on impressments, gave the U.S. everything else it could have hoped for: a restoration of the carrying trade and the doctrine of the broken journey, and explicit rejection of the Rule of 1756. In return the U.S. would agree a) not to cut off trade with England for ten years, and b) not to submit to Napoleon’s Berlin Decree, established just after his victory over Prussia at Jena, which threatened French confiscation of any vessel that had touched in any British or British colonial port.[74]

There could have been little question of submitting to the Berlin Decree in any case; it amounted to as strident a declaration against the neutral trade as anything that ever came out of Whitehall. Nevertheless Jefferson’s reaction, when the treaty finally came before him on March 3, 1807, was to reject it out of hand, on the grounds that the clause concerning the Berlin Decree “amounted to requiring the United States to engage in commercial war against France.” The President refused, amazingly, to even submit the Monroe-Pinckney treaty to the Senate—out of fear, some thought, that it would pass in spite of his disapproval.[75]

For his part, shortly after receiving the Monroe-Pinckney treaty, Madison informed British Ambassador Erskine that the abolition of impressments “had been taken up as appoint of honor by the United States”. He also argued in the Cabinet, in a predictable sign of policy decisions to come, that to give up on non-importation without obtaining a renunciation of impressments “would be yielding the only peaceable instrument for coercing all our rights.”[76] In fact the other Cabinet members, at least, were looking for a way to breach the impasse left by the Monroe-Pinckney treaty’s lack of mention of the impressments issue, and at a meeting on April 3^rd considered whether America should not offer to voluntarily stop employing British seamen in return for a British renunciation of impressments on the high seas. But, as we have seen, the ever-perspicacious Gallatin’s researches had already found that such a trade-off would actually be ruinous to U.S. shipping. Madison considered changing the proposal to only include British sailors who had been in American employ less than two years; but even this, Gallatin found, would deprive the U.S. of about five thousand sailors.[77]

As things would turn out, the Monroe-Pinckney treaty was the last chance for the restoration of amicable relations with England. The British were nonplussed by its rejection, and ultimately concluded that “for reasons of dogma or temerity [Jefferson] was virtually a puppet of Napoleon’s”; in the spring of 1807 a hard-line Tory ministry came to power, its new Foreign Minister, George Canning, determined that “if the United States persisted in acting like an ally of France, it must be treated as an enemy of Great Britain.”[78]

The administration had thus maneuvered itself into a pointless policy of petulant belligerence toward England, from which it was now impossible to escape. War was debated on the floor of Congress, as were proposals to default on the large portion of the national debt held by British subjects (much to Gallatin’s mortification, of course). James Madison, though, was not worried. His pet plan of stopping all imports from Great Britain was gaining steam—a plan which the Secretary of State sincerely believed would cause “three hundred thousand unemployed British laborers [to] march on London and ultimately force [their] Government to mend its ways.”[79]

This was insanely optimistic, as it turned out. But British-American relations were already sliding down the slippery slope that would lead to Embargo and eventually to war. The slide could yet have been arrested with a determined diplomatic effort—but a Secretary of State convinced that his personal brand of economic coercion could make a vastly more powerful country do his bidding, and prey to the childish notion that his country’s honor required eternal defiance of England, would summon forth no such determination. By 1807 any sudden change in the status quo could have pushed the two nations from civil antipathy into open confrontation; as it turned out the catalytic incident took place on a sunny morning in June, a few miles off the Virginia shore.

11. The Insult

The episode which America’s hotter heads chose to take as a national insult took place on the morning of June 22^nd at Hampton Roads, near the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay and only a few miles from Norfolk, Virginia. This was where Captain James Barron’s frigate Chesapeake patrolled, with a crew that included a number of British deserters from the H.M.S. Melampus. Two weeks earlier Admiral Berkeley, the British naval commander at Halifax, had sent out an order charging that these British subjects had “openly paraded the streets of Norfolk in sight of their officers, under the American flag, protected by the Magistrate of the town, and the recruiting officer belonging to the above mentioned frigate,” and ordering the first ship that encountered the Chesapeake to board her and search for deserters.[80]

That turned out to be the H.M.S. Leopard of fifty guns, whose Captain duly hailed the Chesapeake just before noon on the 22^nd, and demanded the right to search the American vessel for the deserters; when the frigate’s captain, James Barron, refused, the Leopard fired on the unprepared Americans for about ten minutes, killing three sailors and severely wounding eighteen others. Eventually the Chesapeake was boarded and the deserters taken into custody.[81] This was the first time an American warship had been thus searched, and in the minds of many it constituted a casus belli; war fever swept the nation, stoked by strident editorials in the Democrat-Republican press.

The Leopard lets loose a broadside against the helpless Chesapeake, as re-imagined in this 1897 drawing.

The news of the Chesapeake’s capture reached John Randolph in Richmond on June 27^th, 1807, the day after he and his fellow grand jurors had indicted Aaron Burr on treason charges; his initial reaction in a letter to Joseph Nicholson was to expect war as a matter of course: “I have tried to avert from my country a war which I foresaw must succeed the follies of 1805-06, but I shall not be the less disposed to withdraw her from it or carry her through with honor.”[82] James Madison, too, was ready to begin hostilities, writing to Monroe on July 6^th  of what he saw as the national cry for war:

It pervades the whole community, is abolishing the distinctions of party; and, regarding only the indignity offered to the Sovereignty and flag of the Nation, and the blood of Citizens so wantonly and wickedly shed, demands, in the loudest tone, an honorable reparation.

On July 17^th Ambassador Erskine wrote to George Canning in Whitehall that the Jeffersonians were trying to use the Chesapeake incident to whip up national indignation. Although it had seemed difficult to stimulate Americans to a warlike spirit on commercial grounds, or picayune points of international law, he observed, “the passions of the people might be worked upon to any extent by an appeal to them on the ground of national insult.”[83] In fact, the American outrage over the Chesapeake was matched by an equally militant wave of popular opinion across the Atlantic, as British public opinion, already more or less in line with the views expressed in War in Disguise,  became even more strongly anti-American in indignant support of the right of the British Navy to re-impress its deserters.[84]

In France a gleeful Napoleon ordered Champagny to take America’s declaration of War with England as a given—and to drive the point home added that American vessels then detained under the Berlin Decree were now hostages to ensure that result:

Answer Mr. Armstrong, that I am ashamed to discuss points of which the injustice is so evident; but that in the position in which England has put the Continent, I do not doubt of the United States declaring war against her….that in my mind I regard was as declared between England and America….that, for the rest, I have ordered that the American vessels should remain sequestered, to be disposed of as shall be necessary according to the circumstances.[85]

But Turreau warned Napoleon not to get too hopeful over the Leopard affair, in dispatch after dispatch filled with disdainful accounts of the Administration’s pusillanimity. At a mid-July official reception Jefferson took Turreau aside and confidently told him that should Britain not accede to his demands the United States would seize both Canada and Florida, and then “we will no longer have any difficulty with our vessels”; the worldly French minister correctly read this hokum as an indication that Jefferson would avoid war at all costs. In September the disgusted Turreau wrote home that the Americans were “a people who have no idea of glory….and are disposed to suffer all kinds of humiliation.”[86]

The choleric French Ambassador had Thomas Jefferson pegged. The President, of course, realized that in spite of the bipartisan war fervor he had no significant military to go to war with. Although he toyed with the idea of a quick campaign, to include the annexation of Canada and the defense of the Atlantic coast by his beloved gunboats, Gallatin poured cold water on the idea, reporting that the militia was in a state of profound unreadiness and that England was prepared to devote substantial resources to an American conflict:

I will only add that if the British Ministry is possessed of energy, and that we have no reason to doubt, we must expect an efficient fleet on our coast late this autumn, with perhaps a few thousand land forces, for the purpose of winter operations in the South. Their great object of attack will be one of four places according to seasons and circumstances—New York, Norfolk, Charleston (or perhaps Savannah), New Orleans.[87]

Redcoats! —a few thousand!—as close as Norfolk! This was not an outcome that Jefferson, who in spite of his many qualities was never known for martial courage, was willing to countenance. So instead, studiously ignoring the cries for British blood, the President tried to convert American moral superiority over the Chesapeake, and the apology he felt was owed, into a blanket British renunciation of impressments; in so doing he overplayed his hand, and the attempt “fell on the hardened ground of Britain’s perennial concern for her undermanned navy.”[88]

But most others in Jefferson’s party were happy to keep ratcheting up the tension. The President’s initial, temperate proclamation, simply excluding British warships from American waters, was not nearly militant enough for Madison, who argued for such rhetorical flourishes as “insults as gross as language could offer”, “an act transcending all former outrages”, and “her lawless and bloody purpose.”[89] Meanwhile on the House floor Randolph continued to epitomize the hardcore Republicans’ general mood of braggadocio when he insisted that “….instant retaliation should have been taken on the offending party. I would have invaded Canada and Nova Scotia, and made a descent on Jamaica. I would have seized upon Canada and Nova Scotia as pledges to be retained against a future pacification, until we had obtained ample redress for our wrongs.”[90]

The upshot of all this bluster was that, although war would be avoided for the moment, so would any satisfactory diplomatic resolution. In his instructions to Monroe, Madison added his own haughty demand for “satisfaction” to Jefferson’s naïve idea that the moral correctness of America’s position would force Britain into concessions it had no intention of making:

With this demand you are charged by the President. The tenor of his proclamation will be your guide, in reminding the British Government of the uniform proofs given by the United States of their disposition to maintain, faithfully, every friendly relation; of the multiplied infractions of their rights by British Naval Commanders on our coasts and in our harbors; of the inefficacy of reiterated appeals to the justice and friendship of that Government; and of the moderation on the part of the United States, which reiterated disappointments had not extinguished; til at length no alternative is left, but a voluntary satisfaction on the part of Great Britain, or a resort to means depending on the United States alone….As a security for the future, an entire abolition of impressments from vessels under the flag of the United States, if not already arranged, is also to make an indispensable part of the satisfaction.[91]

The unfortunate Monroe’s instructions also included a tedious and lawyerly summary from the pen of the Secretary himself of similar “applicable cases”—citing such renowned incidents as that in which “the French King sent an Ambassador Extraordinary to Sardinia, in the most public and solemn manner, with an apology for an infringement of his territorial rights in the pursuit of a smuggler and murderer”, or one in which “an Ambassador Exty was sent by the British Government to the Court of Portugal with an apology for the pursuit and destruction by Admiral Boscawen, of certain French ships on the coast of this last kingdom.” The face-saving emphasis on an “Ambassador Extraordinary” revealed that what the Administration really needed was not “satisfaction” but political cover against the anticipated charges of knuckling under from their own party’s Randolph-led ideologues.[92]

Foreign Minister George Canning has been generally portrayed by historians, especially Henry Adams, as a haughty imperialist in the Pitt mold whose insensitivity created the diplomatic impasse that led to the War of 1812. In fact Canning’s first official communication with Monroe expressly disavowed the actions of Commodore Humphreys and the Leopard: “His Majesty neither does nor has at any time maintained the pretension of a right to search ships of war, in the national service of any State, for deserters.” Monroe allowed as how this might be “considered as conceding essentially the point desired”, which perhaps ought to have been the end of the matter—but that its tone was harsh and peremptory, and as so often with Canning, it was the brusque and superior tone that upset the Americans more than anything. [93]

British Foreign Minister George Canning: his brusque and superior tone upset the Americans, even when he was "conceding essentially the point desired".

Eventually Canning did send an “Ambassador Exty” to Washington to attempt to smoothe out the Chesapeake affair—but unfortunately the envoy he selected, George Rose, could scarcely conceal his disdain for the Republican leadership in Congress, claiming it proved “the excess of the democratic ferment….the dregs having got up to the top.”[94] It also didn’t help matters that Ambassador Ext’y Rose strung Madison along for weeks of negotiations before revealing that his instructions included an ironclad requirement that the U.S. retract Commodore Barron’s denial that he harbored British subjects—obviously, politically, an impossibly bitter pill for the administration to swallow.[95]

Rose’s mission would stretch on fruitlessly into 1808, as the U.S. adopted the disastrous policy of Embargo. Madison eventually wrote a five thousand word reply which stunned the English envoy, who found it “difficult to conceive that the first minister of the United States should have subscribed his name to what is professed to be a delineation of the facts, but in which, besides the perversion of the general complexion of the transactions, he has cautiously and most disingenuously suppressed every circumstance which did not fit the view he chose to give of them.” The Secretary had burned his bridges, complacently trusting that his experiment in commercial pressure would soon bring the British Empire to its knees—if only the public would continue to support it. Rose could only conclude there was a political purpose to Madison’s maneuver, namely, keeping the public hostile to Britain, and therefore supportive of the embargo: “the grand object has been to give such a complexion of hostility to the whole conduct of Great Britain as shall impress upon the people the necessity of a prolonged acquiescence in the embargo, under which their impatience naturally increases every hour.”[96] The Chesapeake-Leopard incident had thus traveled full circle, from casus belli to bargaining chip, and back again.

American histories have tended to treat the Chesapeake affair as an unquestioned atrocity and to imply that the resulting war fever was bipartisan and nationwide. In fact, though there was undoubtedly plenty of real anti-British sentiment, it was stoked considerably by the Democrat-Republican press, and concentrated geographically in the Southern and Middle States. In New England, the last bastion of Federalism, a quite different view also had its adherents. New England’s merchants, shippers, and associated tradespeople understood, as Jefferson and Madison could not, that the British deserters who made up half of their able ships’ hands were a vital part of the economy—and that, at the same time, it was unrealistic to expect England to renounce the right to search for and re-enlist its deserters. Impressment was thus a risk these merchants willingly ran—a risk which was handsomely rewarded by wartime inflated prices and profits. It was the furthest thing imaginable from a pretext for war with America’s most important trading partner and natural ally.[97]

As for Thomas Jefferson, whose Presidency was taking on a disturbingly fatalistic tone, the second half of 1807 saw him all too willing to write off relations with the lone Republic in Europe—and take his chances with the Continent’s conqueror. As he wrote to a friend that August:

I never expected to be under the necessity of wishing success to Buonaparte. But the English being equally tyrannical at sea as he is on land, & that tyranny bearing on us in every point of either honor or interest, I say, ‘down with England’ and as for what Buonaparte is then to do to us, let us trust to the chapter of accidents. I cannot, with the Anglomen, prefer a certain present evil to a future hypothetical one.[98]

12. The Bully

Those wishing to understand Napoleonic foreign policy could do worse than sitting down with a couple DVD’s worth of The Sopranos and cataloguing the methods of the New Jersey Mob. The Bully from Corsica did not operate according to gentlemen’s rules; he had no allies, only vassals, and extortion, threats, and false promises were his preferred tools. Nations that passively acquiesced in his Continental Protection Racket generally regretted their mistake sooner rather than later. “Trusting to the chapter of accidents” would not generally be considered wise where Napoleon Bonaparte was concerned, as Thomas Jefferson would discover shortly.

We have seen how the initial French reaction to the Chesapeake affair was a bland assumption that a U.S. declaration of war would follow as a matter of course—combined with an unsubtle suggestion that U.S. vessels in French ports would be “sequestered” to ensure such an outcome. A few days later Napoleon offered a carrot to counterbalance the stick of holding American ships hostage, once again dangling the Florida bait as a reward for American alliance against England:

Let the American minister know verbally, that….whenever in consequence of this war the Americans shall send troops into the Floridas to help the Spaniards and repulse the English, I shall much approve of it. You will even let him perceive that in case America should be disposed to enter into a treaty of alliance, and make common cause with me, I shall not be unwilling to intervene with the court of Spain to obtain the cession of these same Floridas in favor of the Americas.[99]

But this would be a limited-time offer—and the U.S. was in no position to accept it. On June 25^th Napoleon had concluded the Treaty of Tilsit with Czar Alexander of Russia—his own precursor to the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 122 years later, with the same objective of freeing his hands for the ult