Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (109 page)

It was not the actual number of seizures that most irritated Americans; rather it was the British presumption that His Majesty’s government had the right to decide just what American trade should be permitted or not permitted. It seemed to reduce America once again to the status of a colonial dependent. This was the fundamental issue that underlay America’s turbulent relationship with Britain through the entire period of the European wars.
Aurora
editor William Duane went to the heart of the matter when in March 1807 he asked his readers, “Will you abandon your rights? Will you abandon your independence? Are you willing to become colonies of Great Britain?”
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From the 1790s through 1815 it was the Republicans alone who celebrated the Declaration of Independence and toasted as its author their leader, whom Joel Barlow called “the immortal Jefferson.” The Republicans honored the Declaration, however, not for its promotion of individual rights and equality, as would be the case for all political parties after 1815, but for its denunciation of the British monarchy and its assertion that the new nation had assumed a “separate and equal Station . . . among the Powers of the Earth”—something the Republicans thought the Anglophilic Federalists were reluctant to acknowledge. Indeed, as late as 1823 Jefferson was still fulminating over the way the Federalists treated the Declaration, seeing it, he said, “as being a libel on the government of England . . . [that] should now be buried in utter oblivion to spare the feelings of our English friends and Angloman fellow citizens.”
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The most humiliating grievance for Americans, the one that made them seem still under the thumb of the former mother country, was the British impressment of American seamen, a practice that John Quincy Adams labeled an “authorized system of kidnapping upon the ocean.”
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British captains of warships often stopped and inspected American commercial vessels even in American waters to see if there were any British subjects among the sailors. Such actions, said Jefferson, threatened American sovereignty. “We cannot be respected by France as a neutral nation, nor by the world ourselves as an independent one,” he told Madison in 1804, “if we do not take effectual measures to support, at every risk, our authority in our own harbors.”
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The actual numbers of sailors that Britain impressed from American ships over this war period are unknown, the
British admitting to more than three thousand, the Americans claiming at least double that figure.

The issue was serious and seemingly beyond compromise as long as Britain was in its life-or-death struggle with France. Since the Royal Navy needed to recruit at least thirty thousand to forty thousand new seamen every year, it relied heavily on impressing not only British subjects in their own seaports but also those who had deserted to the American merchant marine—a not insignificant number. According to estimates made by Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin, nine thousand of the twenty-four thousand sailors on American ships were actually British subjects—a figure, admitted Gallatin, that “was larger than we had figured.”
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With the Royal Navy seeming to be the sole obstacle to Napoleon’s invasion of the British Isles, the British government naturally sought to get these sailors back and to discourage future deserters. It thus authorized its naval officers to board American merchant ships and impress into the British navy seamen who they believed were His Majesty’s subjects and who lacked documents proving they were American citizens.

The British never claimed the right to impress American citizens, but since British and American sailors looked and sounded so much alike, aggressive British naval officers often made mistakes that might take years to correct. Although the United States did not employ press gangs to supply seamen for its navy, it never denied the right of the Royal Navy to impress British sailors on American ships in British ports. It did, however, deny Britain’s authority to board American ships to impress men on the high seas. For their part, the British never admitted the right of the United States to do to them what they did to the United States; they never conceded the right of American naval officers to board British ships to impress American deserters—not that there were many of them. This discrepancy is what made impressment seem to the Americans to be an act of British neocolonialism.

The problem grew out of the British denial of the right of British subjects to expatriate and become citizens of another country. But, of course, despite the feelings of some Republicans that “man is born free” and “may remove out of the limits of these United States” at will, some Americans, especially in the judiciary, were not all that clear about the right of American citizens to expatriate either.
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But the United States did offer immigrants a relatively easy route to naturalized citizenship—inconsistent
as that may have been with some judges’ denial of the right of expatriation. Consequently, both nations often claimed the same persons as their own legitimate subjects or citizens.
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Neither Britain nor the United States could give way on the issue. It is easy to explain the British need to maintain impressment, which had become vital to Britain’s security in its titanic struggle with Napoleon. But the Americans’ fixation on impressment is not as easily explained. However brutal, the practice did not endanger the Americans’ national security nor did the loss of even several thousand sailors threaten the existence of their navy or their merchant fleet. Since Americans did not deny the right of the British to search American ships for contraband goods, why, it was argued, could they not allow a search for British deserters—especially since, as Gallatin pointed out, over a third of American sailors were in fact British subjects?

Yet for most Americans, though not for most Federalists, none of this mattered. Impressment remained for most Republicans the rawest and most contentious issue dividing the United States and Britain. It was always first on the list of American complaints against British practices, and its abolition was always the sine quanon in negotiations with Britain. Although after 1808 the Republican leaders tended to place impressment behind neutral rights as a source of grievance, in the end they made it the most important of the reasons Americans went to war in 1812 against the former mother country.

Since most Americans, so British in heritage, language, and looks, could never be sure of their own national identity, they were acutely sensitive to any effort to blur the distinction between themselves and the British—something the Federalists were increasingly doing. The Federalist
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denied that there was any such thing as Americanness. Benjamin Rush in 1805 thought that most of the Federalists in Pennsylvania, “a majority of the old and wealthy
native
citizens,” were “still Englishmen in their hearts.” Indeed, Rush went so far as to say that Americans had “no national character, and however much we may boast of it, there are very few true Americans in the United States.”
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Since a suffocating trans-Atlantic Englishness existed everywhere in the Americans’ culture, it is not surprising that the Republicans came to see the British impressment of American sailors as a glaring example of America’s lack of independence as a nation. The practice aroused so
much anger precisely because it threw into the faces of the Americans the ambiguous and fluid nature of their national identity.

With both impressments of sailors and seizures of American ships increasing during the summer of 1805, Jefferson stopped talking of an alliance with Britain, and the American rapprochement with the former mother country that had begun with Jay’s Treaty a decade earlier now came to an end. In his warlike message to Congress in December 1805 Jefferson called for the fortification of seaport towns, a substantial increase in the number of gunboats, the construction of six seventy-four-gun ships of the line, the creation of a naval militia reserve, and reorganization of the militia. Although he considered Britain’s violation of neutral rights a greater “enormity” than Spanish intransigence over the Louisiana borders, he lumped them together as “injuries” that were “of a nature to be met by force only.” If there were to be a war, he wanted it somehow to result in the acquisition of the Floridas.
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In response to the British injuries Congress considered cutting off all trade with the former mother country. Finally, however, in the spring of 1806 it passed a much milder Non-Importation Act, while rejecting the proposal to build the six ships of the line. Although the Non-Importation Act ignored the most important imports from Britain and prohibited only those British imports that Americans themselves could produce, the Republicans in Congress, fearful not only of spending money but of creating a military despotism, much preferred some sort of non-importation to building expensive ships. Furthermore, this bland measure was to be suspended until November 1806, provoking John Randolph’s sneering (and prophetic) comment that it was “a milk and water bill, a dose of chicken broth to be taken nine months hence . . . too contemptible to be the object of consideration or to excite the feelings of the pettiest state in Europe.”
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This Non-Importation Act and its suspension for nine months were designed to put pressure on the British and to give time for a special commission to Britain, composed of America’s minister in London, James Monroe, and a Baltimore lawyer and former Federalist, William Pinkney, to seek a redress of America’s grievances concerning impressment and neutral rights. Because the British violations of neutral rights and seizures of American ships resembled the situation that existed prior to the negotiation of the Jay Treaty, many thought that Monroe’s and Pinkney’s main mission was to negotiate a replacement for that treaty, which had expired in 1803.

Although American trade had flourished under the Jay Treaty, Jefferson and the Republicans had never liked the treaty, which had barred the United States from passing retaliatory commercial legislation. Jefferson called it “a millstone around our necks,” and he had rejected British proposals to renew its commercial clauses when they had expired. If he had had his way, Monroe and Pinkney would have been authorized to deal with issues of neutral rights only, and not with issues of commerce. Jefferson, like many other Republicans, did not want to surrender the country’s right to impose commercial sanctions against Great Britain, which it had yielded under the Jay Treaty. But pressure from Congress forced Jefferson to allow the Monroe-Pinkney mission to negotiate a whole host of issues between the two nations, including those concerning Anglo-American trade.
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Given Jefferson’s feelings about the use of economic sanctions, the outlook for the treaty that Monroe and Pinkney sent back to the United States early in 1807 was not good. Since the treaty itself mentioned nothing about impressment on the high seas, Jefferson found it unacceptable and refused to send it to the Senate. “To tell you the truth,” he supposedly said to a friend, “I do not wish any treaty with Great Britain.” But since the British went out of their way to conciliate the Americans on the issue of impressment, informally promising to observe “the greatest caution” in impressing their sailors on American ships and to offer “immediate and promptredress” to any American mistakenly impressed, Jefferson felt pressured to find other objections to the treaty.
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What he particularly wanted to preserve was the right of the United States to retaliate commercially against Great Britain, the very thing the treaty was designed to avoid. “We will never tie our hands by treaty,” he declared, “from the right of passing a non-importation or non-intercourse act, to make it in her interest to become just.”
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Although the commercial clauses gave Americans more advantages than they had had under the Jay Treaty, the unwillingness of Jefferson and many other Republicans to give up the weapon of commercial warfare probably doomed any treaty from the start.

With Napoleon’s hopes of invading England shattered by Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in October 1805, the recently crowned French emperor turned to the weapon many Americans had been resorting to on and off for decades—economic sanctions against Great Britain.
Napoleon thus launched what came to be called the Continental System. In a series of decrees, beginning with the Berlin Decree in November 1806, issued five weeks after he had defeated the Prussians at Jena and Auerstädt and gained control of the ports on the North and Baltic seas, Napoleon believed he was in a position to stifle the British economy. He forbade all trade with the British Isles, ordered the confiscation of all goods coming from England or its colonies even when owned by neutrals, and made liable to seizure not only every British ship but any ship that had landed in England or its colonies. The British responded with a series of orders-in-council that proclaimed a blockade of all ports from which British goods were excluded and required neutral ships that wished to trade with these ports to stop in England and pay transit duties first. In December 1807 Napoleon answered with his Milan Decree, declaring that any neutral ship submitting to British trade regulations or even allowing a British search party to board was liable to seizure.

The net effect of all these regulations by the warring parties was to render all neutral commerce illegal and liable to seizure by one power or the other. Although by 1807 the French were seizing American ships in European ports, Britain’s greater ability to capture Americans vessels (in 1805 and 1806 it was plundering about one of every eight American ships that put to sea) and its humiliating practice of impressment made Britain appear the greater culprit in American eyes. Indeed, it was difficult for many Republicans to think of France as the same kind of enemy as Great Britain.
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