For Honour's Sake (7 page)

I
n the aftermath of
Leopard's
attack on
Chesapeake
it seemed reasonable to assume that war would come five years earlier than it eventually did. Along the Virginian side of Chesapeake Bay, the militia, acting under orders from their governor, barred British ships from taking on supplies. A young lance corporal named Winfield Scott took prisoner a party of Royal Navy sailors who had rowed ashore to take on water. Ever prone to riot, a New York mob vandalized an English ship that lay alongside a dock, while the city's British consul had to be placed under police protection. Elsewhere public meetings were held and Great Britain resoundingly condemned. Even in staunchly pro-British Boston more than two thousand people gathered to demand action.
¹

David Erskine, Britain's youthful ambassador, cautioned his superior two weeks after the incident that even the “most temperate people and those most attracted to England say that they are bound as a nation and that they must assert their honour of the first attack upon it, or subject themselves to an imputation which it may be difficult to remove.” While war over the orders-in-council was unlikely, Erskine feared the
Chesapeake
incident could inflame “the passions of the people” to such a point that the Jefferson administration would be forced to act.
²

President Jefferson recognized that the country “has never been in such a state of excitement since the battle of Lexington” and that, if he sought it, Congress would approve a declaration of war. But neither Jefferson nor his secretary of state, James Madison, wished to take that fateful step.
³

As in so many things, the two most powerful men in America were of
like mind. These Virginians of the old landed gentry were the closest of friends, enjoying an intimacy many observers described as like that of a father and son. Having been born in 1743, Jefferson played father to Madison, eight years younger. Where Jefferson was tall and patrician in manner, Madison was short and painfully shy. Always outgoing, Jefferson revelled in large dinner parties followed by long discussions over Madeira. Madison preferred small gatherings and an early bed. Both men shared an appetite for good wine and expensive books, but Jefferson acquired both without concern for the costs. He was subsequently a president shouldering a crushing debt that his $25,000 annual salary did little to relieve. Both men, in terms of land and slaves owned, appeared wealthy, but the cash value of these was far less than either imagined. More realistic, Madison chose to moderate his desire for wine and books, but found it impossible to curb his wife Dolley's appetite for luxury. New gowns were a constant, a carriage to whisk her about Washington absolutely essential, and the pursuit endless for all considered fashionable and necessary to maintain their proper station in the ranks of America's elite. This placed serious strain on Madison's meagre $5,000 salary as secretary of state that was little augmented by income from the plantation.
⁴

It was not only their lifestyles and background that bound Madison and Jefferson. They were both men of the Revolution who shared its ideals and desired to build a nation anchored on the principles of liberty and individualism that had led America to revolt against king and country. The America they sought was one where the power of government was limited, taxes were minimal, and Congress represented and expressed the will of the people.

Jefferson and Madison were grateful that Congress was not in session, and the president astutely resisted recalling it for an emergency sitting that would certainly result in rapid drafting and passage of a war bill.
⁵

Jefferson urged the Virginia governor to restrain his militiamen to avoid any clash with the British. Showing restraint now, he argued, would leave Congress the freedom later to decide “whether, having taught so many other useful lessons to Europe, we may not add that of showing them that there are peaceable means of repressing injustice, by making it the interest of the aggressor to do what is just.”
⁶

When the French minister to America, Gen. Louis Marie Turreau, sounded Jefferson out about whether war was imminent—something France desired—the president declared, “If the English do not give us the satisfaction we demand we will take Canada, which wants to enter the Union.” A shrewd man, Turreau recognized bluster. He reported that “the President does not want war and that Mr. Madison dreads it now still more.”
⁷

In a series of meetings in rooms steaming under Washington summer heat, Madison urged Jefferson's cabinet to react cautiously.
Leopard,
he said, had executed an order issued by Vice-Admiral Berkeley without the British government's authorization. An immediate war declaration would be a tactical blunder because of the numerous British warships already concentrated in American waters. These ships could easily close the nation's ports and seize its merchant ships as they returned home. Better to wait until the majority of the American merchant fleet came home in the late summer and early fall.
⁸

Madison's moderate line met strong opposition from an unexpected corner, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. Being neither native born nor of British stock, the forty-six-year-old Gallatin was an American political rarity. Born to wealthy parents in Geneva, he had emigrated to the United States in 1780, at the age of twenty, with the desire to “drink in a love for independence in the freest country of the universe.”
⁹
More pragmatically, Gallatin also knew there was more opportunity to make his fortune in a new country than in Geneva, where a financial clique controlled the economy.

Gallatin ventured into the still-opening expanses of western Virginia and purchased a thousand acres on the bank of the Ohio River for 100 Virginian pounds. In partnership with a friend, Gallatin also bought warrants for 120,000 acres between the Great and Little Kanawha rivers in Virginia's Monongalia County. Selling off some of this land left the two men comfortably prosperous. Within five years of arriving in America, Gallatin owned a farm that he named Friendship Hill, on a bluff overlooking the Monongahela River across the boundary from Virginia in western Pennsylvania. Having just attained his age of majority at twenty-five, Gallatin received a large infusion of capital
from his family back in Geneva that cemented his position as one of the county's wealthiest and most educated citizens. He also married, without the permission of her mother, a woman much younger than himself. She died just a few months later.

As a palliative to his grief, Gallatin threw himself into politics. He was elected to the Pennsylvanian state legislature in 1790 and three years later to the United States Senate. In 1793, Gallatin married Hannah Nicholson less than a month before taking his seat in the Senate that December. Unlike his first wife, Hannah was no beauty, but, raised in a family tightly linked to the navy (her father was a retired commodore with close ties to Washington), she possessed a keen political mind. His twenty-seven-year-old bride, Gallatin confided to a friend, was “far less attractive than either her mind or her heart …. Her understanding is good, she is as well informed as most young ladies … and she is a pretty good democrat (and so, by the bye, are all her relations).”
¹⁰
Two years later, on December 7, 1795, Gallatin was elected to Congress and hooked his wagon to Thomas Jefferson's rising star. When Jefferson won the presidency in March 1801, he appointed Gallatin federal secretary of the treasury. It was a position Gallatin had held ever since.

In charge of the federal finances, Gallatin clearly understood how ill prepared the nation was for war. As the men behind Jefferson gathered for another sweaty meeting to discuss how the government should react to the
Chesapeake
incident, Gallatin's face was sallower than normal. His hair, sharply receding from a high, sloping forehead, was a tangled, dark mass. His long nose thrust like a sword out from between dark eyes. Gallatin was a hardened survivor, a politician who had held the reins of the treasury for six years despite many House and Senate attempts to get rid of this foreigner, this fiscal rationalist who so opposed incurring national debt that many capital projects that would benefit political colleagues and adversaries alike died for lack of federal funding.

In his cold and ever-rational manner, Gallatin argued for a war he acknowledged would be “calamitous.”
¹¹
But this was a war forced on America by the
Chesapeake
incident and the ever-tightening economic screws of the orders-in-council. Gallatin feared economic chaos and depression, but he feared more that turning the other cheek would be a
humiliation the nation would never rise above because its moral supremacy in relation to the corruption of Europe would be forever lost. America's essence required it to stand up for independence and act against violations of the rights of man. When
Leopard
tore into
Chesapeake
with its broadsides, killing three sailors and maiming many others, Gallatin considered a line had been crossed and war was the ultimate and only redress available to the aggrieved nation.

“We will be poorer, both as a nation and as a government, our debt and taxes will increase, and our progress in every respect be interrupted. But all those evils are … not to be put in competition with the independence and honor of the nation; they are, moreover, temporary, and very few years of peace will obliterate their effects. Nor do I know whether the awakening of nobler feelings and habits than avarice and luxury might not be necessary to prevent our degenerating, like the Hollanders, into a nation of mere calculators.”
¹²

Gallatin not only advocated war but he had much considered the means by which it could be waged. America's navy, severely reduced by his own conservative national fiscal policies, could not best the Royal Navy. From a treasury point of view, Gallatin held that “it would be an economical measure for every naval nation to burn their navy at the end of a war and to build a new one when again at war, if it was not that time was necessary to build ships of war.”
¹³
The best the navy could do was to huddle inside the safety of the few well-fortified American ports or act individually as privateers by preying on helpless British merchantmen. Defending America's coastline would be a daunting challenge, Gallatin concluded, but not insurmountable if preparations began immediately.

Gallatin recognized that a purely defensive war could not be fought effectively. The initiative always lay with the enemy to choose where and when to fight. He therefore proposed a multi-pronged invasion, conducted in stages over several months, of British North America and the seizure of New Providence and Bermuda by amphibious assault. Only Newfoundland, too far away and too heavily garrisoned, was to be left alone. Upper Canada, Lower Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, all were to be invaded in turn. Halifax, with its great port, was the most difficult objective to capture but also the most vital. So “long as the British
hold Halifax they will be able, by the superiority of their naval force, to blockade, during the greater part of the year, all our principal seaports…. If we take it, the difficulty to refit and obtain refreshments will greatly diminish that evil, and enable us to draw some advantage from our small navy on our own coast.” Taking Upper Canada was also critical “in order to cover our northern frontier and to ruin the British fur-trade.”

Gallatin placed the cost of the proposed operation at about $18 million and requiring deployment of around 30,000 men. The war could be financed by drawing down the present surplus by $8 million, dedicating $2.5 million in taxes and duties, selling $500,000 of federal land, and borrowing $7 million.
¹⁴
Gallatin sat and awaited the response of the rest of the executive.

Madison was aghast and Jefferson in no mood to act so intemperately. No, president and secretary of state argued, diplomacy and economic retribution would be the first response. War was unthinkable before those avenues of winning redress were exhausted. Reluctantly Gallatin acceded to Jefferson and Madison's arguments. He knew both men well and was first and foremost a loyal servant of the president. But he doubted the efficacy of Jefferson's proposed course.

On July 2, Jefferson issued a written proclamation denying the Royal Navy access to American ports. The president hoped this measure would satisfy public calls for action while ensuring there would be no further attacks on British ships and crew by mobs or militia. Good, traditional Republicans, Jefferson and Madison were also anxious that the administration not ignite hostilities between Great Britain and America. Authority to make war lay with Congress, Jefferson argued, and the president and his executive “should do no act committing them to war, when it is very probable that they may prefer a non-intercourse to war.”
¹⁵