office is a matter of right, how are vacancies to be obtained? Those by
death are few; by resignation, none.... It would have been to me a
circumstance of great relief, had I found a moderate participation of
office in the hands of the majority. I should gladly have left to time and
accident to raise them to their just share. But their total exclusion
calls for prompter corrections. I shall correct the procedure; but that
done, disdain to follow it. I shall return with joy to that state of
things when the only questions concerning a candidate shall be, Is he
honest? Is he capable? Is he faithful to the Constitution?”
The ascendency of Jefferson and of the Republican party produced a great
change in the government and in national feeling, but it was a change the
most important part of which was intangible, and is therefore hard to
describe. It was such a change as takes place in the career of an
individual, when he shakes off some controlling force, and sets up in life
for himself. The common people felt an independence, a pride, an élan,
which sent a thrill of vigor through every department of industry and
adventure.
The simplicity of the forms which President Jefferson adopted were a
symbol to the national imagination of the change which had taken place. He
gave up the royal custom of levees; he stopped the celebration of the
President’s birthday; he substituted a written message for the speech to
Congress delivered in person at the Capitol, and the reply by Congress,
delivered in person at the White House. The President’s residence ceased
to be called the Palace. He cut down the army and navy. He introduced
economy in all the departments of the government, and paid off
thirty-three millions of the national debt. He procured the abolition of
internal taxes and the repeal of the bankruptcy law—two measures which
greatly decreased his own patronage, and which called forth John
Randolph’s encomium long afterward: “I have never seen but one
administration which seriously and in good faith was disposed to give up
its patronage, and was willing to go farther than Congress or even the
people themselves ... desired; and that was the first administration of
Thomas Jefferson.”
The two most important measures of the first administration were, however,
the repression of the Barbary pirates and the acquisition of Louisiana.
Mr. Jefferson’s ineffectual efforts, while he was minister to France, to
put down by force Mediterranean piracy have already been rehearsed. During
Mr. Adams’s term, two million dollars were expended in bribing the
bucaneers. One item in the account was as follows, “A frigate to carry
thirty-six guns for the Dey of Algiers;” and this frigate went crammed
with a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of powder, lead, timber, rope,
canvas, and other means of piracy. One hundred and twenty-two captives
came home in that year, 1796, of whom ten had been held in slavery for
eleven years.
Jefferson’s first important act as President was to dispatch to the
Mediterranean three frigates and a sloop-of-war to overawe the pirates,
and to cruise in protection of American commerce. Thus began that series
of events which finally rendered the commerce of the world as safe from
piracy in the Mediterranean as it was in the British channel. How
brilliantly Decatur and his gallant comrades carried out this policy, and
how at last the tardy naval powers of Europe followed an example which
they ought to have set, every one is supposed to know.
The second important event was the acquisition of Louisiana. Louisiana
meant the whole territory from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean,
embracing about one million square miles. All this region belonged to
Spain by right of discovery; and early in the year 1801 news came from the
American minister at Paris that Spain had ceded or was about to cede it to
France. The Spanish ownership of the mouth of the Mississippi had long
been a source of annoyance to the settlers on the Mississippi River; and
it had begun to be felt that the United States must control New Orleans at
least. If this vast territory should come into the hands of France, and
Napoleon should colonize it, as was said to be his intention,—France then
being the greatest power in Europe,—the United States would have a
powerful rival on its borders, and in control of a seaport absolutely
necessary for its commerce. We can see this now plainly enough, but even
so able a man as Mr. Livingston, the American minister at Paris, did not
see it then. On the contrary, he wrote to the government at Washington:
“... I have, however, on all occasions, declared that as long as France
conforms to the existing treaty between us and Spain, the government of
the United States does not consider itself as having any interest in
opposing the exchange.”
Mr. Jefferson’s very different view was expressed in the following letter
to Mr. Livingston: “... France, placing herself in that door, assumes to
us the attitude of defiance. Spain might have retained it quietly for
years. Her pacific disposition, her feeble state would induce her to
increase our facilities there.... Not so can it ever be in the hands of
France; the impetuosity of her temper, the energy and restlessness of her
character, placed in a point of eternal friction with us and our
character, which, though quiet and loving peace and the pursuit of wealth,
is high-minded, despising wealth in competition with insult or injury,
enterprising and energetic as any nation on earth,—these circumstances
render it impossible that France and the United States can continue long
friends when they meet in so irritable a position.... The day that France
takes possession of New Orleans fixes the sentence which is to restrain
her forever within her low-water mark.... From that moment we must marry
ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”
Thus, at a moment’s notice, and in obedience to a vital change in
circumstance, Jefferson threw aside the policy of a lifetime, suppressed
his liking for France and his dislike for England, and entered upon that
radically new course which, as he foresaw, the interests of the United
States would require.
Livingston, thus primed, began negotiations for the purchase of New
Orleans; and Jefferson hastily dispatched Monroe, as a special envoy, for
the same purpose, armed, it is supposed, with secret verbal instructions,
to buy, if possible, not only New Orleans, but the whole of Louisiana.
Monroe had not a word in writing to show that in purchasing Louisiana—if
the act should be repudiated by the nation—he did not exceed his
instructions. But, as Mr. Henry Adams remarks, “Jefferson’s friends always
trusted him perfectly.”
The moment was most propitious, for England and France were about to close
in that terrific struggle which ended at Waterloo, and Napoleon was
desperately in need of money. After some haggling the bargain was
concluded, and, for the very moderate sum of fifteen million dollars, the
United States became possessed of a territory which more than doubled its
area.
The purchase of Louisiana was confessedly an unconstitutional, or at least
an extra-constitutional act, for the Constitution gave no authority to the
President to acquire new territory, or to pledge the credit of the United
States in payment. Jefferson himself thought that the Constitution ought
to be amended in order to make the purchase legal; but in this he was
overruled by his advisers.
Thus, Jefferson’s first administration ended with a brilliant achievement;
but this public glory was far more than outweighed by a private loss. The
President’s younger daughter, Mrs. Eppes, died in April, 1804; and in a
letter to his old friend, John Page, he said: “Others may lose of their
abundance, but I, of my wants, have, lost even the half of all I had. My
evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life. Perhaps
I may be destined to see even this last cord of parental affection broken.
The hope with which I have looked forward to the moment when, resigning
public cares to younger hands, I was to retire to that domestic comfort
from which the last great step is to be taken, is fearfully blighted.”
XI
SECOND PRESIDENTIAL TERM
The purchase of Louisiana increased Jefferson’s popularity, and in 1805,
at the age of sixty-two, he was elected to his second term as President by
an overwhelming majority. Even Massachusetts was carried by the
Republicans, and the total vote in the electoral college stood: 162 for
Jefferson and Clinton; 14 for C. C. Pinckney and Rufus King, the Federal
candidates.
This result was due in part to the fact that Jefferson had stolen the
thunder of the Federalists. His Louisiana purchase, though bitterly
opposed by the leading Federalists, who were blinded by their hatred of
the President, was far more consonant with Federal than with Republican
principles; and in his second inaugural address Jefferson went even
farther in the direction of a strong central government, for he said:
“Redemption once effected, the revenue thereby liberated may, by a just
repartition among the States, and a corresponding amendment of the
Constitution, be applied _in time of peace_ to rivers, canals, roads,
arts, manufactures, education, and other great objects within each State.
In time of war, ... aided by other measures reserved for that crisis, it
may meet within the year all the expenses of the year without encroaching
on the rights of future generations by burdening them with the debts of
the past.”
This proposal flatly contradicted what the President had said in his first
inaugural address, and was in strange contrast with his criticism made
years before upon a similar Federal scheme of public improvement, that the
mines of Peru would not supply the moneys which would be wasted on this
object. In later years, after his permanent retirement to Monticello,
Jefferson seems to have reverted to his earlier views, and he condemned
the measures of John Quincy Adams for making public improvements with
national funds.
But the President was no longer to enjoy a smooth course. One domestic
affair gave him much annoyance, and our foreign relations were a continual
source of anxiety and mortification.
Aaron Burr had been a brilliant soldier of the Revolution, a highly
successful lawyer and politician, and finally, during Mr. Jefferson’s
first administration, Vice-President of the United States. But in the year
1805 he found himself, owing to a complication of causes, most of which,
however, could be traced to his own moral defects, a bankrupt in
reputation and in purse. Such being his condition, he applied to the
President for a foreign appointment; and Mr. Jefferson very properly
refused it, frankly explaining that Burr, whether justly or unjustly, had
lost the confidence of the public.
Burr took this rebuff with the easy good-humor which characterized him,
dined with the President a few days later, and then started westward to
carry out a scheme which he had been preparing for a year. His plans were
so shrouded in mystery that it is difficult to say exactly what they were,
but it is certain that he contemplated an expedition against Mexico, with
the intention of making himself the ruler of that country; and it is
possible that he hoped to capture New Orleans, and, after dividing the
United States, to annex the western half to his Mexican empire. Burr had
got together a small supply of men and arms, and he floated down the Ohio,
gathering recruits as he went.
Jefferson, with his usual good sense, perceived the futility of Burr’s
designs, which were based upon a false belief as to the want of loyalty
among the western people; but he took all needful precautions. General
Wilkinson was ordered to protect New Orleans, Burr’s proceedings were
denounced by a proclamation, and finally Burr himself was arrested in
Alabama, and brought to Richmond for trial.
The trial at once became a political affair, the Federalists, to spite the
President, making Burr’s cause their own, though he had killed Alexander
Hamilton but three years before, and pretending to regard him as an
innocent man persecuted by the President for political reasons. Jefferson
himself took a hand in the prosecution to the extent of writing letters to
the district attorney full of advice and suggestions. It would have been
more dignified had he held aloof, but the provocation which he received
was very great. Burr and his counsel used every possible means of throwing
odium upon the President; and in this they were assisted by Chief Justice
Marshall, who presided at the trial. Marshall, though in the main a just
man, was bitterly opposed to Jefferson in political affairs, and in this
case he harshly blamed the executive for not procuring evidence with a
celerity which, under the circumstances, was impossible. He also summoned
the President into court as a witness. The President, however, declined to
attend, and the matter was not pressed. Burr was acquitted, chiefly on
technical grounds.
The Burr affair, however, was but a trifle compared with the difficulties
arising from our relations with England. That country had always asserted
over the United States the right of impressment, a right, namely, to
search American ships, and to take therefrom any Englishmen found among
the crew. In many cases, Englishmen who had been naturalized in the United
States were thus taken. This alleged right had always been denied by the
United States, and British perseverance in it finally led to the war of
1812.
Another source of contention was the neutral trade. During the European
wars in the early part of the century the seaport towns of the United
States did an immense and profitable business in carrying goods to
European ports, and from one European port to another. Great Britain,
after various attempts to discourage American commerce with her enemies,
undertook to put it down by confiscating vessels of the United States on
the ground that their cargoes were not neutral but belligerent
property,—the property, that is, of nations at war with Great Britain.
And, no doubt, in some cases this was the fact,—foreign merchandise having
been imported to this country to get a neutral name for it, and thence
exported to a country to which it could not have been shipped directly
from its place of origin. In April, 1806, the President dispatched Mr.
Monroe to London in order, if possible, to settle these disputed matters
by a treaty. Monroe, in conjunction with Mr. Pinckney, our minister to
England, sent back a treaty which contained no reference whatever to the
matter of impressments. It was the best treaty which they could obtain,
but it was silent upon this vital point.
The situation was a perilous one; England had fought the battle of
Trafalgar the year before; and was now able to carry everything before her
upon the high seas. Nevertheless, the President’s conduct was bold and
prompt. The treaty had been negotiated mainly by his own envoy and friend,
Monroe, and great pressure was exerted in favor of it,—especially by the
merchants and shipowners of the east. But Jefferson refused even to lay it
before the Senate, and at once sent it back to England. His position, and
history has justified it, was that to accept a treaty which might be
construed as tacitly admitting the right of impressment would be a
disgrace to the country. The other questions at issue were more nearly
legal and technical, but this one touched the national honor; and with the
same right instinct which Jefferson showed in 1807, the people of the
United States, five years later, fixed upon this grievance, out of the fog
in which diplomacy had enveloped our relations with England, as the true
and sufficient cause of the war of 1812.
Nevertheless, Jefferson treated Monroe with the greatest consideration. At
this period Monroe and Madison were both candidates for the Republican
nomination for the presidency. Jefferson’s choice was Madison, but he
remained impartial between them; and he withheld Monroe’s treaty from
publication at a time when to publish it would have given a fatal blow to
Monroe’s prospects. In every way, in fact, he exerted himself to disguise
and soften Monroe’s discredit.
The wisdom of Jefferson’s course as to the treaty was shown before three
months had elapsed by an act of British aggression, which, had the Monroe
treaty been accepted, might fairly have been laid to its door. In June,
1807, the British frigate Leopard, having been refused permission to
search the American frigate Chesapeake, fired upon the Chesapeake, which
was totally unprepared for action, and, after killing three men and
wounding eighteen, refused to accept the surrender of the ship, but
carried off three alleged deserters.
This event roused a storm of indignation, which never quite subsided until
the insult had been effaced by the blood which was shed in the war of
1812. “For the first time in their history,” says Mr. Henry Adams, “the
people of the United States learned in June, 1807, the feeling of a true
national emotion.” “Never since the battle of Lexington,” wrote Jefferson,
“have I seen this country in such a state of exasperation as at present.”
War might easily have been precipitated, had Jefferson been carried away
by the popular excitement. He immediately dispatched a frigate to England
demanding reparation, and he issued a proclamation forbidding all British
men-of-war to enter the waters of the United States, unless in distress or
bearing dispatches. Jefferson expected war, but he meant to delay it for a
while.
To his son-in-law, John Eppes, he wrote: “Reason and the usage of
civilized nations require that we should give them an opportunity of
disavowal and reparation. Our own interests, too, the very means of making
war, require that we should give time to our merchants to gather in their
vessels and property and our seamen now afloat.”
Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury, even criticised the President’s
annual message at this time as being too warlike and “not in the style of
the proclamation, which has been almost universally approved at home and
abroad.” It cannot truly be said, therefore, that Jefferson had any
unconquerable aversion to war.
Mr. Canning, the British Foreign Minister, went through the form of
expressing his regrets for the Chesapeake affair, and sent a special envoy
to Washington to settle the difficulty. Reparation was made at last, but
not till the year 1811.
In the mean time, both Great Britain and France had given other causes of
offense, which may be summarized as follows: In May, 1806, Great Britain
declared the French ports from Brest to the Elbe closed to American as to
all other shipping. In the following November, Napoleon retorted with a
decree issued from Berlin, prohibiting all commerce with Great Britain.
That power immediately forbade the coasting trade between one port and
another in the possession of her enemies. And in November, 1807, Great
Britain issued the famous Orders in Council, which forbade all trade
whatsoever with France and her allies, except on payment of a tribute to
Great Britain, each vessel to pay according to the value of its cargo.
Then followed Napoleon’s Milan decree prohibiting trade with Great
Britain, and declaring that all vessels which paid the tribute demanded
were lawful prizes to the French marine.
Such was the series of acts which assailed the foreign commerce of the
United States, and wounded the national honor by attempting to prostrate
the country at the mercy of the European powers. Diplomacy had been
exhausted. The Chesapeake affair, the right of impressment, the British
decrees and orders directed against our commerce,—all these causes of
offense had been tangled into a complication which no man could unravel.
Retaliation on our part had become absolutely necessary. What form should
it take? Jefferson rejected war, and proposed an embargo which prohibited
commerce between the United States and Europe. The measure was bitterly
opposed by the New England Federalists; but the President’s influence was
so great that Congress adopted it almost without discussion.
Jefferson’s design, to use his own words, was “to introduce between
nations another umpire than arms;” and he expected that England would be
starved into submission. The annual British exports to the United States
amounted to $50,000,000. Cutting off this trade meant the throwing out of
work of thousands of British sailors and tens of thousands of British
factory hands, who had no other means of livelihood. Mr. Jefferson felt
confident that the starvation of this class would bring such pressure to
bear upon the English government, then engaged in a death struggle with
Bonaparte, that it would be forced to repeal the laws which obstructed
American commerce. It is possible that this would have been the result had
the embargo been observed faithfully by all citizens of the United States.
Jefferson maintained till the day of his death that such would have been
the case; and Madison, no enthusiast, long afterward asserted that the
American state department had proofs that the English government was on
the point of yielding. The embargo pressed hardest of all upon Virginia,
for it stopped the exportation of her staples,—wheat and tobacco. It
brought about, by the way, the financial ruin of Jefferson himself and of
his son-in-law, Colonel Randolph. But the Virginians bore it without a
murmur. “They drained the poison which their own President held
obstinately to their lips.”
It was otherwise in New England. There the disastrous effect of the
embargo was not only indirect but direct. The New England farmers, it is
true, could at least exist upon the produce of their farms; but the
mariners, the sea-captains, and the merchants of the coast towns, saw a
total suspension of the industry by which they lived. New England evaded
the embargo by smuggling, and resisted it tooth and nail. Some of the
Federal leaders in that section believing, or pretending to believe, that
it was a pro-French measure, were in secret correspondence with the
British government, and meditated a secession of the eastern States from
the rest of the country. They went so far, in private conversation at
least, as to maintain the British right of impressment; and even the
Orders in Council were defended by Gardenier, a leading Federalist, and a
member of Congress.
The present generation has witnessed a similar exhibition of anglomania,
when, upon the assertion of the Monroe doctrine in respect to Venezuela,
by President Cleveland, his attitude was criticised more severely by a
group in New York and Boston than it was by the English themselves.
Jefferson’s effort to enforce the embargo and his calm resistance to New
England fury showed extraordinary firmness of will and tenacity of
purpose. In August, 1808, he wrote to General Dearborn, Secretary of War,
who was then in Maine: “The Tories of Boston openly threaten insurrection
if their importation of flour is stopped. The next post will stop it.”
Blood was soon shed; but Jefferson did not shrink. The army was stationed
along the Canadian frontier, to prevent smuggling; gunboats and frigates
patrolled the coast. The embargo failed; but Mr. Henry Adams, the ablest
and fairest historian of this period, declares that it “was an experiment
in politics well worth making. In the scheme of President Jefferson,
non-intercourse was the substitute for war.... Failure of the embargo
meant in his mind not only a recurrence to the practice of war, but to
every political and social evil that war had always brought in its train.
In such a case the crimes and corruptions of Europe, which had been the
object of his political fears, must, as he believed, sooner or later, teem
in the fat soil of America. To avert a disaster so vast was a proper
motive for statesmanship, and justified disregard for smaller interests.”
Mr. Parton observes, with almost as much truth as humor, that the embargo
was approved by the two highest authorities in Europe, namely, Napoleon
Bonaparte and the “Edinburgh Review.”