FROM INDEPENDENCE TO JAY'S TREATY, 1794
The colonial connection between Great Britain and the thirteen
communities which became the original States of the American Union was
brought to a formal conclusion in 1776, by their Declaration of
Independence. Substantially, however, it had already terminated in
1774. This year was marked by the passage of the Boston Port Bill,
with its accessory measures, by the British Parliament, and likewise
by the renewal, in the several colonies, of the retaliatory
non-importation agreements of 1765. The fundamental theory of the
eighteenth century concerning the relations between a mother country
and her colonies, that of reciprocal exclusive benefit, had thus in
practice yielded to one of mutual injury; to coercion and deprivation
on the one side, and to passive resistance on the other. On September
5 the representatives of twelve colonies assembled in Philadelphia;
Georgia alone sending no delegates, but pledging herself in
anticipation to accept the decisions taken by the others. One of the
first acts of this Congress of the Continental Colonies was to indorse
the resolutions by which Massachusetts had placed herself in an
attitude of contingent rebellion against the Crown, and to pledge
their support to her in case of a resort to arms. These several steps
were decisive and irrevocable, except by an unqualified abandonment,
by one party or the other, of the principles which underlay and
dictated them. The die was cast. To use words attributed to George the
Third, "the colonies must now either submit or triumph."
The period which here began, viewed in the aggregate of the national
life of the United States, was one of wavering transition and
uncertain issue in matters political and commercial. Its ending, in
these two particulars, is marked by two conspicuous events: the
adoption of the Constitution and the Commercial Treaty with Great
Britain. The formation of the Federal Government, 1788-90, gave to the
Union a political stability it had hitherto lacked, removing elements
of weakness and dissensions, and of consequent impotence in foreign
relations; the manifestation of which since the acknowledgment of
independence had justified alike the hopes of enemies and the
forebodings of friends. Settled conditions being thus established at
home, with institutions competent to regulate a national commerce,
internal and external, as well as to bring the people as a whole into
fixed relations with foreign communities, there was laid the
foundations of a swelling prosperity to which the several parts of the
country jointly contributed. The effects of these changes were soon
shown in a growing readiness on the part of other nations to enter
into formal compacts with us. Of this, the treaty negotiated by John
Jay with Great Britain, in 1794, is the most noteworthy instance;
partly because it terminated one long series of bickerings with our
most dangerous neighbor, chiefly because the commercial power of the
state with which it was contracted had reached a greater eminence, and
exercised wider international effect, than any the modern world had
then seen.
Whatever the merits of the treaty otherwise, therefore, the
willingness of Great Britain to enter into it at all gave it an
epochal significance. Since independence, commercial intercourse
between the two peoples had rested on the strong compelling force of
natural conditions and reciprocal convenience, the true foundation,
doubtless, of all useful relations; but its regulation had been by
municipal ordinance of either state, changeable at will, not by
mutual agreement binding on both for a prescribed period. Since the
separation, this condition had seemed preferable to Great Britain,
which, as late as 1790, had evaded overtures towards a commercial
arrangement.[54] Her consenting now to modify her position was an
implicit admission that in trade, as in political existence, the
former mother country recognized at last the independence of her
offspring. The latter, however, was again to learn that independence,
to be actual, must rest on something stronger than words, and surer
than the acquiescence of others. This was to be the lesson of the
years between 1794 and 1815, administered to us not only by the
preponderant navy of Great Britain, but by the petty piratical fleets
of the Barbary powers.
From the Boston Port Bill to Jay's Treaty was therefore a period of
transition from entire colonial dependence, under complete regulation
of all commercial intercourse by the mother country, to that of
national commercial power, self-regulative and efficient, through the
adoption of the Constitution. Upon this followed international
influence, the growing importance of which Great Britain finally
recognized by formal concessions, hitherto refused or evaded. During
these years the policy of her government was undergoing a process of
adjustment, conditioned on the one hand by the still vigorous
traditional prejudices associated with the administration of
dependencies, and on the other by the radical change in political
relations between her remaining colonies in America and the new states
which had broken from the colonial bond. This change was the more
embarrassing, because the natural connection of specific mutual
usefulness remained, although the tie of a common allegiance had been
loosed. The old order was yielding to the new, but the process was
signalized by the usual slowness of men to accept events in their
full significance. Hitherto, all the western hemisphere had been
under a colonial system of complete monopoly by mother countries, and
had been generally excluded from direct communication with Europe,
except the respective parent states. In the comprehensive provisions
of the British Navigation Act, America was associated with Asia and
Africa. Now had arisen there an independent state, in political
standing identical with those of Europe, yet having towards colonial
America geographical and commercial relations very different from
theirs. Consequently there was novelty and difficulty in the question,
What intercourse with the remaining British dominions, and especially
with the American colonies, should be permitted to the new nation?
Notwithstanding the breach lately made, it continued a controlling aim
with the British people, and of the government as determined by
popular pressure, to restore the supremacy of British trade, by the
subjection of America, independent as well as colonial, to the welfare
of British commerce. Notably this was to be so as regards the one
dominant interest called Navigation, under which term was comprised
everything relating to shipping,--ship-building, seafaring men, and
the carrying trade. Independence had deprived Great Britain of the
right she formerly had to manipulate the course of the export and
import trade of the now United States. It remained to try whether
there did not exist, nevertheless, the ability effectually to control
it to the advantage of British navigation, as above defined. "Our
remaining colonies on the Continent, and the West India Islands," it
was argued, "with the favorable state of English manufactures, may
still give us almost exclusively the trade of America;" provided these
circumstances were suitably utilized, and their advantages rigorously
enforced, where power to do so still remained, as it did in the West
Indies.
Although by far the stronger and more flourishing part of her
colonial dominions had been wrested from Great Britain, there yet
remained to her upon the continent, in Canada and the adjacent
provinces, a domain great in area, and in the West India Islands
another of great productiveness. Whatever wisdom had been learned as
regards the political treatment of colonies, the views as to the
nature of their economical utility to the mother country, and their
consequent commercial regulation, had undergone no enlargement, but
rather had been intensified in narrowness and rigor by the loss of so
valuable a part of the whole. No counteractive effect to this
prepossession was to be found in contemporary opinion in Europe. The
French Revolution itself, subversive as it was of received views in
many respects, was at the first characterized rather by an
exaggeration of the traditional exclusive policy of the eighteenth
century relating to colonies, shipping, and commerce. In America, the
unsettled commercial and financial conditions which succeeded the
peace, the divergence of interests between the several new states, the
feebleness of the confederate government, its incompetency to deal
assuredly with external questions, and lack of all power to regulate
commerce, inspired a conviction in Great Britain that the continent
could not offer strong, continued resistance to commercial aggression,
carried on under the peaceful form of municipal regulation. It was
generally thought that the new states could never unite, but instead
would drift farther apart.
The belief was perfectly reasonable; a gift of prophecy only could
have foretold the happy result, of which many of the most prominent
Americans for some time despaired. "It will not be an easy matter,"
wrote Lord Sheffield,[55] "to bring the American States to act as a
nation; they are not to be feared as such by us. It must be a long
time before they can engage, or will concur, in any material
expense.... We might as reasonably dread the effects of combinations
among the German as among the American states, and deprecate the
resolves of the Diet, as those of Congress." "No treaty can be made
that will be binding on the whole of them." "A decided cast has been
given to public opinion here," wrote John Adams from London, in
November, 1785, "by two presumptions. One is, that the American states
are not, and cannot, be united."[56] Two years later Washington wrote:
"The situation of the General Government, if it can be called a
government, is shaken to its foundation, and liable to be overturned
at every blast. In a word, it is at an end.... The primary cause of
all our disorders lies in the different state governments, and in the
tenacity of that power which underlies the whole of their systems.
Independent sovereignty is so ardently contended for." "At present,
under our existing form of confederation, it would be idle to think of
making commercial regulations on our part. One state passes a
prohibitory law respecting one article; another state opens wide the
avenue for its admission. One assembly makes a system, another
assembly unmakes it."[57]
Under such conditions it was natural that a majority of Englishmen
should see power and profit for Great Britain in availing herself of
the weakness of her late colonists, to enforce upon them a commercial
dependence as useful as the political dependence which had passed
away. Were this realized, she would enjoy the emoluments of the land
without the expense of its protection. This gospel was preached at
once to willing ears, and found acceptance; not by the strength of its
arguments, for these, though plausible, were clearly inferior in
weight to the facts copiously adduced by those familiar with
conditions, but through the prejudices which the then generation had
received from the three or four preceding it. The policy being
adopted, the instrument at hand for enforcing it was the relation of
colonies to mother countries, as then universally maintained by the
governments of the day. The United States, like other independent
nations, was to be excluded wholly from carrying trade with the
British colonies, and as far as possible from sending them supplies.
It was urged that Canada, and the adjacent British dominions,
encouraged by this reservation of the West India market for their
produce, would prove adequate to furnishing the provisions and lumber
previously derived from the old continental colonies. The prosperity
once enjoyed by the latter would be transferred, and there would be
reconstituted the system of commercial intercourse, interior to the
empire, which previously had commanded general admiration. The new
states, acting commercially as separated communities, could oppose no
successful rivalry to this combination, and would revert to isolated
commercial dependence; tributary to the financial supremacy of Great
Britain, as they recently had been to her political power. In debt to
her for money, and drawing from her manufactures, returns for both
would compel their exports to her ports chiefly, whence distribution
would be, as of old, in the hands of British middlemen and navigators.
Just escaped from the fetters of the carrying trade and _entrepot_
regulations, the twin monopolies in which consisted the value of a
colonial empire, it was proposed to reduce them again under bondage by
means for which the West India Islands furnished the leverage; for
"the trade carried on by Great Britain with the countries now become
the United States was, and still is, so connected with the trade
carried on to the remaining British colonies in America, and the
British islands in the West Indies, that it is impossible to form a
true judgment of the past and present of the first, without taking a
comprehensive view of all, as they are connected with, and influence,
each other."[58]
Before the peace of 1783, the writings of Adam Smith had gravely
shaken belief in the mercantile system of extraordinary trade
regulation and protection as conducive to national prosperity. Though
undermined, however, it had not been overthrown; and even to doubters
there remained the exception, which Smith himself admitted, of the
necessity to protect navigation as a nursery for the navy, and
consequently as a fundamental means of national defence. Existence
takes precedence of prosperity; the life is more than the meat.
Commercial regulation, though unfitted to increase wealth, could be
justified as a means to promote ship-building; to retain ship-builders
in the country; to husband the raw materials of their work; to force
the transport of merchandise in British-built ships and by British
seamen; and thus to induce capital to invest, and men to embark their
lives, in maritime trade, to the multiplication of ships and seamen,
the chief dependence of the nation in war. "Keeping ships for
freight," said Sheffield, "is not the most profitable branch of trade.
It is necessary, for the sake of our marine, to force or encourage it
by exclusive advantages." "Comparatively with the number of our people
and the extent of our country, we are doomed almost always to wage
unequal war; and as a means of raising seamen it cannot be too often
repeated that it is not possible to be too jealous on the head of
navigation." He proceeds then at once to draw the distinction between
the protection of navigation and that of commerce generally. "This
jealousy should not be confounded with that towards neighboring
countries as to trade and manufactures; nor is the latter jealousy in
many instances reasonable or well founded. Competition is useful,
forcing our manufacturers to act fairly, and to work reasonably."
Sheffield was the most conspicuous, and probably the most influential,
of the controversialists on this side of the question at this period;
the interest of the public is shown by his pamphlet passing through
six editions in a twelvemonth. He was, however, far from singular in
this view. Chalmers, a writer of much research, said likewise: "In
these considerations of nautical force and public safety we discover
the fundamental principle of Acts of Navigation, which, though
established in opposition to domestic and foreign clamors, have
produced so great an augmentation of our native shipping and sailors,
and which therefore should not be sacrificed to any projects of
private gain,"--that is, of commercial advantage. "There are
intelligent persons who suggest that the imposing of alien duties on
alien ships, rather than on alien merchandise, would augment our naval
strength."[59]
Colonies therefore were esteemed desirable to this end chiefly. To use
the expression of a French officer,[60] they were the fruitful nursery
of seamen. French writers of that day considered their West India
islands the chief nautical support of the state. But in order to
secure this, it was necessary to exercise complete control of their
trade inward and outward; of the supplies they needed as well as of
the products they raised, and especially to confine the carriage of
both to national shipping. "The only use and advantage of the
(remaining) American colonies[61] or West India islands to Great
Britain," says Sheffield, "are the monopoly of their consumption and
the carriage of their produce. It is the advantage to our navigation
which in any degree countervails the enormous expense of protecting
our islands. Rather than give up their carrying trade it would be
better to give up themselves." The _entrepot_ system herein found
additional justification, for not only did it foster navigation by the
homeward voyage, confined to British ships, and extort toll in
transit, but the re-exportation made a double voyage which was more
than doubly fruitful in seamen; for from the nearness of the British
Islands to the European continent, which held the great body of
consumers, this second carriage could be done, and actually was done,
by numerous small vessels, able to bear a short voyage but not to
brave an Atlantic passage. Economically, trade by many small vessels
is more expensive than by a few large, because for a given aggregate
tonnage it requires many more men; but this economical loss was
thought to be more than compensated by the political gain in
multiplying seamen. It was estimated in 1795 that there was a
difference of from thirty-five to forty men in carrying the same
quantity of goods in one large or ten small vessels. This illustrates
aptly the theory of the Navigation Act, which sought wealth indeed,
but, as then understood, subordinated that consideration distinctly to
the superior need of increasing the resources of the country in ships
and seamen. Moreover, the men engaged in these short voyages were more
immediately at hand for impressment in war, owing to the narrow range
of their expeditions and their frequent returns to home ports.
In 1783, therefore, the Navigation Act had become in general
acceptance a measure not merely commercial, but military. It was
defended chiefly as essential to the naval power of Great Britain,
which rested upon the sure foundation of maritime resources thus laid.
Nor need this view excite derision to-day, for it compelled then the
adhesion of an American who of all in his time was most adverse to the
general commercial policy of Great Britain. In a report on the subject
made to Congress in 1793, by Jefferson, as Secretary of State, he
said: "Our navigation involves still higher considerations than our
commerce. As a branch of industry it is valuable, but as a resource of
defence essential. It will admit neither neglect nor forbearance. The
position and circumstances of the United States leave them nothing to
fear on their land-board; ... but on their seaboard they are open to
injury, and they have there too a commerce (coasting) which must be
protected. This can only be done by possessing a respectable body of
citizen-seamen, and of artists and establishments in readiness for
ship-building."[62] The limitations of Jefferson's views appear here
clearly, in the implicit relegation of defence, not to a regular and
trained navy, but to the occasional unskilled efforts of a distinctly
civil force; but no stronger recognition of the necessities of Great
Britain could be desired, for her nearness to the great military
states of the world deprived her land-board of the security which the
remoteness of the United States assured. With such stress laid upon
the vital importance of merchant seamen to national safety, it is but
a step in thought to perceive how inevitable was the jealousy and
indignation felt in Great Britain, when she found her fleets, both
commercial and naval, starving for want of seamen, who had sought
refuge from war in the American merchant service, and over whom the
American Government, actually weak and but yesterday vassal, sought to
extend its protection from impressment.
Up to the War of American Independence, the singular geographical
situation of Great Britain, inducing her to maritime enterprise and
exempting her from territorial warfare, with the financial and
commercial pre-eminence she had then maintained for three-fourths of a
century, gave her peculiar advantages for enforcing a policy which
until that time had thriven conspicuously, if somewhat illusively, in
its commercial results, and had substantially attained its especial
object of maritime preponderance. Other peoples had to submit to the
compulsion exerted by her overweening superiority. The obligation upon
foreign shipping to be three-fourths manned by their own citizens, for
instance, rested only upon a British law, and applied only in a
British port; but the accumulations of British capital, with the
consequent facility for mercantile operations and ability to extend
credits, the development of British manufactures, the extent of the
British carrying trade, the enforced storage of colonial products in
British territory, with the correlative obligation that foreign goods
for her numerous and increasing colonists must first be brought to her
shores and thence transshipped,--all these circumstances made the
British islands a centre for export and import, towards which foreign
shipping was unavoidably drawn and so brought under the operation of
the law. The nation had so far out-distanced competition that her
supremacy was unassailable, and remained unimpaired for a century
longer. To it had contributed powerfully the economical distribution
of her empire, greatly diversified in particulars, yet symmetrical in
the capacity of one part to supply what the other lacked. There was in
the whole a certain self-sufficingness, resembling that claimed in
this age for the United States, with its compact territory but wide
extremes of boundary, climates, and activities.
This condition, while it lasted, in large degree justified the
Navigation Act, which may be summarily characterized as a great
protective measure, applied to the peculiar conditions of a particular
maritime empire, insuring reciprocal and exclusive benefit to the
several parts. It was uncompromisingly logical in its action, not
hesitating at rigid prohibition of outside competition. Protection, in
its best moral sense, may be defined as the regulation of all the
business of the nation, considered as an interrelated whole, by the
Government, for the best interests of the entire community, likewise
regarded as a whole. This the Navigation Act did for over a century
after its enactment; and it may be plausibly argued that, as a war
resort at least, it afterwards measurably strengthened the hands of
Great Britain during the wars of the French Revolution. No men
suffered more than did the West India planters from its unrelieved
enforcement after 1783; yet in their vehement remonstrance they said:
"The policy of the Act is justly popular. Its regulations, until the
loss of America, under the various relaxations which Parliament has
applied to particular events and exigencies as they arose, have guided
the course of trade without oppressing it; for the markets which those
regulations left open to the consumption of the produce of the
colonies were sufficient to take off the whole, and no foreign country
could have supplied the essential part of their wants materially
cheaper than the colonies of the mother country could supply one
another."
Thus things were, or were thought to be, up to the time when the
revolt of the continental colonies made a breach in the wall of
reciprocal benefit by which the whole had been believed to be
enclosed. The products of the colonies sustained the commercial
prosperity of the mother country, ministering to her export trade, and
supplying a reserve of consumers for her monopoly of manufactures,
which they were forbidden to establish for themselves, or to receive
from foreigners. She on her part excluded from the markets of the
empire foreign articles which her colonies produced, constituting for
them a monopoly of the imperial home market, as well in Great Britain
as in the sister colonies. The carriage of the whole was confined to
British navigation, the maintenance of which by this means raised the
British Navy to the mastery of the seas, enabling it to afford to the
entire system a protection, of which convincing and brilliant evidence
had been afforded during the then recent Seven Years' War. As a matter
of political combination and adjustment, for peace or for war, the
general result appeared to most men of that day to be consummate in
conception and in development, and therefore by all means to be
perpetuated. In that light men of to-day must realize it, if they
would adequately understand the influence exercised by this
prepossession upon the course of events which for the United States
issued in the War of 1812.
In this picture, so satisfactory as a whole, there had been certain
shadows menacing to the future. Already, in the colonial period, these
had been recognized by some in Great Britain as predictive of
increasing practical independence on the part of the continental
colonies, with results injurious to the empire at large, and to the
particular welfare of the mother kingdom. In the last analysis, this
danger arose from the fact that, unlike the tropical West Indies,
these children were for the most part too like their parent in
political and economical character, and in permanent natural
surroundings. There was, indeed, a temporary variation of activities
between the new communities, where the superabundance of soil kept
handicrafts in abeyance, and the old country, where agriculture was
already failing to produce food sufficient for the population, and men
were being forced into manufactures and their export as a means of
livelihood. There was also a difference in their respective products
which ministered to beneficial exchange. Nevertheless, in their
tendencies and in their disposition, Great Britain and the United
States at bottom were then not complementary, but rivals. The true
complement of both was the West Indies; and for these the advantage of
proximity, always great, and especially so with regard to the special
exigencies of the islands, lay with the United States. Hence it came
to pass that the trade with the West Indies, which then had almost a
monopoly of sugar and coffee production for the world, became the most
prominent single factor in the commercial contentions between the two
countries, and in the arbitrary commercial ordinances of Great
Britain, which step by step led the two nations into war. The
precedent struggle was over a market; artificial regulation and
superior naval power seeking to withstand the natural course of
things, and long successfully retarding it.
The suspension of intercourse during the War of Independence had
brought the economical relations into stronger relief, and
accomplished independence threatened the speedy realization of their
tendencies. There were two principal dangers dreaded by Great Britain.
The West India plantation industry had depended upon the continental
colonies for food supplies, and to a considerable extent also
financially; because these alone were the consumers of one important
product--rum. Again, ship-building and the carrying trade of the
empire had passed largely into the hands of the continental colonists,
keeping on that side of the Atlantic, it was asserted, a great number
of British-born seamen. While vessels from America visited many parts
of the world, the custom-house returns showed that of the total inward
and outward tonnage of the thirteen colonies, over sixty per cent had
been either coastwise or with the West Indies; and this left out of
account the considerable number engaged in smuggling. Of the
remainder, barely twenty-five per cent went to Great Britain or
Ireland. In short, there had been building upon the western side of
the ocean, under the colonial connection, a rival maritime system,
having its own products, its own special markets, and its own carrying
trade. The latter also, being done by very small vessels, adapted to
the short transit, had created for itself, or absorbed from
elsewhere, a separate and proportionately large maritime population,
rivalling that of the home country, while yet remaining out of easy
reach of impressment and remote from immediate interest in European
wars. One chief object of the Navigation Act was thus thwarted; and
indeed, as might be anticipated from quotations already made, it was
upon this that British watchfulness more particularly centred. As far
as possible all interchange was to be internal to the empire, a kind
of coasting trade, which would naturally, as well as by statute, fall
to British shipping. Protective regulation therefore should develop in
the several parts those productions which other parts needed,--the
material of commerce; but where this could not be done, and supplies
must be sought outside, they should go and come in British vessels,
navigated according to the Act. "Our country," wrote Sheffield, in
concluding his work, "does not entirely depend upon the monopoly of
the commerce of the thirteen American states, and it is by no means
necessary to sacrifice any part of our carrying trade for imaginary
advantages never to be attained."[63]
A further injury was done by the cheapness with which the Americans
built and sold ships, owing to their abundance of timber. They built
them not only to order, but as it were for a market. Although
acceptable to the mercantile interest, and even indirectly beneficial
by sparing the resources for building ships of war, this was an
invasion of the manufacturing industry of the kingdom, in a particular
peculiarly conducive to naval power. The returns of the British
underwriters for twenty-seven shipping ports of Great Britain and
Ireland, during a series of years immediately preceding the American
revolt, no ship being counted twice, showed the British-built vessels
entered to be 3,908, and the American 2,311.[64] The tonnage of the
latter was more than one-third of the total. The intercourse between
the American continent and the West Indies, not included in this
reckoning, was almost wholly in American bottoms. The proportion of
American-built shipping in the total of the empire is hence apparent,
as well as the growth of the ship-building industry. This of course
was accompanied by a tendency of mechanics, as well as seamen, to
remove to a situation so favorable for employment. But the maintenance
of home facilities for building ships was as essential to the
development of naval power as was the fostering of a class of seamen.
In this respect, therefore, the ship-building of America was
detrimental to the objects of the Navigation Act; and the evil
threatened to increase, because of a discernible approaching shortness
of suitable timber in the overtaxed forests of Europe.
Such being the apparent tendency of things, owing to circumstances
relatively permanent in character, the habit of mind traditional with
British merchants and statesmen, formed by the accepted colonial and
mercantile systems, impelled them at once to prohibitory measures of
counteraction, as soon as the colonies, naturally rival, had become by
independence a foreign nation. For a moment, indeed, it appeared that
broader views might prevail, based upon a sounder understanding of
actual conditions and of the principles of international commerce. The
second William Pitt was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time the
provisional articles of peace with the United States were signed, in
November, 1782; and in March, 1783, he introduced into the House of
Commons a bill for regulating temporarily the intercourse between the
two nations, so far as dependent upon the action of Great Britain,
until it should be possible to establish a mutual arrangement by
treaty. This measure reflected not only a general attitude of good
will towards America, characteristic of both father and son, but also
the impression which had been made upon the younger man by the
writings of Adam Smith. Professing as its objects "to establish
intercourse on the most enlarged principles of reciprocal benefit,"
and "to evince the disposition of Great Britain to be on terms of most
perfect amity with the United States of America," the bill admitted
the ships and vessels of the United States, with the merchandise on
board, into all the ports of Great Britain in the same manner as the
vessels of other independent states; that is, manned three-fourths by
American seamen. This preserved the main restrictions of the
Navigation Act, protective of British navigation; but the merchandise,
even if brought in American ships, was relieved of all alien duties.
These, however, wherever still existing for other nations, were light,
and this remission slight;[65] a more substantial concession was a
rebate upon all exports from Great Britain to the United States, equal
to that allowed upon goods exported to the colonies. As regarded
intercourse with the West Indies, there was to be made in favor of the
thirteen states a special and large remission in the rigor of the Act;
one affecting both commerce and navigation. To British colonies, by
long-standing proscription, no ships except British had been admitted
to export or import. By the proposed measure, the United States, alone
among the nations of the world, were to be allowed to import freely
any goods whatsoever, of their own growth, produce, or manufacture, in
their own ships; on the same terms exactly as British vessels, if
these should engage in the traffic between the American continent and
the islands. Similarly, freedom to export colonial produce was granted
to American bottoms from the West Indies to the United States. Both
exports and imports, thus to be authorized, were to be "liable to the
same duties and charges only as the same merchandise would be subject
to, if it were the property of British native-born subjects, and
imported in British ships, navigated by British seamen."[66] In short,
while the primary purpose doubtless was the benefit of the islands,
the effect of the measure, as regarded the West India trade, was to
restore the citizens of the now independent states to the privileges
they had enjoyed as colonists. The carrying trade between the islands
and the continent was conceded to them, and past experience gave
ground to believe it would be by them absorbed.
It was over this concession that the storm of controversy arose and
raged, until the outbreak of the French Revolution, by the
conservative reaction it provoked in other governments, arrested for
the time any change of principle in regard to colonial administration,
whatever modifications might from time to time be induced by momentary
exigencies of policy. The question immediately argued was probably on
all hands less one of principle than of expediency. Superior as
commercial prosperity and the preservation of peace were to most other
motives in the interest of Pitt's mind, he doubtless would have
admitted, along with his most earnest opponents, that the fostering of
the national carrying trade, as a nursery to the navy and so
contributory to national defence, took precedence of purely commercial
legislation. With all good-will to America, his prime object
necessarily was the welfare of Great Britain; but this he, contrary to
the mass of public opinion, conceived to lie in the restoration of the
old intercourse between the two peoples, modified as little as
possible by the new condition of independence. He trusted that the
habit of receiving everything from England, the superiority of British
manufactures, a common tongue, and commercial correspondences only
temporarily interrupted by the war, would tend to keep the new states
customers of Great Britain chiefly, as they had been before; and what
they bought they must pay for by sending their own products in return.
This constraint of routine and convenience received additional force
from the scarcity of capital in America, and its abundance in Great
Britain, relatively to the rest of Europe. The wealthiest nation could
hold the Americans by their need of accommodations which others could
not extend.
In so far there probably was a general substantial agreement in Great
Britain. The Americans had been consumers to over double the amount of
the West Indies before the war, and it was desirable to retain their
custom. Nor was the anticipation of success deceived. Nine years
later, despite the rejection of Pitt's measure, an experienced
American complained "that we draw so large a proportion of our
manufactures from one nation. The other European nations have had the
eight years of the war (of Independence) exclusively, and the nine
years of peace in fair competition, and do not yet supply us with
manufactures equivalent to half of the stated value of the shoes made
by ourselves."[67] In the first year of the government under the
Constitution, from August, 1789, to September 30, 1790, after seven
years of independence, out of a total of not quite $20,000,000 imports
to the United States, over $15,000,000 were from the dominions of
Great Britain;[68] and nearly half the exports went to the same
destination, either as raw material for manufactures, or as to the
distributing centre for Europe. The commercial dependence is evident;
it had rather increased than diminished since the Peace. As regards
American navigation, the showing was somewhat better; but even here
217,000 tons British had entered United States ports, against a total
of only 355,000 American. As of the latter only 50,000 had sailed from
Great Britain, it is clear that the empire had retained its hold upon
its carrying trade, throughout the years intervening between the Peace
and the adoption of the Constitution.
As regards the commercial relations between the two nations, these
results corresponded in the main with the expectations of those who
frustrated Pitt's measure. He had conceived, however, that it was wise
for Great Britain not only to preserve a connection so profitable, but
also to develop it; to multiply the advantage by steps which would
promote the prosperity and consequent purchasing power of the
communities involved. This was the object of his proposed concession.
During the then recent war, no part of the British dominions--save
besieged Gibraltar--had suffered so severely as the West Indies.
Though other causes concurred, this was due chiefly to the cessation
of communications with the revolted colonies, entailing failure of
supplies indispensable to their industries. Despite certain
alleviations incidental to the war, such as the capture of American
vessels bound to foreign islands, and the demand for tropical products
by the British armies and fleets, there had been great misery among
the population, as well as financial loss. The restoration of
commercial intercourse would benefit the continent as well as the
islands; but the latter more. The prosperity of both would redound to
the welfare of Great Britain; for the one, though now politically
independent, was chained to her commercial system by imperative
circumstances, while of the trade of the other she would have complete
monopoly, except for this tolerance of a strictly local traffic with
the adjoining continent. As for British navigation, the supreme
interest, Pitt believed that it would receive more enlargement from
the increase of productiveness in the islands, and of consequent
demand for British manufactures, than it would suffer loss by American
navigation. More commerce, more ships. Then, as at the present day,
the interests of Great Britain and of the United States, in their
relations to a matter of common external concern, were not opposed,
but complementary; for the prosperity of the islands through America
would make for the prosperity of Great Britain through the islands.
This, however, was just the point disputed; and, in default of the
experience which the coming years were to furnish, fears not wholly
unreasonable, from the particular point of view of sea power, as then
understood, were aroused by the known facts of American shipping
enterprise, both as ship-builders and carriers, even under colonial
trammels. John Adams, who was minister to Great Britain from 1785 to
1788, had frequent cause to note the deep and general apprehension
there entertained of the United States as a rival maritime state. The
question of admission to the colonial trade, as it presented itself to
most men of the day, was one of defence and of offence, and was
complicated by several considerations. As a matter of fact, there was
no denying the existence of that transatlantic commercial system, in
which the former colonies had been so conspicuous a factor, the sole
source of certain supplies to an important market, reflecting therein
exactly Great Britain's own position relatively to the consumers of
the European continent. The prospect of reviving what had always been
an _imperium in imperio_, but now uncontrolled by the previous
conditions of political subjection, seemed ominous; and besides, there
was cherished the hope, ill-founded and delusive though it was, that
the integrity of the empire as a self-sufficing whole, broken by
recent revolt, might be restored by strong measures, coercive towards
the commerce of the United States, and protective towards Canada and
the other remaining continental colonies. It was believed by some that
the agriculture, shipping, and fisheries of Canada, Nova Scotia, and
Newfoundland, despite the obstacles placed by nature, could be so
fostered as to supply the needs of the West Indies, and to develop
also a population of consumers bound to take off British manufactures,
as the lost colonists used to do. This may be styled the constructive
idea, in Sheffield's series of propositions, looking to the
maintenance of the British carrying trade at the expense of that of
the United States. This expectation proved erroneous. Up to and
through the War of 1812, the British provinces, so far from having a
surplus for export, had often to depend upon the United States for
much of the supplies which Sheffield expected them to send to the West
Indies.
The proposition was strongly supported also by a wish to aid the
American loyalists, who, to the number of many thousands, had fled
from the old colonies to take refuge in the less hospitable North.
These men, deprived of their former resources, and having a new start
in life to make, desired that the West India market should be reserved
for them, to build up their local industries. Their influence was
exerted in opposition to the planters, and the mother country justly
felt itself bound to their relief by strong obligation. Conjoined to
this was doubtless the less worthy desire to punish the successful
rebellion, as well as to hinder the growth of a competitor. "If I had
not been here and resided here some time," wrote John Adams, in 1785,
"I should not have believed, nor could have conceived, such an union
of all Parliamentary factions against us, which is a demonstration of
the unpopularity of our cause."[69] "Their direct object is not so
much the increase of their own wealth, ships, or sailors, as the
diminution of ours. A jealousy of our naval power is the true motive,
the real passion which actuates them. They consider the United States
as their rival, and the most dangerous rival they have in the world. I
can see clearly they are less afraid of the augmentation of French
ships and sailors than American. They think they foresee that if the
United States had the same fisheries, carrying trade, and same market
for ready-built ships, they had ten years ago, they would be in so
respectable a position, and in so happy circumstances, that British
seamen, manufacturers, and merchants too, would hurry over to
them."[70] These statements, drawn from Adams's association with many
men, reflect so exactly the line of argument in the best known of the
many controversial pamphlets published about that time,--Lord
Sheffield's "Observations on the Commerce of the American States,"--as
to prove that it represented correctly a preponderant popular feeling,
not only adverse to the restoration of the colonial privileges
contemplated by Pitt, but distinctly inimical to the new nation; a
feeling born of past defeat and of present apprehension.
Inextricably associated with this feeling was the conviction that the
navigation supported by the sugar islands, being a monopoly always
under the control of the mother country, and ministering to the
_entrepot_ on which so much other shipping depended, was the one sure
support of the general carrying trade of the nation. "Considering the
bulk of West India commodities," Sheffield had written, "and the
universality and extent of the consumption of sugar, a consumption
still in its infancy even in Europe, and still more in America, it is
not improbable that in a few ages the nation which may be in
possession of the most extensive and best cultivated sugar islands,
_subject to a proper policy_,[71] will take the lead at sea." Men of
all schools concurred in this general view, which is explanatory of
much of the course pursued by the British Government, alike in
military enterprise, commercial regulation, and political belligerent
measures, during the approaching twenty years of war with France. It
underlay Pitt's subsequent much derided, but far from unwise, care to
get the whole West India region under British control, by conquering
its sugar islands. It underlay also the other measures, either
instituted or countenanced by him, or inherited from his general war
policy, which led through ever increasing exasperation to the war with
the United States. The question, however, remained, "What is the
proper policy conducive to the end which all desire?" Those who
thought with Pitt in 1783 urged that to increase the facilities of the
islands, by abundant supplies from the nearest and best source, in
America, would so multiply the material of commerce as most to promote
the necessary navigation. The West India planters pressed this view
with forcible logic. "Navigation and naval power are not the parents
of commerce, but its happy fruits. If mutual wants did not furnish the
subject of intercourse between distant countries, there would soon be
an end of navigation. The carrying trade is of great importance, but
it is of greater still to have trade to carry." To this the reply
substantially was that if the trade were thrown open to Americans, by
allowing them to carry in their own vessels, the impetus so given to
their navigation, with the cheapness of their ships, owing to the
cheapness of materials, would make them carriers to the whole world,
breaking up the monopoly of British merchants, and supplanting the
employment of British ships.
A few statesmen, more far seeing and deeper reasoning,--notably Edmund
Burke,--came to Pitt's support, and the West India proprietors,
largely resident in England, by their knowledge of details contributed
much to elucidate the facts; but their efforts were unavailing. Their
argument ran thus: "Only the American continent can furnish at
reasonable rates the animals required for the agriculture of the
islands, the food for the slaves, the lumber for buildings and for
packing produce. Only the continent will take the rum which Europe
refuses, and with which the planter pays his running expenses. Owing
to irreversible currents of trade, neither British nor island shipping
can carry this traffic at a profit to themselves, except by ruinously
overcharging the planter. Americans only can do it. Concede the
exchange by this means, and the development of sugar and coffee
raising, owing to their bulk as freight, will enlarge British shipping
to Europe by an amount much beyond that lost in the local transport.
Of the European carriage you will retain a monopoly, as you will of
the produce, which goes into your storehouses alone; whence you reap
the advantage of brokerage and incidental handling, at the expense of
the continental consumer, while your home navigation is enlarged by
its export. Refuse this privilege, and your islands sink under French
and Spanish competition. French Santo Domingo, especially, exceeds by
far all your possessions, both in the extent of soil and quality of
product." Very shortly they were able also to say that the French
allowed ships to be bought from Americans; and, although in their
treaty with the United States they had refused free intercourse to
American vessels, a royal ordinance of 1784 permitted it to vessels of
under sixty tons' burden.
Within a month of the introduction of Pitt's bill the ministry to
which he then belonged fell. The one which followed refrained from
dealing at all with the subject, except by recourse to an expedient
not uncommon with party leaders, dealing with a new question of
admitted intricacy. They passed a bill leaving the whole matter to the
Crown for executive action. Accordingly, in July, 1783, a proclamation
was issued permitting intercourse between the islands and the
American continent, in a long list of specified articles, but only by
British ships, owned and navigated as required by the Navigation Act.
American vessels were excluded by omission, and while most necessaries
for food, agriculture, and commerce were admitted, one staple article,
salt fish, urgently requested by the planters, was forbidden. This was
partly to encourage the Newfoundland fisheries and those of Great
Britain, and partly to injure American. Both objects were in the line
of the Navigation Act, to foster home navigation and impede that of
foreigners; fisheries being considered a prime support of each. A
generation before, the elder Pitt had inveighed against the Peace of
Paris, in 1763, on account of the concession of the cod fisheries.
"You leave to France," he said, "the opportunity of reviving her
navy." Before the separation, the near and great market of the West
India negro population had consumed one-third of the American catch of
fish. So profitable a condition could no longer be continued. Salt
provisions also, butter, and cheese, were not allowed, being reserved
for Irish producers.[72]
The next December the enabling bill was renewed and the proclamation
re-issued. At this moment Pitt returned to office. A few months later,
in the spring of 1784, Parliament was dissolved, and the ensuing
elections carried him into power at the head of a great majority. He
made no immediate attempt to resume legislation favoring the American
trade with the West Indies. The disposition of the majority of
Englishmen in the matter had been plainly shown, and other more urgent
commercial reforms engaged his attention. Soon after the receipt of
the news in America, some of the states passed retaliatory measures,
on their own account, or authorized the Continental Congress so to act
for them. The bad feeling already caused by the non-fulfilment, on
both sides, of certain stipulations of the treaty of peace was
particularly exasperated by this proclamation; for anticipation,
aroused by Pitt's proposed measure, had been nursed into confident
expectation during the four months' interval, in which intercourse had
been openly or tacitly allowed. It was at this period that Nelson
first came conspicuously into public notice, by checking the
connivance of the West Indian governors in the infractions of the
Navigation Laws; the Act authorizing commanders of Kings' ships to
seize offending vessels, and bring them before the Court of
Admiralty.[73] It is said also that his experience had much to do with
shaping subsequent legislation upon the same prohibitory lines. In
America disappointment was bitter. Little concern was felt in England.
Concerted action by several states was thought most unlikely, and a
more perfect union impossible. While Massachusetts, for example, in
1785 forbade import or export in any vessel belonging in whole or in
part to British subjects, the state then next to her in maritime
importance, Pennsylvania, in 1786 repealed laws imposing extra charges
on British ships, and admitted all nations on equal terms with her
sister states. "The ministry in England," wrote Adams, "build all
their hopes and schemes upon the supposition of such divisions in
America as will forever prevent a combination of the States, either in
prohibition or in retaliatory duties."[74]
Effective retaliation consequently was not feared, and as for results
otherwise, it was doubtless thought best to await the test of
experience. Proclamation, annually authorized and re-issued, remained
therefore the mode of regulating commerce between the British
dominions and the United States up to the date of Jay's treaty. Once
only, in 1788, Parliament interfered so far as to pass a law,
confining the trade with the West Indies to British-built ships and
to certain enumerated articles, in the strict spirit of the Navigation
system. Otherwise, intercourse with the United States was throughout
this period subject at any moment to be modified or annulled by the
single will of the Executive; whereas that with other nations, fixed
by statute,--the Navigation Act,--could be altered only by the
legislature.[75]
Of this British commercial policy, following immediately upon the
recognition of independence, Americans had not the slightest reason to
complain. They had insisted upon being independent, and it would be
babyish to fret about the consequences, when unpalatable. It was
unpleasant to find that Great Britain, satisfied that the carrying
trade was the first of her interests, upon which depended her naval
supremacy, rigorously excluded Americans from branches of that trade
before permitted to them; but in so doing she was simply seeking her
own advantage by means of her own laws, as a nation does, for
instance, when it imposes heavy protective duties. It is quite as
legitimate to protect the carrying trade as any other form of
industry; and the Navigation Act was no new device, for the special
annoyance of Americans. It is very possible that the action of Great
Britain at this time was so stupid, that, to use words of Jefferson's,
the only way to prophesy what she would do was to ascertain what she
ought to do, and infer the contrary. The rule, he said, never failed.
This particular stupidity, if such it were,--and there was at least
partial ground for the charge,--was simply another case of a most
common form of human dulness of perception, preoccupation with a fixed
idea. But were the policy wise or foolish, as regards herself, towards
the Americans it was not a wrong, but an injury; and, consequently,
what the newly independent people had to do was not to complain, but
to strike back with retaliatory commercial measures. Jefferson, no
friend generally to coercive action, wrote concerning this particular
situation, "It is not to the moderation or justice of others we are to
trust for fair and equal access to market with our productions, or for
our due share in the transportation of them; but to our own means of
independence, and the firm will to use them."[76]
Equally, when Great Britain, under the emergencies of the French
Revolution, resorted to measures that overpassed her rights, either
municipal or international, and infringed our own, the resort should
have been to the remedy with which nations defend their rights, as
distinct from their interest. The American people, then poor, and
habituated to colonial dependence, failed to create for themselves in
due time the power necessary to self-assertion; nor did they as a
nation realize, what men like John Adams and Gouverneur Morris saw and
preached, that in the complicated tangle of warring interests which
constitutes every contemporary situation, the influence of any single
factor depends, not merely upon its own value, but upon that value
taken in connection with other conditions. A pound is but a pound; but
when the balance is nearly equal, a pound may turn a scale. Because
America could not possibly put afloat the hundred--or two
hundred--ships-of-the-line which Great Britain had in commission,
therefore, many argued, as many do to-day, it was vain to have any
navy. "I believe," wrote Morris in 1794,[77] and few men better
understood financial conditions, "that we could now maintain twelve
ships-of-the-line, perhaps twenty, with a due proportion of frigates
and smaller vessels. And I am tolerably certain that, while the United
States of America pursue a just and liberal conduct, _with twenty
sail-of-the-line at sea_, no nation on earth will dare to insult them.
I believe also, that, not to mention individual losses, five years of
war would involve more national expense than the support of a navy for
twenty years. One thing I am thoroughly convinced of, that, if we do
not render ourselves respectable, we shall continue to be insulted."
A singular, and too much disregarded, instance of the insults to which
the United States was exposed, by the absence of naval strength, is
found in the action of the Barbary Powers towards our commerce, which
scarcely dared to enter the Mediterranean. It is less known that this
condition of things was eminently satisfactory to British politicians
of the old-fashioned school, and as closely linked as was the
Navigation system itself to the ancient rivalry with Holland. "Our
ships," wrote the Dutch statesman De Witt, who died in 1672, "should
be well guarded by convoy against the Barbary pirates. Yet it would by
no means be proper to free that sea of those pirates, because we
should hereby be put upon the same footing with East-landers, [_i.e._,
Baltic nations, Denmark, Sweden, etc.] English, Spaniards, and
Italians; wherefore it is best to leave that thorn in the sides of
those nations, whereby they will be distressed in that trade, while we
by convoy engross all the European traffic and navigation."[78] This
cynical philosophy was echoed in 1784 by the cultured English
statesman, Lord Sheffield, the intimate friend of the historian
Gibbon, and editor of his memoirs. "If the great maritime powers know
their interests," he wrote, "they will not encourage the Americans to
be carriers. That the Barbary States are an advantage to the maritime
powers is obvious. If they were suppressed, the little states of
Italy, etc., would have much more of the carrying trade. The Armed
Neutrality would be as hurtful to the great maritime powers as the
Barbary States are useful."[79]
It may be a novel thought to many Americans, that at that time
American commerce in the Mediterranean depended largely for protection
upon Portuguese cruisers; its own country extending none. When peace
was unexpectedly made between Portugal and Algiers in 1793, through
the interposition of a British consular officer, a wail of dismay went
up to heaven from American shipmen. "The conduct of the British in
this business," wrote the American consul at Lisbon, "leaves no room
to doubt or mistake their object, which was evidently aimed at us, and
that they will leave nothing unattempted to effect our ruin." It
proved, indeed, that the British consul's action was not that of his
Government, but taken on his own initiative; but the incident not only
recalls the ideas of the time, long since forgotten, but in its
indications, both of British commercial security and American
exposure, illustrates the theory of the Navigation Act as to the
reciprocal influence of the naval and merchant services. There was
then nothing, in the economical conditions of the United States, to
forbid a navy stronger than the Portuguese; yet the consul, in his
pitiful appeal to the Portuguese Court, had to write: "My countrymen
have been led into their present embarrassment by confiding in the
friendship, power, and protection of her Most Faithful Majesty," ...
which "lulled our citizens into a fatal security."[80] Our lamentable
dependence upon others, for the respect we should have extorted
ourselves, is shown in the instructions issued to Jay, on his mission
to England in 1794. "It may be represented to the British Ministry,
how productive of perfect conciliation it might be to the people of
the United States, if Great Britain would use her influence with the
Dey of Algiers for the liberation of the American citizens in
captivity, and for a peace upon reasonable terms. It has been
communicated from abroad, to be the fixed policy of Great Britain to
check our trade in grain to the Mediterranean. This is too doubtful to
be assumed, but fit for inquiry."[81] The Dey had declared war in
1785, this being with the Barbary rulers the customary method of
opening piratical action. "If the Dey makes peace with every one,"
said one of his captains to Nelson, "what is he to do with his ships?"
The experience of the succeeding fifteen years was to give ample
demonstration of the truth of Morris's prophecy; but what is
interesting now to observe is, that he, who certainly did not imagine
twenty ships to be equal to a hundred, accurately estimated the
deterrent force of such a body, prepared to act upon an enemy's
communications,--or interests,--at a great distance from the strategic
centre of operations. A valuable military lesson of the War of 1812 is
just this: that a comparatively small force--a few frigates and
sloops--placed as the United States Navy was, can exercise an
influence utterly disproportionate to its own strength. Instances of
Great Britain's extremity, subsequent to Morris's prediction, are
easily cited. In 1796, her fleet was forced to abandon the
Mediterranean. In 1799, a year after the Nile, Nelson had to implore a
small Portuguese division not to relinquish the blockade of Malta,
which he could not otherwise maintain. Under such conditions,
apprehension of even a slight additional burden of hostility imposes
restraint. Had Morris's navy existed in 1800, we probably should have
had no War of 1812; that is, if Jefferson's passion for peace, and
abhorrence of navies, could have been left out of the account. War, as
Napoleon said, is a business of positions. The commercial importance
of the United States, and the position of its navy relatively to the
major interests of Great Britain, would together have produced an
effect, to which, under the political emergency of the time, the mere
commercial retaliation then attempted was quite inadequate. This
distressed the enemy, but did not reduce him; and it bitterly
alienated a large part of our own community, so that we went into the
war a discordant, almost a disunited, nation.
During the years of American impotence under the early confederation,
the trade regulations of the British Government, framed on the lines
advocated by Lord Sheffield, met with a measure of success which was
perhaps more apparent than real; due attention being scarcely paid to
the actual loss entailed upon British planters by the heightened cost
of supplies, and the consequent effect upon British commerce and
navigation. "Under the present limited intercourse with America,"
wrote the planter, Edwards, "the West Indies are subject to three sets
of devouring monopolies: 1, the British ship-owners; 2, their agents
in American ports; 3, their agents in the ports of the islands; all of
whom exact an unnatural profit of the planters."[82] Chalmers, looking
only to the navigation of the kingdom, which these culprits
represented, admits that in the principal supplies Great Britain
cannot compete with America; but, "whatever may be the difference in
price to the West Indians, this is but a small equivalent which they
ought to pay to the British consumer, for enjoying the exclusive
supply of sugar, rum, and other West India products."[83] A few
figures show conclusively that under all disadvantages the islands
increased in actual prosperity, although they fell behind their French
competitors, favored by a more liberal policy. In the quiet year 1770,
before the revolt of the continent, the British West Indies shipped
to the home country produce amounting to L3,279,204;[84] in 1787 this
had risen to L4,839,145,[85] a gain of over 30 per cent. Between the
same years, exports to the United States, limited after the peace to
British ships, had fallen from L481,407 to L196,461. American produce,
confined to British bottoms for admission to British colonies, had
gone largely to the French islands, with which before the Revolution
they could have only surreptitious intercourse. The result was that
the British planter had to pay much more for his plantation supplies
than did the French, who were furnished by American vessels, built and
run much cheaper than British.[86] He was rigidly forbidden also to
seek stores in the French islands. Such circuitous intercourse with
America, by depriving British ships of the long voyage to the
continent, would place the French islands in the obnoxious relation of
_entrepot_ to their neighbors, which Holland had once occupied towards
England. In all legislation minute care was taken to prevent such
injury to navigation. Direct trade with British dominions was the
fetich of British policy; circuitous trade its abomination.
Despite drawbacks, a distinct advance was observable also in British
navigation; in the development of the British-American colonies,
continental and island; and in the intercolonial intercourse and
shipping. Immediately after the institution of the new government, the
United States enacted laws protective of her own navigation; notably
by an alien duty laid upon all foreign tonnage. To consider the
probable effects of this legislation, and of the new American
institutions, upon British commerce and navigation, a committee of the
Privy Council was appointed, to which we owe a digested and
authoritative summary of the change of conditions effected by the
British measures, between 1783 and 1790. From its report, based upon
averages of several years, it appears that in the direct trade between
Great Britain and the United States, in which American ships stood on
equal terms with British, there had been little variation in value of
imports or exports, with the single exception of tobacco and rice.
These two articles, which formerly had to pass through Great Britain
as an _entrepot_, now went direct to their destination. The American
shipping--navigation--employed in the trade with Great Britain
herself, was only one-third of the British; the respective tonnage
being 26,564 and 52,595. As this was nearly the proportion of American
to British built ships in the colonial period, American shipping
before the adoption of the Constitution had not gained at all, under
the most favorable treatment conceded to it in British dominions. The
Report, indeed, estimated that it had lost by nearly 20 per cent.[87]
In the colonial trade, on the other hand, very marked British gains
could be reported. The commercially backward communities of Canada,
etc., forbidden now to admit American ships, or to import many
articles from the United States, and given special privileges in the
West Indies, had more than doubled their imports from the mother
country; the amount rising from L379,411 to L829,088. These sums are
not to be regarded in their own triviality, but as harbingers of a
development, which it was hoped would fill the void in the British
imperial system caused by the loss of the former colonies. The West
Indies showed a more gradual increase, though still satisfactory;
their exports since 1774 had risen 20 per cent. It was, however, in
navigation, avowedly the chief aim of the protective legislation, that
the intercolonial results were most encouraging. Through the exclusion
of American competition, British tonnage to Canada and the neighboring
colonies had enlarged fourfold, from 11,219 to 46,106. The national
tonnage engaged between the West Indies and the mother country had
grown from 80,482 to 133,736; 60 per cent. More encouraging still,
from the ideal point of view of a restored system of mutual support,
embracing both sides of the Atlantic, the tonnage employed between
Canada and the West Indies had risen from 996 only in 1774, to 14,513
in 1789. In brief, after a careful and systematic examination of the
whole field, the committee considered that British navigation had
gained 111,638 tons by excluding Americans from branches of trade they
had once shared, and still eagerly desired.
The effects of the system were most conspicuous in the trade between
the West Indies and the United States. The tonnage here employed had
fallen from 107,739, before the war, to 62,738. The reflections of the
Committee upon this particular are so characteristic of national
convictions as to be worth quoting.[88] "This decrease is rather less
than half what it was before the war;[89] but before the war
five-eighths belonged to merchants, permanent inhabitants of the
countries now under the dominion of the United States, and
three-eighths to British merchants residing occasionally in the said
countries. At that time, very few vessels belonging to British
merchants, resident in the British European dominions, or in the
British Islands in the West Indies, had a share in this trade. The
vessels employed in this trade can now only belong to British subjects
_residing_ in the present British dominions. Many vessels now go from
the ports of Great Britain, carrying British manufactures to the
United States, there load with lumber and provisions for the British
Islands in the West Indies, and return with the produce of these
islands to Great Britain. The whole of this branch of freight may also
be considered as a new acquisition, and was obtained by your Majesty's
Order in Council before mentioned,[90] which has operated to the
increase of British Navigation, compared to that of the United States
in a double ratio; _but it has taken from the navigation of the United
States more than it has added to that of Great Britain_."
The last sentence emphasizes the fact, which John Adams had noted,
that the object of the Navigation system was scarcely more defensive
than offensive, in the military sense of the word. The Act carried
provisions meant distinctly to impede the development of foreign
shipping, as far as possible to do so by municipal regulation. The
prohibition of entrance to a port of Great Britain by a foreign
trader, unless three-fourths manned by citizens of the country whose
flag she bore, was distinctly offensive in intent. But for this, other
states might increase their tonnage by employing seamen not their own,
which Great Britain could not do without weakening the reserves
available for her navy, and imperative to her defence. Rivalry was
thus engendered, and became bitter and apprehensive in proportion to
the national interests involved; but at no time had such
considerations persuaded the country to depart from its purpose. "The
foreign war which those measures first brought upon us, and the odium
which they have never ceased to cause, to the present day (1792) among
neighboring nations, have not induced the legislature to give up any
one of its principles."[91] In the case of the United States, the
exasperation aroused was very great. It perpetuated the national
animosity surviving from the War of Independence, and provoked
retaliation. Before the formation of the better Union this was too
desultory and divided to have much effect, and the artificial system
of which Sheffield was the chief public champion had the appearance of
success which has been described; but as soon as the thirteen states
could wield their power as one whole, under a system at once
consistent and permanent, American navigation began to make rapid
headway. In 1790 there entered American ports from abroad 355,000 tons
of American shipping and 251,000 foreign, of which 217,000 were
British.[92] After one year of the discriminating tonnage dues laid by
the national Congress, the American tonnage entering home ports from
Great Britain had risen, from the 26,564 average of the three years,
1787 to 1789, ascertained by the British committee, to 43,580.[93] In
1801 there entered 799,304 tons of native shipping,[94] and but
138,000 foreign.[95] The amount of British among the latter is not
stated; but in the year 1800 there cleared from Great Britain, under
her own flag, for the United States, but 14,381 tons.[96] This
reversal of the conditions in 1787-89, before quoted,[97] was the
result of a gradual progress, noticeable immediately after the
American imposition of tonnage duties, and increasing up to 1793, when
it was accelerated by the war between Great Britain and France.
It is carefully to be remembered that the British committee,
representing strictly the prepossessions of the body by which it was
constituted, looked primarily to the development of national carrying
trade. "As the security of the British dominions principally depends
on the greatness of your Majesty's naval power, it has ever been the
policy of the British Government to watch with a jealous eye every
attempt that has been made by foreign nations to the detriment of its
navigation; and even in cases where the interests of commerce and
those of navigation could not be wholly reconciled, the Government of
Great Britain has always given the preference to the interests of
navigation; and it has never yet submitted to the imposition of any
tonnage duties by foreign nations on British ships trading to their
ports, without proceeding immediately to retaliation."[98] It had,
however, submitted to several such measures, retaliatory for the
exclusion from the West India trade, enacted by the separate states in
the years 1783 to 1789; as well as to other legislation, taxing
British shipping by name much above that of other foreigners. This
quiescence was due to confidence, that the advantages possessed by
Great Britain would enable her to overcome all handicaps. It was
therefore with satisfaction that, after six years of commercial
antagonism, the committee was able, not only to report the growth of
British shipping, already quoted, but to show by the first official
statement of entries issued by the American Government,[99] for the
first year of its own existence, that for every five American tons
entering American ports from over sea, there entered also three
British; and that of the whole foreign tonnage there were six British
to one of all other nations together.
Upon the whole, therefore, while regretting the evidence in the
American statement which showed increasing activity by American
shipping over that ascertained by themselves for the previous
years,--to be accounted for, as was believed, by transient
circumstances,--the committee, after consultation with the leading
merchants in the American trade, thought better to postpone
retaliation for the new tonnage duties, which contained no invidious
distinction in favor of other foreign shipping against British. The
system of trade regulation so far pursued had given good results, and
its continuance was recommended; though bitterly antagonizing
Americans, and maintaining ill-will between the two countries. Upon
one point, especially desired by the United States, the committee was
particularly firm. It considered that its Government might judiciously
make one proposition--and one only--for a commercial treaty; namely,
that there should be entire equality of treatment, as to duties and
tonnage, towards the ships of both nations in the home ports of each
other. "But if Congress should propose (as they certainly will) that
this principle of equality should be extended to the ports of our
Colonies and Islands, and that the ships of the United States should
there be treated as British ships, it should be answered that this
demand cannot be admitted even as a subject of negotiation.... This
branch of freight is of the same nature with the freight from one
American state to another" (that is, trade internal to the empire is
essentially a coasting trade). "Congress has made regulations to
confine the freight, employed between the different states, to the
ships of the United States, and Great Britain does not object to this
restriction."[100] "The great advantages which have resulted from
excluding American ships appear in the accounts given in this report;
many of the merchants and planters of the West Indies, who formerly
resisted this advice, now acknowledge the wisdom of it."[101]
The committee recognized that exclusion from the carrying trade of the
British West Indies was in some degree compensated to the American
carrier, by the permission given by the Government of France for
vessels not exceeding sixty tons to trade with her colonies, actually
much greater producers, and therefore larger customers. Santo Domingo
in particular, in the period following the American war, had enjoyed a
heyday of prosperity, far eclipsing that of all the British islands
together. This was due partly to natural advantages, and partly to
social conditions,--the planters being generally resident, which the
British were not; but cheaper supplies through free intercourse with
the American continent also counted for much. From the French West
Indies there entered the United States in 1790, 101,417 tons of
shipping, of which only 3,925 were French.[102] From the British
Islands there came 90,375, but of these all but 4,057 were
British.[103] Returning, the exports from the United States to the two
were respectively, $3,284,656 and $2,077,757.[104] The flattering
testimony borne by these figures to the meagreness of French
navigation, in the particular quarter, needed doubtless to be
qualified by reference to their home trade from the West Indies, borne
in French ships. This amounted in 1788 to 296,435 tons from Santo
Domingo alone;[105] whereas the British trade from all their islands
employed but 133,736.[106] This, however, was the sole great carrying
trade of France; to the United States she sent from her home ports
less than 13,000 tons.
It was the opinion of the British committee that the privilege
conceded to American shipping in the French islands was so contrary to
established colonial policy as to be of doubtful continuance. Still,
in concluding its report with a summary of American commercial
conditions, which it deemed were in a declining way, it took occasion
to utter a warning, based upon these relations of America with the
foreign colonies. In case of a commercial treaty, "Should it be
proposed to treat on maritime regulations, any article allowing the
ships of the United States to protect the property of the enemies of
Great Britain in time of war" (that is, the flag to cover the goods),
"should on no account be admitted. It would be more dangerous to
concede this privilege to the United States than to any other foreign
country. From their situation, the ships of these states would be able
to cover the whole trade of France and Spain with their islands and
colonies, in America and the West Indies, whenever Great Britain shall
be engaged with either of those Powers; and the navy of Great Britain
would, in such case, be deprived of the means of distressing the
enemy, by destroying his commerce and thereby diminishing his
resources." It is well to note in these words the contemporary
recognition of the importance of the position of the United States; of
the value of the colonial trade; of the bearing of commerce
destruction on war, by "diminishing the resources" of an enemy; and of
the opportunity of the United States, "from their situation," to cover
the carriage of colonial produce to Europe; for upon these several
points turned much of the troubles, which by their accumulation caused
mutual exasperation, and established an antagonism that inevitably
lent itself to the war spirit when occasion arose. The specific
warning of the committee was doubtless elicited by the terms of the
then recent British commercial treaty with France, in 1786, by which
the two nations had agreed that, in case of war to which one was a
party, the vessels of the other might freely carry all kinds of goods,
the property of any person or nation, except contraband. Such a
concession could be made safely to France,--was in fact perfectly
one-sided in favoring Great Britain; but to America it would open
unprecedented opportunity.
To the state of things so far described came the French Revolution;
already begun, indeed, when the committee sat, but the course of which
could not yet be foreseen. Its coincidence with the formation of the
new government of the United States is well to be remembered; for the
two events, by their tendencies, worked together to promote the
antagonism between the United States and Great Britain, which was
already latent in the navigation system of the one and the maritime
aptitudes of the other. Washington, the first American President, was
inaugurated in March, 1789; in May, the States General of France met.
In February, 1793, the French Republic declared war against Great
Britain, and in March Washington entered on his second term. In the
intervening four years the British Government had persisted in
maintaining the exclusion of American carrying trade from her colonial
ports. During the same period the great French colony Santo Domingo
had undergone a social convulsion, which ended in the wreck of its
entire industrial system by the disappearance of slavery, and with it
of all white government. The huge sugar and coffee product of the
island vanished as a commercial factor, and with it the greater part
of the colonial carriage of supplies, which had indemnified American
shippers and agriculturists for their exclusion from British ports. Of
167,399 American tonnage entering American ports from the West Indies
in 1790, 101,417 had been from French islands.
The removal of so formidable a competitor as Santo Domingo of course
inured to the advantage of the British sugar and coffee planter, who
was thus more able to bear the burden laid upon him to maintain the
navigation of the empire, by paying a heavy percentage on his
supplies. This, however, was not the only change in conditions
affecting commerce and navigation. By 1793 it had become evident that
Canada, Nova Scotia, and their neighbors, could not fill the place in
an imperial system which it had been hoped they would take, as
producers of lumber and food stuffs. This increased the relative
importance of the West India Islands to the empire, just when the rise
in price of sugar and coffee made it more desirable to develop their
production. Should war come, the same reason would make it expedient
to extend by conquest British productive territory in the Caribbean,
and at the same time to cut off the supplies of such enemy's
possessions as could not be subdued; thus crippling them, and removing
their competition by force, as that of Santo Domingo had been by
industrial ruin. These considerations tended further to fasten the
interest of Great Britain upon this whole region, as particularly
conducive to her navigation system. That cheapening supplies would
stimulate production, to meet the favorable market and growing demands
of the world, had been shown by the object-lesson of the French
colonies; though as yet the example had not been followed.
At this time also Great Britain had to recognize her growing
dependence upon the sea, because her home territory had ceased to be
self-sufficing. Her agriculture was becoming inadequate to feeding her
people, in whose livelihood manufactures and commerce were playing an
increasing part. Both these, as well as food from abroad, required the
command of the sea, in war as in peace, to import raw materials and
export finished products; and control of the sea required increase of
naval resources, proportioned to the growing commercial movement.
According to the ideas of the age, the colonial monopoly was the
surest means to this. It was therefore urgent to resort to measures
which should develop the colonies; and the question was inevitable
whether reserving to British navigation the trade by which they were
supplied was not more than compensated by the diminished production,
with its effect in lessening the cargoes employing shipping for the
homeward voyage.
Thus things were when war broke out. The two objects, or motives,
which have been indicated, came then at once into play. The conquest
of the French West Indies, a perfectly legitimate move, was speedily
undertaken; and meanwhile orders passing the bounds of recognized
international law were issued, to suppress, by capture, their
intercourse with the United States, alike in import and export. The
blow of course fell upon American shipping, by which this traffic was
almost wholly maintained. This was the beginning of a long series of
arbitrary measures, dictated by a policy uniform in principle, though
often modified by dictates of momentary expediency. It lasted for
years in its various manifestations, the narration of which belongs to
subsequent chapters. Complementary to this was the effort to develop
production in British colonies, by extending to them the neutral
carriage denied to their enemies. This was effected by allowing direct
trade between them and the United States to American vessels of not
over seventy tons; a limit substantially the same as that before
imposed by France, and designed to prevent their surreptitiously
conveying the cargoes to Europe, to the injury of British monopoly of
the continental supply, effected by the _entrepot_ system, and doubly
valuable since the failure of French products.
This concession to American navigation, despite the previous
opposition, had become possible to Pitt, partly because its
advisability had been demonstrated and the opportunity recognized;
partly, also, because the immense increase of the active navy, caused
by the war, created a demand for seamen, which by impressment told
heavily upon the merchant navigation of the kingdom, fostered for this
very purpose. To meet this emergency, it was clearly politic to
devolve the supply of the British West Indies upon neutral carriers,
who would enjoy an immunity from capture denied to merchant ships of a
belligerent, as well as relieve British navigation of a function which
it had never adequately fulfilled. The measure was in strict accord
with the usual practice of remitting in war the requirement of the
Navigation Act, that three-fourths of all crews should be British
subjects; by which means a large number of native seamen became at
once released to the navy. To throw open a reserved trade to foreign
ships, and a reserved employment to foreign seamen, are evidently only
different applications of the one principle, viz.: to draw upon
foreign aid, in a crisis to which the national navigation was unequal.
Correlative to these measures, defensive in character, was the
determination that the enemy should be deprived of these benefits;
that, so far as international law could be stretched, neutral ships
should not help him as they were encouraged to help the British. The
welfare of the empire also demanded that native seamen should not be
allowed to escape their liability to impressment, by serving in
neutral vessels. The lawless measures taken to insure these two
objects were the causes avowed by the United States in 1812 for
declaring war. The impressment of American seamen, however, although
numerous instances had already occurred, had not yet made upon the
national consciousness an impression at all proportionate to the
magnitude of the wrong; and the instructions given to Jay,[107] as
special envoy in 1794, while covering many points at issue, does not
mention this, which eventually overtopped all others.
FOOTNOTES:
[54] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 121.
[55] Commerce of the American States (Edition February, 1784), pp.
198-199.
[56] Works of John Adams, vol. viii. p. 290.
[57] Washington's Correspondence, 1787, edited by W.C. Ford, vol.
viii. pp. 159, 160, 254.
[58] Report of the Committee of the Privy Council, Jan. 28, 1791, p.
20.
[59] Chalmers, Opinions, p. 32.
[60] Jurien de la Graviere, Guerres Maritimes, Paris, 1847, vol. ii.
p. 238.
[61] Canada, Newfoundland, Bermuda, etc.
[62] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 303.
[63] p. 288.
[64] Coxe, View of the United States, p. 346.
[65] Reeves, p. 381. Nevertheless, foreign nations frequently
complained of this as a distinction against them (Report of the
Committee of the Privy Council, Jan. 28, 1791, p. 10).
[66] Bryan Edwards, West Indies, vol. ii. p. 494 (note).
[67] Coxe's View, p. 318.
[68] American State Papers, Foreign Affairs, vol. i. p. 301. Jefferson
added, "These imports consist mostly of articles on which industry has
been exhausted,"--_i.e._, completed manufactures. The State Papers,
Commerce and Navigation, give the tabulated imports and exports for
many succeeding years.
[69] Works of John Adams, vol. viii. p. 333.
[70] Works of John Adams, vol. viii. p. 291.
[71] My italics.
[72] Chalmers, Opinions, p. 65.
[73] Reeves, pp. 47, 57.
[74] Works of John Adams, vol. viii. p. 281.
[75] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 307.
[76] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 304.
[77] Morris to Randolph (Secretary of State), May 31, 1794. American
State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 409. The italics are
Morris's.
[78] Quoted from De Witt's Interest of Holland, in Macpherson's Annals
of Commerce, vol. ii. p. 472.
[79] Observations on the Commerce of the American States, 1783, p.
115. Concerning this pamphlet, Gibbon wrote, "The Navigation Act, the
palladium of Britain, was defended, perhaps saved, by his pen."
[80] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. pp. 296-299.
[81] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 474.
[82] West Indies, vol. ii. page 522, note.
[83] Opinions, p. 89.
[84] Macpherson, vol. iii. p. 506.
[85] Ibid., vol. iv. p. 158.
[86] Bryan Edwards, himself a planter of the time, says (vol. ii. p.
522) that staves and lumber had risen 37 per cent in the British
islands, which he attributes to the extortions of the navigation
monopoly, "under the present limited intercourse with America." Coxe
(View, etc., p. 134) gives lists of comparative prices, in 1790, June
to November, in the neighboring islands of Santo Domingo and Jamaica,
which show forcibly the burdens under which the latter labored.
[87] Chalmers, in one of his works quoted by Macpherson (vol. iii. p.
559), estimates the annual entries of American-built ships to British
ports, 1771-74, to be 34,587 tons. From this figure the falling off
was marked.
[88] Report of the Committee of the Privy Council, Jan. 28, 1791, p.
39.
[89] This awkward expression means that the amount of decrease was
rather less than half the before-the-war total.
[90] June 18, 1784, substantially the re-issue of that of Dec. 26,
1783, which Reeves (p. 288) considers the standard exemplar.
[91] Reeves, p. 431.
[92] American State Papers, Commerce and Navigation, vol. x. p. 389.
[93] Ibid., Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 301.
[94] Ibid., Commerce and Navigation, vol. x. p. 528.
[95] Ibid., p. 584.
[96] Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, vol. iv. p. 535.
[97] Ante, pp. 77, 78.
[98] Report of the Committee, p. 85.
[99] Ibid., p. 52.
[100] Report, p. 96.
[101] Ibid., p. 94.
[102] American State Papers, Commerce and Navigation, vol. x. p. 47.
[103] Ibid., p. 45.
[104] Ibid., p. 24.
[105] Coxe, p. 171.
[106] Committee's estimate; Report, p. 43.
[107] American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 472.
[Illustration: JOHN JAY
From the painting by Gilbert Stuart, in Bedford (Jay) House,
Katonah, N.Y.]