"Never before did society witness a total prohibition of all intercourse
like this in a commercial nation. But it has been asked in debate, 'Will
not Massachusetts, the Cradle of Liberty, submit to such privations?' An
Embargo Liberty was never cradled in Massachusetts. Our Liberty was not
so much a mountain-nymph as a sea-nymph. She was free as air. She could
swim, or she could run. The ocean was her cradle. Our fathers met her as
she came, like the Goddess of Beauty, from the waves. They caught her as
she was sporting on the beach. They courted her while she was spreading
her nets upon the rocks. But an Embargo Liberty, a handcuffed Liberty,
Liberty in fetters, a Liberty traversing between the four sides of a
prison and beating her head against the walls, is none of our offspring.
We abjure the monster! Its parentage is all inland.
"Is embargo independence? Deceive not yourselves! it is palpable
submission! France and Great Britain require you to relinquish a part of
your commerce, and you relinquish it entirely! At every corner of this
great city we meet some gentlemen of the majority wringing their hands
and exclaiming, 'What shall we do? nothing but an embargo will save us;
remove it, and what shall we do?' Sir, it is not for me, an humble and
uninfluential individual, at an awful distance from the predominant
influences, to suggest plans for Government. But, to my eye, the path
of duty is as distinct as the Milky Way,--all studded with living
sapphires, glowing with light. It is the path of active preparation, of
dignified energy. It is the path of 1776. It consists not in abandoning
our rights, but in supporting them as they exist and where they
exist,--_on the ocean as well as on the land_."
Troup of Georgia, one of the champions of the Democratic party, replied
to the Opposition,--"Shall we sacrifice the honor and independence of
the nation for a little trade in codfish and potash? Permission to arm
is equivalent to a declaration of war; make the embargo effective, and
it will show what all the great commercial politicians have said
is true,--it will vitally affect the manufacturing and commercial
interests of England."
As one coercive measure after another was proposed, John Randolph of
Roanoke, who had at first favored an embargo, came out against the
measure, and "warned the Administration that they were fast following in
the fatal footsteps of Lord North."
But one of the most effective speeches against the Democratic policy was
made in February, 1809, by Gardinier, who represented New York, a city
the creation of commerce.
"The avowed object of this policy," he said, "was to save our vessels
and property from capture; the real one seemed to be to establish a
total non-intercourse with the whole world. We are engaged perpetually
in making additions and supplements to the embargo. Wherever we can spy
a hole, although it be no bigger than a wheat-straw, at which industry
and enterprise can find vent, all our powers are called in requisition
to stop it. The people of the country shall sell nothing but what they
can sell to each other. All our surplus produce shall rot on our hands.
God knows what all this means; I cannot understand it. I see effects,
but I can trace them to no cause. I fear there is an unknown hand
guiding us to the most dreadful destinies, unseen, because it cannot
endure the light. Darkness and mystery overshadow the House and the
whole nation. We know nothing, we are permitted to know nothing. We sit
here as mere automata."
This speech nearly cost Gardinier his life, for he was in consequence of
it challenged and dangerously wounded; but the embargo was permitted to
continue.
The produce of the country fell sixty to seventy per cent. in value, and
much of it passed at low prices into the hands of British agents. Armed
ships from England appeared on the coast of Georgia and loaded with
cotton from lighters in defiance of Government, and Northern ships in
the outports occasionally eluded the vigilance of collectors or escaped
by their collusion; but the measure pressed with a crushing weight upon
the honest merchants and ship-owners.
When news of the Enforcing Act reached Boston, it was received with such
indignation, that General Lincoln, the collector of the port, resigned,
and the flags of the dismantled ships were hoisted at half-mast,
processions of starving sailors and mechanics passed through the
streets, and the whole community was highly excited; an excitement
increased by an order from the Cabinet to the commandant of the fort to
allow no vessel whatever to proceed to sea.
But the end of Jefferson's administration was approaching. He had come
in as the advocate of popular rights; and now at the close of his term
was enforcing measures more arbitrary than those which preceded the
Revolution. Madison was nominated as his successor. All New England,
save the inland State of Vermont, was revolutionized and voted against
him, while Maryland and New York chose Federal Assemblies. The South,
however, gave him its votes, and he was elected; but the tide of public
opinion was rolling strongly against the Embargo.
The new legislature of Massachusetts was convened; Governor Gore,
who had displaced Gerry, drew their attention to the arbitrary and
oppressive measures of Government; and the General Court, in their
reply, after denouncing those measures as illegal and unconstitutional,
used the memorable words, that "_they would be true to the Union,
although they had fallen under the ban of the Empire_."
The merchants determined to test the legality of the Enforcing Act; but
John Quincy Adams and Joseph Story repaired to Washington, and urged the
necessity of a repeal. Their representations, and the signal defeat of
the Democracy at the North, proved irresistible; and the Embargo, after
a protracted struggle, fell before them.
From this glance at the history of the Embargo we can account for the
asperity of feeling towards the Democratic leaders, and the distrust of
their measures and men, which pervaded New England from the passage of
the Embargo Act until the close of the war.
New England, and more especially Massachusetts, commercial from its
infancy, did not come into the Union to surrender its commerce,
navigation, or seamen to any visionary theories of the South. For nearly
two centuries it had struggled for all its liberties with the parent
empire. It had learned in the cruel school of oppression that the price
of freedom is perpetual vigilance.
Fifteen months had now elapsed since the laying of the embargo, and it
had more than realized all the presages of its opponents. Our minister,
Armstrong, had written from France, that it had produced no effect in
France and was forgotten in England. Pinckney, in England, did all in
his power to save the Administration, by offering to end the embargo, if
England would relax her policy; but Canning replied, that England had no
complaints to make, that Spain and Russia had been opened to her, and
the measure would serve to convince her that she was not absolutely
dependent on the trade of America; with cutting irony, he added, he
would make but one concession to America: she had complained that
England drew a tribute from her merchandise, when shipped to the
Continent; he would, out of deference to American delicacy, substitute a
total prohibition. He had the tact, also, to draw from Pinckney a letter
offering to concede many of the points in dispute, and published it with
an insolent commentary.
Jefferson still clung to the embargo; but Madison and his friends,
deferring to the reasons of Story and Adams, and yielding to the adverse
current now setting strongly against Democracy, March 9, 1809, repealed
the obnoxious act. Such was the end and signal failure of a measure
alike disastrous at home and abroad, a measure which had falsified all
the predictions of its author. Its avowed object was to secure our
seamen from impressment, to protect our commerce, and preserve our
ships; its presumed object was to coöperate with France, and starve
England into submission: but none, of these objects were effected.
Instead of rescuing our seamen, it imprisoned them all at home, and
deprived them of the food which they found even in the prisons of the
enemy. Instead of protecting our commerce, it tamely resigned it to
England, and either left our exports to perish or reduced their value
sixty per cent. It seized all our ships at home, and left most of them
to decay, without giving the sufferer the claim to ultimate redress
which consoled him in cases of foreign seizure. It aided France so
little, that this "deed of magnanimity" was in a few months forgotten.
Instead of impoverishing or humbling England, it poured into her lap the
riches of the world, and increased the insolence of her tone; while it
impoverished our own nation, broke the spirit of the commercial classes
and alienated them from Government, and gave the first of a series of
blows to the nation from which it did not recover for a quarter of a
century.
But the pusillanimous policy which prompted the embargo survived its
repeal. The Chinese theory still showed itself, not in measures for
defence, but in impotent measures for restriction or prohibition, and
finally in a declaration of war against England on the very eve of her
triumph by the power of her navy and commerce over the greatest captain
of the age: a war declared by our rulers without an army, navy,
officers, coast-defence, or national credit, for the avowed purpose of
securing free trade and sailors' rights by measures which the mercantile
community rejected. In its progress, the want of discipline, forts,
ships, munitions of war, credit abroad, and frugality at home, was most
severely felt; and the principal honor derived from it arose from the
exploits of the few frigates left to us by improvidence and parsimony,
from the achievements of the Northern troops of Scott, Brown, and
Miller, disciplined during the war, and the courage and sagacity of the
veteran Jackson and his Western volunteers behind their cotton ramparts
at New Orleans.
If, during the seven years of trial and suffering, from 1808 to 1815, in
which nearly one-half of the wealth of New England was extinguished, her
citizens became indignant at the wanton sacrifice of their means and
of the best opportunity Fortune ever gave them to gain riches by
commerce,--if the public sentiment found expression alike through
the press, in town-meetings, in legislative halls, and even in the
pulpit,--if the capitalists lost confidence in a government which
trifled with its own resources,--if the merchant refused all countenance
to those who had wrought his ruin,--let the blame fall on the
originators of the evil. Lord North did but impose a few light taxes,
place a few restrictions upon commerce, and make a few other inroads on
freedom; but he set a nation in flames. The Cabinets of 1807 and 1812
warred against commerce itself, and placed an interdict on every harbor;
and which of the measures of the British statesman was more arbitrary
in its character, more repugnant to the spirit of freemen, or more
questionable as to its legality, than the Enforcing Act of 1808? And
if the men of New England, who had in their colonial weakness met both
France and England by sea and land without a fear, saw the fruits of
their industry sacrificed and the bread taken from their children's
mouths by the Chinese policy of a Southern cabinet, might they not well
chafe under measures so oppressive and so unnecessary that they were
ingloriously abandoned? Under a dynasty whose policy had closed their
ports, silenced their cannon, nearly ruined their commerce, and left
their country without a navy, army, coast-defences, or national credit,
could they be expected to rush with ardor into a war with the greatest
naval power of the age, elated with her triumph over Napoleon,--into a
war to be prosecuted on land by raw recruits against the veteran troops
of England, for the avowed purpose of protecting the commerce of those
who opposed it, and in which munitions of war were to be dragged at
their expense across pathless forests,--into a war whose burdens were
to fall either in present or prospective charges upon their surviving
trade? Must they not have deeply felt that they were still under
"the ban of the Empire"? and is it not proof of the extent of their
patriotism and intense love of country, that under such trials and
adverse policy they were still "true to the Union"?
If Canada were desired, how easily might it have been acquired by a
wiser policy! A small loan to the State of New York, from surplus funds,
might have opened the Erie and Champlain Canals twenty years in advance
of their completion. A little aid to men of genius might have placed
Fulton's steamers, then navigating the Hudson, on the Lakes.
A dozen frigates to cruise in the Gulf of St. Lawrence would have cut
off supplies from England. The attractions of a new outlet for commerce,
aided by a few disciplined regiments, the command of the Lakes,
facilities for moving munitions of war and for intercepting supplies,
would have settled the question in advance. And instead of a series of
measures which embittered parties, created a jealousy between North
and South, called into the field one hundred and twenty thousand raw
militia, and absorbed in wasteful expenses nearly half our resources, we
should have reaped a golden harvest in commerce, preserved our wealth,
and have either avoided war, or terminated it in the same style in which
the Constitution, Constellation, and United States terminated their
conflicts on the deep, or as France and England terminated their recent
war with Russia, arresting their foe in his march of conquest, closing
his ports, destroying his fleet, seamen, and chief military station, and
nearly exhausting his resources,--and drawing the means of war from
commerce, have at the same time expanded our commerce, cities, and
wealth to a degree unparalleled in our history.
The past, however, is gone, and the future is before us. England,
conscious of her naval power, of her vast steam-marine, and of our
deficiencies, has not acceded to our proposal to exempt merchantmen from
seizure in future wars. Is it not now our policy to provide in advance
for the contingencies of the future,--to obtain the live-oak and cedar
frames, the engines, boilers, Paixhan guns for at least one hundred
steam-frigates, with coats of mail for some of them,--so that, instead
of spending years in their construction, launching them when the war is
over, and then leaving them to decay, we may, as the crisis approaches,
be able in a few months to fit out a fleet which, if not irresistible,
shall at least command respect? Accomplished officers and men can be
drawn from the merchant-service at short notice; but we cannot create
steamers in a moment.
The appropriations by Congress of late years for steam--frigates and
sloops-of-war, and for the defence of New York, New Bedford, Portland,
Bath, and Bangor,--for Bath, in particular, which owns nearly two
hundred thousand tons of shipping, and which builds more ships annually
than any other port in the Union, Boston excepted,--are most judicious;
but are there not other points which deserve the attention of
Government? Should not a few thousand rifled cannon, a good supply of
rifles, and a proportionate amount of powder and ball be deposited near
San Francisco, to enable us, in case of war, to convert our clipper
ships and steamers in the Pacific into cruisers? Should not batteries of
Paixhan guns be erected at the outlet of Long Island Sound, upon Gull
and Fisher's Islands and the opposite points, to convert the whole
Sound above into a fortified harbor, and thus defend New York and the
important seaports upon the Sound, and by these fortresses and a few
coast-batteries between Stonington and Newport, like those on the coast
of France, keep open during war an inland navigation for coal and flour
between the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, Pennsylvania, New York,
Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts? Should not these and
similar questions of national defence, in these days of extended
commerce, command the attention of the nation?
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