Part 6 (1/2)

Only a few months' experience was needed to convince the military authorities at Was.h.i.+ngton that the war must be fought mainly by volunteers. Every military consideration derived from American history warned against this policy, it is true, but neither Congress nor the people would entertain for an instant the thought of conscription. Only with great reluctance and under pressure had Congress voted to increase the regular army and to authorize the President to raise fifty thousand volunteers. The results of this legislation were disappointing, not to say humiliating. The conditions of enlistment were not such as to encourage recruiting; and even when the pay had been increased and the term of service shortened, few able-bodied citizens would respond. If any such desired to serve their country, they enrolled in the State militia which the President had been authorized to call into active service for six months.

In default of a well-disciplined regular army and an adequate volunteer force, the Administration was forced more and more to depend upon such quotas of militia as the States would supply. How precarious was the hold of the national Government upon the State forces, appeared in the first months of the war. When called upon to supply troops to relieve the regulars in the coast defenses, the governors of Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut flatly refused, holding that the commanders of the State militia, and not the President, had the power to decide when exigencies demanded the use of the militia in the service of the United States. In his annual message Madison termed this ”a novel and unfortunate exposition” of the Const.i.tution, and he pointed out-what indeed was sufficiently obvious-that if the authority of the United States could be thus frustrated during actual war, ”they are not one nation for the purpose most of all requiring it.” But what was the President to do? Even if he, James Madison, author of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, could so forget his political creed as to conceive of coercing a sovereign state, where was the army which would do his bidding? The President was the victim of his own political theory.

These bitter revelations of 1812-the disaffection of New England, the incapacity of two of his secretaries, the disasters of his staff officers on the frontier, the slow recruiting, the defiance of Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut-almost crushed the President. Never physically robust, he succ.u.mbed to an insidious intermittent fever in June and was confined to his bed for weeks. So serious was his condition that Mrs. Madison was in despair and scarcely left his side for five long weeks. ”Even now,” she wrote to Mrs. Gallatin, at the end of July, ”I watch over him as I would an infant, so precarious is his convalescence.” The rumor spread that he was not likely to survive, and politicians in Was.h.i.+ngton began to speculate on the succession to the Presidency.

But now and then a ray of hope shot through the gloom pervading the White House and Capitol. The stirring victory of the Const.i.tution over the Guerriere in August, 1812, had almost taken the sting out of Hull's surrender at Detroit, and other victories at sea followed, glorious in the annals of American naval warfare, though without decisive influence on the outcome of the war. Of much greater significance was Perry's victory on Lake Erie in September, 1813, which opened the way to the invasion of Canada. This brilliant combat followed by the Battle of the Thames cheered the President in his slow convalescence. Encouraging, too, were the exploits of American privateers in British waters, but none of these events seemed likely to hasten the end of the war. Great Britain had already declined the Russian offer of mediation.

Last day but one of the year 1813 a British schooner, the Bramble, came into the port of Annapolis bearing an important official letter from Lord Castlereagh to the Secretary of State. With what eager and anxious hands Monroe broke the seal of this letter may be readily imagined. It might contain a.s.surances of a desire for peace; it might indefinitely prolong the war. In truth the letter pointed both ways. Castlereagh had declined to accept the good offices of Russia, but he was prepared to begin direct negotiations for peace. Meantime the war must go on-with the chances favoring British arms, for the Bramble had also brought the alarming news of Napoleon's defeat on the plains of Leipzig. Now for the first time Great Britain could concentrate all her efforts upon the campaign in North America. No wonder the President accepted Castlereagh's offer with alacrity. To the three commissioners sent to Russia, he added Henry Clay and Jonathan Russell and bade them G.o.dspeed while he nerved himself to meet the crucial year of the war.

Had the President been fully apprized of the elaborate plans of the British War Office, his anxieties would have been multiplied many times. For what resources had the Government to meet invasion on three frontiers? The Treasury was again depleted; new loans brought in insufficient funds to meet current expenses; recruiting was slack because the Government could not compete with the larger bounties offered by the States; by summer the number of effective regular troops was only twenty-seven thousand all told. With this slender force, supplemented by State levies, the military authorities were asked to repel invasion. The Administration had not yet drunk the bitter dregs of the cup of humiliation.

That some part of the invading British forces might be detailed to attack the Capital was vaguely divined by the President and his Cabinet; but no adequate measures had been taken for the defense of the city when, on a fatal August day, the British army marched upon it. The humiliating story of the battle of Bladensburg has been told elsewhere. The disorganized mob which had been hastily a.s.sembled to check the advance of the British was utterly routed almost under the eyes of the President, who with feelings not easily described found himself obliged to join the troops fleeing through the city. No personal humiliation was spared the President and his family. Dolly Madison, never once doubting that the noise of battle which reached the White House meant an American victory, stayed calmly indoors until the rush of troops warned her of danger. She and her friends were then swept along in the general rout. She was forced to leave her personal effects behind, but her presence of mind saved one treasure in the White House-a large portrait of General Was.h.i.+ngton painted by Gilbert Stuart. That priceless portrait and the plate were all that survived. The fleeing militiamen had presence of mind enough to save a large quant.i.ty of the wine by drinking it, and what was left, together with the dinner on the table, was consumed by Admiral c.o.c.kburn and his staff. By nightfall the White House, the Treasury, and the War Office were in flames, and only a severe thunderstorm checked the conflagration.*

* Before pa.s.sing judgment on the conduct of British officers and men in the capital, the reader should recall the equally indefensible outrages committed by American troops under General Dearborn in 1813, when the Houses of Parliament and other public buildings at York (Toronto) were pillaged and burned. See Kingsford's ”History of Canada,” VIII, pp. 259- 61.

Heartsick and utterly weary, the President crossed the Potomac at about six o'clock in the evening and started westward in a carriage toward Montpelier. He had been in the saddle since early morning and was nearly spent. To fatigue was added humiliation, for he was forced to travel with a crowd of embittered fugitives and sleep in a forlorn house by the wayside. Next morning he overtook Mrs. Madison at an inn some sixteen miles from the Capital. Here they pa.s.sed another day of humiliation, for refugees who had followed the same line of flight reviled the President for betraying them and the city. At midnight, alarmed at a report that the British were approaching, the President fled to another miserable refuge deeper in the Virginia woods. This fear of capture was quite unfounded, however, for the British troops had already evacuated the city and were marching in the opposite direction.

Two days later the President returned to the capital to collect his Cabinet and repair his shattered Government. He found public sentiment hot against the Administration for having failed to protect the city. He had even to fear personal violence, but he remained ”tranquil as usual... though much distressed by the dreadful event which had taken place.” He was still more distressed, however, by the insistent popular clamor for a victim for punishment. All fingers pointed at Armstrong as the man responsible for the capture of the city. Armstrong offered to resign at once, but the President in distress would not hear of resignation. He would advise only ”a temporary retirement” from the city to placate the inhabitants. So Armstrong departed, but by the time he reached Baltimore he realized the impossibility of his situation and sent his resignation to the President. The victim had been offered up. At his own request Monroe was now made Secretary of War, though he continued also to discharge the not very heavy duties of the State Department.

It was a disillusioned group of Congressmen who gathered in September, 1814, in special session at the President's call. Among those who gazed sadly at the charred ruins of the Capitol were Calhoun, Cheves, and Grundy, whose voices had been loud for war and who had pictured their armies overrunning the British possessions. Clay was at this moment endeavoring to avert a humiliating surrender of American claims at Ghent. To the sting of defeated hopes was added physical discomfort. The only public building which had escaped the general conflagration was the Post and Patent Office. In these cramped quarters the two houses awaited the President's message.

A visitor from another planet would have been strangely puzzled to make the President's words tally with the havoc wrought by the enemy on every side. A series of achievements had given new l.u.s.ter to the American arms; ”the pride of our naval arms had been amply supported”; the American people had ”rushed with enthusiasm to the scenes where danger and duty call.” Not a syllable about the disaster at Was.h.i.+ngton! Not a word about the withdrawal of the Connecticut militia from national service, and the refusal of the Governor of Vermont to call out the militia just at the moment when Sir George Prevost began his invasion of New York; not a word about the general suspension of specie payment by all banks outside of New England; not a word about the failure of the last loan and the imminent bankruptcy of the Government. Only a single sentence betrayed the anxiety which was gnawing Madison's heart: ”It is not to be disguised that the situation of our country calls for its greatest efforts.” What the situation demanded, he left his secretaries to say.

The new Secretary of War seemed to be the one member of the Administration who was prepared to grapple with reality and who had the courage of his convictions. While Jefferson was warning him that it was nonsense to talk about a regular army, Monroe told Congress flatly that no reliance could be pled in the militia and that a permanent force of one hundred thousand men must be raised-raised by conscription if necessary. Throwing Virginian and Jeffersonian principles to the winds, he affirmed the const.i.tutional right of Congress to draft citizens. The educational value of war must have been very great to bring Monroe to this conclusion, but Congress had not traveled so far. One by one Monroe's alternative plans were laid aside; and the country, like a rudderless s.h.i.+p, drifted on.

An insuperable obstacle, indeed, prevented the establishment of any efficient national army at this time. Every plan encountered ultimately the inexorable fact that the Treasury was practically empty and the credit of the Government gone. Secretary Campbell's report was a confession of failure to sustain public credit. Some seventy-four millions would be needed to carry the existing civil and military establishments for another year, and of this sum, vast indeed in those days, only twenty-four millions were in sight. Where the remaining fifty millions were to be found, the Secretary could not say. With this admission of incompetence Campbell resigned from office. On the 9th of November his successor, A. J. Dallas, notified holders of government securities at Boston that the Treasury could not meet its obligations.

It was at this crisis, when bankruptcy stared the Government in the face, that the Legislature of Ma.s.sachusetts appointed delegates to confer with delegates from other New England legislatures on their common grievances and dangers and to devise means of security and defense. The Legislatures of Connecticut and Rhode Island responded promptly by appointing delegates to meet at Hartford on the 15th of December; and the proposed convention seemed to receive popular indors.e.m.e.nt in the congressional elections, for with but two exceptions all the Congressmen chosen were Federalists. Hot-heads were discussing without any attempt at concealment the possibility of reconstructing the Federal Union. A new union of the good old Thirteen States on terms set by New England was believed to be well within the bounds of possibility. News-sheets referred enthusiastically to the erection of a new Federal edifice which should exclude the Western States. Little wonder that the hara.s.sed President in distant Was.h.i.+ngton was obsessed with the idea that New England was on the verge of secession.

William Wirt who visited Was.h.i.+ngton at this time has left a vivid picture of ruin and desolation:

”I went to look at the ruins of the President's house. The rooms which you saw so richly furnished, exhibited nothing but unroofed naked walls, cracked, defaced, and blackened with fire. I cannot tell you what I felt as I walked amongst them.... I called on the President. He looks miserably shattered and wobegone. In short, he looked heartbroken. His mind is full of the New England sedition. He introduced the subject, and continued to press it-painful as it obviously was to him. I denied the probability, even the possibility that the yeomanry of the North could be induced to place themselves under the power and protection of England, and diverted the conversation to another topic; but he took the first opportunity to return to it, and convinced me that his heart and mind were painfully full of the subject.”

What added to the President's misgivings was the secrecy in which the members of the Hartford Convention shrouded their deliberations. An atmosphere of conspiracy seemed to envelop all their proceedings. That the ”deliverance of New England” was at hand was loudly proclaimed by the Federalist press. A reputable Boston news-sheet advised the President to procure a faster horse than he had mounted at Bladensburg, if he would escape the swift vengeance of New England.

The report of the Hartford Convention seemed hardly commensurate with the fears of the President or with the windy boasts of the Federalist press. It arraigned the Administration in scathing language, to be sure, but it did not advise secession. ”The multiplied abuses of bad administrations” did not yet justify a severance of the Union, especially in a time of war. The manifest defects of the Const.i.tution were not incurable; yet the infractions of the Const.i.tution by the National Government had been so deliberate, dangerous, and palpable as to put the liberties of the people in jeopardy and to constrain the several States to interpose their authority to protect their citizens. The legislatures of the several States were advised to adopt measures to protect their citizens against such unconst.i.tutional acts of Congress as conscription and to concert some arrangement with the Government at Was.h.i.+ngton, whereby they jointly or separately might undertake their own defense, and retain a reasonable share of the proceeds of Federal taxation for that purpose. To remedy the defects of the Const.i.tution seven amendments were proposed, all of which had their origin in sectional hostility to the ascendancy of Virginia and to the growing power of the New West. The last of these proposals was a shot at Madison and Virginia: ”nor shall the President be elected from the same State two terms in succession.” And finally, should these applications of the States for permission to arm in their own defense be ignored, then and in the event that peace should not be concluded, another convention should be summoned ”with such powers and instructions as the exigency of a crisis so momentous may require.”

Ma.s.sachusetts, under Federalist control, acted promptly upon these suggestions. Three commissioners were dispatched to Was.h.i.+ngton to effect the desired arrangements for the defense of the State. The progress of these ”three amba.s.sadors,” as they styled themselves, was followed with curiosity if not with apprehension. In Federalist circles there was a general belief that an explosion was at hand. A disaster at New Orleans, which was now threatened by a British fleet and army, would force Madison to resign or to conclude peace. But on the road to Was.h.i.+ngton, the amba.s.sadors learned to their surprise that General Andrew Jackson had decisively repulsed the British before New Orleans, on the 8th of January, and on reaching the Capital they were met by the news that a treaty of peace had been signed at Ghent. Their cause was not only discredited but made ridiculous. They and their mission were forgotten as the tension of war times relaxed. The Virginia Dynasty was not to end with James Madison.

CHAPTER XII. THE PEACEMAKERS

On a May afternoon in the year 1813, a little three-hundred-ton s.h.i.+p, the Neptune, put out from New Castle down Delaware Bay. Before she could clear the Capes she fell in with a British frigate, one of the blockading squadron which was already drawing its fatal cordon around the seaboard States. The captain of the Neptune boarded the frigate and presented his pa.s.sport, from which it appeared that he carried two distinguished pa.s.sengers, Albert Gallatin and James A. Bayard, Envoys Extraordinary to Russia. The pa.s.sport duly viseed, the Neptune resumed her course out into the open sea, by grace of the British navy.

One of these envoys watched the coast disappear in the haze of evening with mingled feelings of regret and relief. For twelve weary years Gallatin had labored disinterestedly for the land of his adoption and now he was recrossing the ocean to the home of his ancestors with the taunts of his enemies ringing in his ears. Would the Federalists never forget that he was a ”foreigner”? He reflected with a sad, ironic smile that as a ”foreigner with a French accent” he would have distinct advantages in the world of European diplomacy upon which he was entering. He counted many distinguished personages among his friends, from Madame de Stael to Alexander Baring of the famous London banking house. Unlike many native Americans he did not need to learn the ways of European courts, because he was to the manner born: he had no provincial habits which he must slough off or conceal. Also he knew himself and the happy qualities with which Nature had endowed him-patience, philosophic composure, unfailing good humor. All these qualities were to be laid under heavy requisition in the work ahead of him.

James Bayard, Gallatin's fellow pa.s.senger, had never been taunted as a foreigner, because several generations had intervened since the first of his family had come to New Amsterdam with Peter Stuyvesant. Nothing but his name could ever suggest that he was not of that stock commonly referred to as native American. Bayard had graduated at Princeton, studied law in Philadelphia, and had just opened a law office in Wilmington when he was elected to represent Delaware in Congress. As the sole representative of his State in the House of Representatives and as a Federalist, he had exerted a powerful influence in the disputed election of 1800, and he was credited with having finally made possible the election of Jefferson over Burr. Subsequently he was sent to the Senate, where he was serving when he was asked by President Madison to accompany Gallatin on this mission to the court of the Czar. Granting that a Federalist must be selected, Gallatin could not have found a colleague more to his liking, for Bayard was a good companion and perhaps the least partisan of the Federalist leaders.

It was midsummer when the Neptune dropped anchor in the harbor of Kronstadt. There Gallatin and Bayard were joined by John Quincy Adams, Minister to Russia, who had been appointed the third member of the commission. Here was a pureblooded American by all the accepted canons. John Quincy Adams was the son of his father and gloried secretly in his lineage: a Puritan of the Puritans in his outlook upon human life and destiny. Something of the rigid quality of rock-bound New England entered into his composition. He was a foe to all compromise-even with himself; to him Duty was the stern daughter of the voice of G.o.d, who admonished him daily and hourly of his obligations. No character in American public life has unbosomed himself so completely as this son of Ma.s.sachusetts in the pages of his diary. There are no half tones in the pictures which he has drawn of himself, no winsome graces of mind or heart, only the rigid outlines of a soul buffeted by Destiny. Gallatin-the urbane, cosmopolitan Gallatin-must have derived much quiet amus.e.m.e.nt from his a.s.sociation with this robust New Englander who took himself so seriously. Two natures could not have been more unlike, yet the superior flexibility of Gallatin's temperament made their a.s.sociation not only possible but exceedingly profitable. We may not call their intimacy a friends.h.i.+p-Adams had few, if any friends.h.i.+ps; but it contained the essential foundation for friends.h.i.+p-complete mutual confidence.