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Optimism
Thanks to Garry Wills,
readers of his new book, Henry
Adams and the Making of America, will gain new impressions of that
seminal historian, will have misconceptions corrected, and will share Wills’
gratitude to Adams for his contributions to the study of history. Today, Adams is read via The
Education of Henry Adams, or Democracy.
Most readers and historians have neglected the nine volumes of the history of
the United States
from 1800 to 1817. Thanks to Wills, that work comes alive. Here’s an excerpt,
from the beginning of Chapter 4, “Three Foes: The History, Volume Three,” pp. 186-193:
Following his triumphant first term, Jefferson had a progressively difficult second term.
It began with trouble coming from three foes, two abroad (Talleyrand and
Pitt) and one at home (Marshall).
The First Foe: Talleyrand
Engagement in Paris with Talleyrand had been broken off, for a time,
by Monroe. Fed
up with French attempts to make a “job” of negotiations for Florida,
Monroe decided that he could, as a special
emissary, leave Paris and make his demands for
Florida directly to Spain. But he
began in Madrid
with a great disadvantage, the presence there of the regular minister,
Charles Pinckney, whose bluster had amused as much as offended the court.
Instead of making things better, Monroe
brought things to an abrupt halt by refusing to discuss the separate points
at issue with Spain
(618). He said all of five demands must be met together — (1) surrender of Texas as part of
“Louisiana:’ (2) surrender of Florida as part of “Louisiana:’ (3) recompense
for spoliations incurred by the closing of New Orleans, (4) return of ships
and goods seized by Spain, and (5) return of ships and goods seized by France
and taken to Spanish harbors. He was exasperated that “for nearly a year
past the French and Spanish governments had combined to entrap and humiliate
him” (622). He and Pinckney encouraged each other to think that threats of
force were the only expedient left them.
In this
spirit, Monroe urged Armstrong in Paris to threaten American action if France did not join in pressuring Spain to
yield what he was asking. As Adams puts it,
“He undertook to terrify Napoleon” (622). A harsh response from the French
government convinced Monroe that he could do
no more in Madrid than in Paris.
To
escape from Madrid
without suffering some personal mortification was his best hope, and
fortunately Godoy took no pleasure in personalities.
The Spaniard was willing to let Monroe
escape as soon as his defeat should be fairly recorded. (624)
In this mood Monroe went to England, which still lacked an
American in the minister’s post. But he fared no better there. In Spain his demands had at least been turned
down courteously (if tediously); in England they were rudely
rebuffed when not ignored:
Monroe had felt the
indifference or contempt of Lord Harrowby, Talleyrand,
and Cevallos: that of Lord Muigrave
was but one more variety of a wide experience. The rough treatment of Monroe by the
Englishman was a repetition of that which he had accepted or challenged
[provoked] at the hands of the Frenchman and Spaniard. Lord Muigrave showed no wish to trouble himself in any way
about the United States.
(624)
Monroe was dealing not only
with a new foreign minister but a new prime minister as well. William Pitt
had replaced the accommodating Addington, and he
had a new weapon in his arsenal for use against America. The famous judge of
Admiralty Court Sir William Scott decided the Essex case in July, 1805, invalidating the former
“broken voyage” rule for neutral trade — that a ship could take
goods from the Caribbean to Europe if it stopped on the way in a United
States port, unloaded there, paid customs, and put the merchandise on a new
ship. Now such trade must terminate in America (632). With this ruling,
the British fleet began capturing American merchant ships that had observed
the old broken voyage rule. Monroe
could do nothing but protest, and Pitt would do nothing but point to the
ruling. Monroe in his frustration saw no
recourse for America but
to “threaten war upon France,
Spain, and England at
once” (534). Adams sees a sadly comic side to Monroe’s travail, rejected in court after
court, like a silent-movie actor who opens a series of doors and gets a pie
in the face every time:
During a
century of American diplomatic history, a minister of the United States has
seldom if ever within six months suffered, at two great courts [French and
Spanish], such contemptuous treatment as had then fallen to Monroe’s lot. . . and he could no longer
avoid another defeat [in England] more serious, and even more public, than
the two which had already disturbed his temper. (631)
The
frustration was mounting at home as well. Through the summer and fall of
1805, the Washington triumvirate tried to
assess the damage registered in the reports from all three major powers, France, England,
and Spain.
Negotiation was at a dead end in all three places. Monroe had trod a weary round of rejection.
What was left to do? What plan could be put before Congress at the end of the
year? On Florida, Jefferson could not
understand Spain’s
attitude. As he told the new minister being sent to Madrid,
James Bowdoin, “We want nothing of hers” — nothing,
Adams wryly notes, but Baton Rouge, Mobile, Pensacola, East
Florida, and Texas
(642). But the president felt that for now he could demand little more than
navigation rights on the Mobile
River (639). Madison agreed,
and said that a new mission should be created to propose this — which
prompts Adams’s first severe criticism of the man whose presidency he will
later be studying: “Madison, after enduring one ‘refusal of all our overtures
in a haughty tone: suggested that another be invited” (42).
Jefferson
was meanwhile reverting to his idea of marrying the British fleet in order to
defy France and Spain by seizing Florida
and Texas.
In August, he wrote to Madison, who was in Philadelphia (where his wife was being
treated by the eminent doctor Philip Syng Physick):
Whatever ill humor may
at times have been expressed against us by individuals of that country, the
first wish of every Englishman’s heart is to see us once more fighting by their
side against France; nor could the King or his ministers do an act so popular
[with their subjects] as to enter into an alliance with us. . . England should receive an
overture as early as possible. (646)
Did Jefferson
really think that the British had been hugging sentimental memories of the
French and Indian War for nearly half a century (“the Spirit of ‘63”)? Adams
noted a little earlier that “Jefferson had the faculty, peculiar to certain
temperaments, of seeing what he wished to see, and of believing what he
wished to believe” (641).
Jefferson agreed with
Madison’s proposal for sending Bowdoin on the
mission to Spain, a mission to secure the status quo, but only as a cover for
his real response to this crisis: “We should take into consideration whether
we ought not immediately to propose to England an eventual treaty of
alliance, to come into force whenever (within — years) a war shall
take place with Spain and France” (544). That was written less than a month
after the Essex decision,
when Jefferson could not know that the
British fleet was already seizing American commercial vessels for violation
of it. Madison, too, was ignorant of the decision when he said that he would
improve relations with Merry, to see if England might be open to an alliance — though
he warned against giving too many benefits in return (645-47).
Gallatin, writing from Washington to Madison in
Philadelphia and Jefferson in Monticello, threw cold
water on all the options being entertained — negotiation, war, or
some combination of the two. He did not share his fellows’ belief that Florida belonged to the United States. The negotiations
with Spain had failed because of the “unpardonable oversight or indifference”
of Livingston and Monroe in not making the boundaries of the Purchase clear
before signing the treaty (648) and because “the demands from Spain were too
hard to have expected, even independent of French interference, any success
from the negotiation” (DM 5.51—52). As for war, “We again run the risk of
lowering the national importance by pretensions which our strength may not
at this moment permit us to support” (647).
The
physical separation of these three men during such a crucial discussion
gives us in their letters a hint of what may have gone on in their Washington meetings.
It is an interesting dynamic — Jefferson’s
high-flying optimism, Madison’s cautious
stalling, and Gallatin’s
realistic concentration on what could actually be done. In this case, he
advised renewed negotiations with England
and Spain,
with fewer demands, while preparing for eventual war. Congress should be
asked to build ships of the line — not gunboats, and not
even frigates, but the Flying Fortresses of their day. Much as Gallatin hated the idea and expense of
a navy~ if the United
States were going to have one, it
should be a real one.
Madison,
while still warning that a bargain with England might ask of the United
States more than it could give, agreed that it would be a good idea to make
gestures in that direction, to put the French “under apprehensions of an
eventual connection between the United States and Great Britain” (651). Adams is scathing on this plan:
To leave
Bonaparte “under apprehensions” was to be the object of Madison’s diplomacy
at Paris — a task which several European governments were
then employing half a million armed men to accomplish, hitherto without
success, but which Madison hoped to effect by civilities to Merry. (651)
Jefferson could not come up with
any better plan. Overtures to the British as war partners “would correct the
dangerous error that we are a people whom no injuries can provoke to war:’
but he shrank from the hated step, just as he had during the closing of the entrepôt at New
Orleans. “He shrank from war except under the
shield of England, and yet
he feared England for an
ally even more than Spain
for an enemy” (652). What Jefferson meant by using England
for a shield was made clear in his report on a cabinet meeting after he had
returned to Washington.
He wrote Madison, who was still in Philadelphia, that the cabinet considered
“whether we shall enter into a provisional alliance with England to come into
force only in the event that during the
present war we become engaged in war with
France, leaving the declaration of the casus foederis [activation of the alliance]
ultimately with us” (652, emphasis in original).
The idea
that this arrangement would appeal to William Pitt is perhaps even more
comic than an appeal to the Spirit of ‘63. There is a poignancy
in reading this correspondence and reflecting that these men were engaged in
conflict with people as shrewd and tricky as Pitt, Napoleon, Talleyrand, and
Godoy. At the very time of this writing, “Pitt’s
great collaboration with Russia
and Austria
against Napoleon took the field” (653). Napoleon was moving on toward his
victories at Ulm and
Austerlitz — yet
Madison hoped to put him “under apprehensions”
that the United States,
without an army, might someday, somehow, do what the troops of Russia and Austria were actually doing.
Only
against the backdrop of the irresolute resolutions the triumvirate came up
with in the summer and fall of 1805 can one understand what was decided in
November, less than three weeks before the reassembling of Congress, when
some plan had to be presented. In September, Talleyrand sent an intermediary
to deliver a letter, in his hand but unsigned, to Armstrong in Paris. The Emperor was
still willing to offer his services for the acquisition of Florida
if the United States would
pay Spain
ten million dollars. Armstrong rejected the idea out of hand, but the
intermediary came back with a lowered price — only seven million. It
was clear that France
would pocket all or most of the money, and force Spain to do its will. When
Talleyrand was jobbing, says Adams, “Spain
was always the party to suffer, and France was always the party to
profit by Spanish sacrifices” (629).
Madison had written in the
very month when this letter was delivered that the United
States would refuse “every hope of turning our controversy
with Spain
into a French job” (651). Yet when the letter reached Jefferson,
such was his extremity that he was already considering some such measure.
Talleyrand would get the money? No matter. It was time for a new effort, he
told Madison
in late October:
Where should this be done? Not at Madrid, certainly. At Paris! through
Armstrong, or Armstrong and Monroe as negotiators, France
as the intermediary, the price of the Floridas as the means. We need
not care who gets that, and an enlargement of the sum we thought of may be
the bait to France:’
(954—55)
The triumvirate was ready
to bargain — but it would
offer only five million, with two million put down as an advance payment.
Now all the triumvirate had to do was get the two million from Congress,
which would be harder than they imagined.
Since Adams is scornful of the plan the triumvirate finally
came up with (or had thrust upon them), it is worth asking what he thought
should have been done. Monroe and Armstrong, convinced by the futility of
their negotiations that they would never achieve what was wanted, urged
Jefferson to seize Texas
by force. The Mexican army was not large on that frontier, and it would take
time for Spain
to supply extra troops. Adams — who thinks Texas, unlike Florida,
was a part of the Purchase
— agrees with the two ministers:
Spain
might then [after the seizure of Texas] have declared war; but had Godoy taken this extreme measure, he could have had no
other motive than to embarrass Napoleon by dragging France into a war with
the United States, and had this policy succeeded, President Jefferson’s
difficulties would have vanished in an instant. He might then have seized
Florida; his controversies with England about neutral trade, blockade, and impressment would have fallen to the ground; and had war
with France continued two years, until Spain threw off the yoke of Napoleon
and once more raised in Europe the standard of popular liberty, Jefferson
might perhaps have effected some agreement with the Spanish patriots, and
would then have stood at the head of the coming popular [anti-Bonapartist] movement throughout the world — the
movement which he and his party were destined to resist. (658)
Jefferson,
by continually deferring to Napoleon, hoping to get Florida
from him, had helped crush freedom in Haiti,
handicapped England in its
effort to rally Europe against the Emperor, and made it harder for Spain to slip
out from under his yoke. Even Dumas Malone agrees on what (ideally) should
have been done in suppressing Napoleon:
In the
light of subsequent events it can be argued that Jefferson
would have run relatively little risk and have saved much later trouble if he
had followed the recommendation of his representatives abroad that he employ
force at this juncture. Had he been a Napoleon Bonaparte, or even an Alexander
Hamilton or Aaron Burr, conceivably he might have taken military steps as a
result of which his country would have gained speedy possession of
territories it was destined to acquire later by means which were not wholly
diplomatic. By ranging the United States,
in effect, on the side of Great
Britain in the international conflict, he
might have greatly reduced, though he could hardly have wholly obviated,
later commercial difficulties with that country. He might have prevented the
War of 1812 and hastened the downfall of Napoleon, whom he actually detested.
Unlike the historian, however, he was unable to take a retrospective view.
(DM 5.55)
Instead, Jefferson chose a course that did not work and one that
was morally sordid, one that would rely on Napoleon, not oppose him. As
Jefferson told the Anglophobe editor of the Aurora: “We were not disposed to join with Britain under any belief that she
is fighting for the liberties of mankind” (DM 5.108—9). But in fact, she
was. The course Jefferson chose had only an outside chance of working (and
it did not work), and it involved unsavory means — used, as John Randolph put it when
shown the plan, to “excite one nation by money to bully another nation out of
its property” (695).
To
pursue his scheme, Jefferson first needed to
get the money be would be offering Talleyrand. He had to approach Congress in
a way that would not arouse public opposition to buying what Jefferson said had already been bought. Secrecy was
important, as Talleyrand knew. Jefferson decided to use a two-track approach,
one for the American public and one for those with what would later be called
“security clearance:’ To throw the public off, he used his inaugural address
to inveigh heavily against Spanish aggressions in the vicinity of New
Orleans, as if there were no longer any hope of negotiation with that
country. This, he told Gallatin, would have
the extra benefit of putting pressure on France
to settle the Florida
question without war. “He played a game of finesse hardly safe in the face of
men like Godoy, Talleyrand, and Napoleon, whose
finesse was chiefly used to cover force” (682).
While
requesting funds for fortifications and naval expansion, Jefferson
said he would be sending a message to Congress for its confidential
consideration. Adams thinks that the martial
language of the address made members of Congress expect war plans to be laid
before them. Instead, Jefferson’s message
assured the members that there was now great promise of successful
negotiation and that he would need two million dollars as “expenses” for
this unspecified plan. Gallatin
criticized the message as too vague — the two million was to
be a down payment on a larger sum, but Congress might think it was the whole
amount required.
Jefferson also asked Congress
to join him in deception of the public. He actually sent Congress two
messages, “double messages breathing war and peace” (684), and asked that
Congress make a public answer only to the bellicose one while secretly voting
the money asked for in the other one. John Randolph wanted neither the
secrecy nor the grant of money. Randolph,
whose hatred for Madison over the Yazoo
settlement had become a fixation, was now trying to promote Monroe
for president, and he remembered how Monroe
had left Paris
in high dudgeon rather than “grease the fists of Napoleon with American gold”
(DM 5.75). Randolph
lost this battle. The Two Million Act was passed, though there was a
rancorous dispute over the choice of an emissary to offer Talleyrand the
money.
John
Armstrong was chosen as the emissary to work with James Bowdoin,
the minister already in Paris.
The two submitted their bid to Napoleon, but when no reply was forthcoming
they floundered in the uncertain world of Talleyrand’s
agents and money managers. At length Napoleon told Talleyrand he was not
willing to take Florida for the Americans — Adams thinks because
his designs on Spain made it desirable that hostility exist between that
country and America (860—69). Talleyrand lost his bribe money, and the
Americans again lost the Florida
they claimed they already had. It is a trying thing to put one’s soul up for
sale and find no buyer.
The combination of Wills and Adams make
this period of history come alive. Henry
Adams and the Making of America highlights the compromises made in the
early years of the republic, and the opportunities presented to our early leaders.
Adams’ optimism shines throughout this book,
and provides a new image of him. It also becomes very clear how Henry felt
about John and John Quincy. Entertaining and enjoyable reading, especially
for those who enjoy this period of American history.
Steve Hopkins,
December 22, 2005
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