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NOT IN MY BACKYARD
 Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip
Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.

Copyright © 2024 by Brian Balogh.

All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in
any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational,

business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected]
(U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office).

Set in Scala type by IDS Infotech, Ltd.

Printed in the United States of America.

Frontispiece: Map from Green Springs house tours pamphlet, 1971.

(The Green Springs Association)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023936630

ISBN 978-0-300-25378-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For KC
 CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations
Introduction

PART ONE: ESCAPING THE PAST

1 A Reform-Minded Republican
2 Escaping Cul-de-sacs
3 Competing Histories
4 “He Was Not Always Right—But He Was Never Wrong”

PART TWO: MAKING HISTORY

5 Peppery Women
6 Federalism’s Fissures
7 Virginia’s Preservation Network
8 Federal Court
9 The Women’s Ground War
10 Courting Bureaucrats
11 Public-Private Partnership
12 Vermiculite
13 The Conflict Expands
14 Echoes of Vietnam
15 Genteel Civility

PART THREE: PRESERVING HISTORY

16 Guys and Dames

17 Repurposing Civil Rights Strategies
18 The Problem of Asbestos
19 A Formidable New Foe
20 Local Affairs and the Law of the Land

PART FOUR: HISTORY RHYMES

21 Preservationists as Lobbyists
22 Wife or Environmentalist?
23 A Silk Jungle
24 “A Female in Your Face”
Epilogue

Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
 ABBREVIATIONS

BOS Louisa County Board of Supervisors

DWI Virginia Department of Welfare and Institutions
EPA U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
FmHA Farmers Home Administration
HGSI Historic Green Springs, Inc.
JRWA James River Water Authority
LEAA Law Enforcement Assistance Administration
NEPA National Environmental Policy Act
NIMBY “not in my backyard”
NHPA National Historic Preservation Act
NPS National Park Service
SLAPP “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation”
UVa University of Virginia
VHLC Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission
VRA Voting Rights Act
VVL Virginia Vermiculite, Ltd.
NOT IN MY BACKYARD
 Introduction

“THE VERY FIRST THING I THOUGHT TO DO,and I told our board of directors
instantly, we must all buy shares of stock. And they looked at me
like I was crazy,” Rae Ely recalled. She bought a few shares thinking
“those ten shares are going to carry me far, and they did.”1
Rae had never seen The Solid Gold Cadillac, Hollywood’s 1956
version of one woman taking on a giant corporation by purchasing a
handful of shares, but twenty years after the Oscar-winning movie
she turned a real-life W. R. Grace & Co. shareholders’ meeting to
similar advantage, although it would take decades for the strategy to
pay dividends. That Grace “was a corporation headed up by a man
with a name—and it was an old family name, unlike ‘Mr. General
Motors’ or ‘Mr. General Electric’ ” made it a “target.”2
By the May 1976 shareholders’ meeting in Boston Rae was on
CEO Peter Grace’s radar. His staff warned that “Apparently, Mrs.
Hiram (Rae) Ely . . . has gotten to the Secretary [of the Interior],”
who had written a typical “eco-freak letter . . . asking us to give up
our vermiculite reserves in Virginia.” There was every reason to
expect fireworks at the meeting, and a cluster of Grace lawyers and
security staff was dispatched to meet the anticipated band of angry
women.3
Instead, they got what Rae described as a solitary slim and
pretty southern gentlewoman “dressed like a fairy princess. I mean
really eye-catching clothes, not conservative . . . because I knew I’d
be on TV.” “Good morning gentlemen,” Rae drawled in her best
Virginia lady accent. “So sorry about your lawyer.” “What?” one of
the men asked. As she headed for her seat Rae casually mentioned,
“Well, you know he was arrested yesterday; I’m sure you’ll hear
about it.”4
The lawyer, Bill Perkins, had diligently labored to clear Grace’s
legal path to strip mine in the recently created Green Springs
National Historic Landmark District. Perkins had been rounded up
with ten other notables at a cockfight on Inglecress Farm near
Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia. The incident had
been entertaining enough to elicit the New York Times’ headline
“Uproar Over Cockfight Ruffles Virginia Gentry.” The top brass at
Grace were embarrassed by the arrest; learning about it from Rae
Ely only made matters worse.5
Rae had arrived at the shareholders’ meeting early to get a
“really choice spot . . . in Peter Grace’s line of sight.” As soon as the
public comment period began Rae jumped to her feet. “Well, Mrs.
Ely,” Peter boomed, “so nice to see you here again this year.” “So
nice to see you,” Rae replied with her big cheery smile, turning
sideways so that the photographers and hundreds of shareholders
could see her.6
“Mr. Grace,” Rae began, “I’m just here this morning to tell all
these shareholders how grateful the people of Green Springs are to
you, sir, for the efforts that this fine company is making to preserve
the beautiful historic Green Springs valley in Virginia from efforts
that this company had been considering making to extract
vermiculite.” Rae knew that W. R. Grace still planned to mine in what
she described as the most beautiful eighteenth-century grouping of
historic buildings “nestled in the shadow of Monticello.” But she also
knew that relationships mattered. That morning’s mission was to
establish a good one with a powerful opponent.7
The tactic worked when the entire auditorium burst into
applause; people stood and cheered. Peter Grace beamed. As
shareholders boarded buses that whisked them to a bicentennial
luncheon in Lexington, some men raced up to Rae and announced:
“Mr. Grace would like to know if you would be kind enough to ride
with him today.” “Certainly,” Rae replied, “what a nice invitation.” She
soon glided off in his limousine.8
“He’s just a jolly, hard-drinking, Catholic elf—raised by nuns,” Rae
concluded. “This, of course, is the theme of the rest of our
relationship. . . . You’re never going to persuade anybody by angry
ranting.” Rae Ely’s vivid demonstration of the good will that the
company could garner with shareholders by paying lip service to
preserving history and the environment was just one gambit of many
in her long-range strategy to drive the company out of the historic
district that she had created.9

Years later, after moving to a farm in Green Springs, I began to hear

what seemed like fantastical stories about Rae Ely. She had defeated
Governor Linwood Holton’s effort to site a prison there in the early
1970s; she had prevailed over W. R. Grace’s attempt to mine; she
had created America’s first national historic landmark in a rural
district that encompassed thousands of acres; she had graduated
from the University of Virginia School of Law without an
undergraduate college degree; she had burned down her house in
an attempt to murder her husband. Intrigued, I looked into these
rumors, and much to my surprise, discovered that all but the last
one proved to be true. I even noticed the bullet-pocked brown signs
that announced the borders of that landmark district and realized for
the first time that I lived inside it. Few people seemed to know much
about Rae Ely’s life before she arrived in Green Springs in 1967.
What I learned about her early years made her political success all
the more remarkable.
Rae Hatfield was born in the Coconut Grove section of Miami on
May 13, 1941. When Rae was five years old her mother was killed in
a traffic accident. From that point on Rae was raised by a series of
her father’s girlfriends and wives—three of them soon to be ex-
wives. Her father, Ray Hatfield, captained yachts for unsavory
characters, including, it was rumored, Al Capone. Hatfield only had
an eighth-grade education, “but there was no smarter man that ever
lived,” Rae recalled. “If he hadn’t been a drunk, he [would have]
done something with himself.” He could be a mean drunk—so much
so that the state of Florida removed Rae from her home in the
spring of 1954. She was placed in foster care and a few years later
shipped to a high school for girls in distress in Thomasville, Georgia.
When Rae turned eighteen she graduated (or aged out of) the
Vashti Industrial School for Girls, took a job at a local business, and
soon married her boss, Hugh Duncan. She did not stay in
Thomasville or married to Duncan for long. In 1962, when she
learned that Colonel Hiram Ely, the husband of a recently deceased
prominent Dachshund breeder, was seeking an appropriate mate for
his wife’s dogs, she showed up at his house in Flemington, New
Jersey, with two candidates.10
Hiram’s 1692 gray stone manor house seemed magical. Likewise
its dozens of acres, its horses, not to mention the fine Dachshunds
and Colonel Ely himself. He was good-looking and accomplished; Rae
was sold, despite the near-half-century age difference between
them. They were married that same year, happily at first. Yet, as
New York City’s exurban sprawl crept closer, the Elys sought safe
harbor. In 1967 they moved to Louisa County, Virginia, a rural
backwater whose seat a county supervisor described as “a one-horse
town . . . and the horse died in 1936.”11
Although Rae knew nothing about politics—when they moved to
Virginia she didn’t know if she and Hiram were Democrats or
Republicans—her powerful will, capacity for learning, and knack for
long-term strategy enabled her to shift from dependent to political
action figure. She soon battled a series of powerful men who, in her
opinion, threatened to destroy the unique rural character of her
neighborhood and her rights as a fully empowered citizen. Her first
antagonist was, at the time, Virginia’s first Republican governor in
the past century, Linwood Holton. In May 1970 he announced plans
to close Richmond’s decrepit state penitentiary by building a new
“diagnostic center” to sort and rehabilitate convicted felons. It would
be located directly across from the Elys’ front yard in Green Springs.
An island of wealth in otherwise impoverished Louisa County, Green
Springs, with its many surviving plantations, had begun to attract
northerners like Rae and Hiram fleeing exurban sprawl.
The fight against the prison was so prolonged that the
Washington Post labeled it “Holton’s Vietnam.” Rae next took on
multinational mining conglomerate W. R. Grace & Co., which wanted
to mine Green Springs’ vermiculite, a rare absorbent mineral used in
construction, manufacturing, potting soil, and sometimes as cat litter.
The neighborhood activists eventually defeated Grace in a battle that
lasted even longer than the prison fight.12
Along the way, Rae Ely and her allies established the first
national historic landmark to be honored explicitly for preserving the
heritage of thousands of acres of rural history, joining a small group
of American landmarked icons including the Alamo and Mount
Vernon. The Green Springs National Historic Landmark District was
created when property owners placed scenic conservation
easements on thousands of acres of private land, sacrificing their
right to subdivide their property or interfere with the rural
environment that surrounded the houses and other structures.
Creating a landmark to preserve rural history was all the more
remarkable because nobody in Louisa’s political establishment
believed that Green Springs had any notable history. As the district’s
own supervisor told Time magazine, “Virginia is full of old houses
like that.”13
The citizens’ group led by Rae challenged the local branch of an
old political machine, Virginia’s Byrd organization. Circuit court
judges ran the organization in rural counties, and in Louisa that
judge was Harold Purcell. The local courthouse crowd had been
coerced by Federal courts to integrate the Louisa County High School
in 1970, but the all-white male group of public officials remained in
firm control of other local prerogatives like land use. The majority of
the county’s voters vigorously supported the courthouse crowd’s
agenda: protecting male and racial privilege as well as property
rights, prioritizing economic development, and most vocally, keeping
the Federal government out of the county’s business—at least
business that was not profitable for political insiders or that might
bring jobs.14
Green Springs’ middle-class white women may have leaned
heavily on history to preserve the rural quality of their property, but
they bridled at the Byrd organization’s historically insulated style of
politics. Instead, they engaged the full range of political venues
directly (rather than merely at the ballot box or through their elected
representatives), from mass meetings, to petitioning, to lobbying
distant Federal agencies and litigating in Federal courts. By 1980,
local land-use policy in Green Springs—a government prerogative
kept as close to home as Jim Crow segregation had been—was
shared with the “Feds” and a nonprofit organization led by Rae Ely
and powered by female citizen activists.

How did Rae Ely beat the odds and defeat the local machine, a
powerful governor, and a Fortune 500 company? Some of the
answers were obvious: her talent, skill, and persistence. It helped
that she was white and upper middle-class. As I dug deeper into the
extensive documentary evidence and began to interview locals,
many of whom were afraid to talk about the courthouse crowd fifty
years later, I realized that the full answer required an appreciation
for the historical context in which this story unfolded. Rae was
successful because the political, social, and economic landscape was
shifting rapidly when she jumped into politics in 1970. Her personal
story wound through some of the key changes experienced by
Americans in the last third of the twentieth century. Indeed, it
illuminated them. Rae conquered that shifting landscape and
leveraged the new resources for citizen activists it unearthed. She
was the right woman in the right place at the right time.
Her story provides a unique perspective on American politics in
the last third of the twentieth century. The most important change
she turned to her advantage was the rising demand—especially
among progressives—for an improved quality of life, manifested
most visibly in the surging environmental movement. So too her
recognition that the national government had penetrated a
centuries-old local monopoly on racial matters by 1970. Why not
engage the Federal government to protect the quality of life that she
and her neighbors enjoyed in Green Springs?
That such a quest was endorsed far more heartily by national
elites both in the environmental protection sphere and among
historical preservationists only increased the incentive to circumvent
local control. The Green Springs activists harnessed legislation like
the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970, Federal
agencies like the Department of the Interior, and the Federal
judiciary to override local majorities who resented both the Feds’
intervention in their business and any restrictions on their property.
Although the white female activists in Green Springs had never been
denied the right to vote, their voices had been silenced by the same
ruling oligarchy that until recently had presided over Jim Crow
segregation.
Gaining access to national venues had never been easier given a
decade-long commitment to opening national administrative
agencies, regulatory review, and most importantly, Federal courts to
citizen comments, concerns, and legal standing. Rae plunged into
politics at a moment in American history when autonomous rights-
bearing individuals increasingly displaced place-based communities,
as did groups who identified by race and gender, regardless of where
their members happened to live. In an age of jet travel, interstate
highways, national broadcast networks, and most significantly, the
demise of legally enforced Jim Crow segregation in the South, the
connection between place and political jurisdiction meant far less
than it had even a decade earlier. By 1975, the most visible pillars of
the Jim Crow regime had been dismantled, clearing a path for
citizens with far different backgrounds and agendas than civil rights
activists. These newly minted activists demanded that their national
constitutional rights be protected as well, even when local
oligarchies like the one that governed Louisa County insisted
otherwise.15
Although place as political jurisdiction meant less than it had a
few years earlier, many middle-class white women were introduced
to politics when something both dear and near to home was
threatened. Rae was only one of hundreds of thousands, perhaps
millions, of citizens who engaged directly in political action for the
first time in the 1970s. Although they adapted strategies and tactics
forged by the national civil rights, anti–Vietnam War, environmental,
and second-wave feminist movements, these activists advanced far
different agendas over the next three decades than the social
movements of the sixties. Much of this activity occurred at the local,
often neighborhood level. Newly engaged citizens reconciled the
demise of place-based governance with the rise of neighborhood-
based agendas by identifying more closely with likeminded
Americans thousands of miles away than with certain neighbors just
down the road.
Governor Holton announced his plans for the diagnostic center
shortly before the New York Times quoted highway and public utility
officials criticizing “backyard obstructionists.” The phrase slowly
morphed into “not in my backyard” (NIMBY). Those advocating for
new construction or changes in land use usually applied the term to
somebody else’s backyard—protesters who opposed a range of
initiatives, from mobile home courts to the transportation of nuclear
waste; from shelters for the homeless to drug treatment centers. It
was just this kind of intrusion that prompted Rae Ely’s initial foray
into politics. What critics of NIMBYs have missed because their
causes are so often neighborhood-based are the common concerns
that many NIMBYs share across geographic boundaries. Those
shared concerns about quality of life issues reshaped national
political agendas.16
Perhaps the most surprising resource seized by Green Springs’
citizen activists was triggered by changing conceptions of what
constituted history. It was only after a Ph.D. student at the
University of Virginia introduced a newly minted framework for
understanding Green Springs’ past that residents embraced it as the
best way to authenticate the area’s distinctive characteristics. Prison
opponents argued that history consisted of more than famous
political leaders and military battles. An approach that captured the
relationship between old structures—even if nobody famous ever
slept there—and the surrounding landscape encouraged Green
Springs residents to dig deeper into their own past. It ultimately
shaped the district’s future.
By the 1970s these tectonic shifts in the relationship between
citizen and state were taking place against a backdrop of long-term
economic decline in the United States. Yet policymakers continued to
promise more, especially when it came to issues like the
environment. Doing more with less money is precisely what the
Green Springs activists promised to achieve through the public-
private partnership they crafted. Private easements would now
protect 14,000 acres from intrusions like prisons and strip mining. To
be sure, the Federal government played an important role. But the
Feds were joined by those private landowners who voluntarily
restricted the use of their land, and by Historic Green Springs, Inc.,
which connected landowners to the National Park Service (NPS).
The urge to do more with less explains, in part, the fluid state of
partisan politics during the 1970s. By 1975, fiscally constrained
Federal administrators no longer contemplated massive projects like
the national parks built during the New Deal. Both liberals and
conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, emerged from this era
with a renewed commitment to public-private partnerships. This was
hardly the triumph of the free market so often associated with the
“Reagan Era,” but it did accommodate growing voter frustration
about rising taxes, budget deficits, and centralized control.
Nor did political parties demand the kind of strict partisan
allegiance that paralyzed politics by the twenty-first century. Rae Ely
was backed by Republican secretaries of the Interior under
Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, even though that support
pitted them against Virginia’s Republican governor. It could not have
been comfortable for Interior Secretary Rogers Morton, a former
Republican National Committee chair, to back Linwood Holton’s
Green Springs opponents. Nor was it easy for President Ford’s
secretary of the Interior to publicly pressure a major Republican
donor like Peter Grace to forgo mining.
 Republicans and Democrats had already begun to diverge in
1970 over local control, especially when it came to integrating public
schools. President Nixon’s signature domestic program, the “New
Federalism,” promised to reverse the flow of power to Washington.
In an extraordinary jujitsu move, Ely used the Federal legislation that
funded Holton’s proposed prison, support that was explicitly
designed to cut Federal strings, to circumvent local courts. The result
was a landmark decision in the United States Court of Appeals for
the Fourth Circuit that imposed a virtual spider’s web of restrictions
on how Virginia could use those Federal funds, ruling that other
national legislation passed to protect the environment and preserve
the nation’s history trumped Nixon’s pledge to return decisions to
“local officials responding to local conditions and local
constituencies.”17
Nixon appealed to the growing number of Americans who
insisted that improving the quality of life for middle-class citizens
directly threatened their own economic progress. Louisa County’s
citizens battled over two contrasting visions of progress. Pushing
back against the Green Springs crowd, most Louisans, whatever
their attitude about prison reform, recognized an opportunity for job
creation when they saw one. Every public official in Louisa County
agreed and supported both the prison and mining.
What began as Nixon’s tentative effort to reverse the powerful
trend toward nationalizing politics fanned broad rural support for a
set of ideals that had long defined the courthouse crowd’s agenda.
When I started my research in 2010, I viewed many of the
arguments mounted by Louisa’s ruling oligarchy about race, the
sanctity of private property, and the evils of centralized government
as the last gasp of a part of America that was vanishing. Rather,
these beliefs soon became (many would argue had already become)
the foundation for one of the two major political parties in the United
States, along with the rural base of voters that supported these
appeals.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
thought war should be declared before Congress adjourned, and
that he would send an Embargo Message if he could be assured it
would be agreeable to the House.[154] On the same day Foster
called at the State Department for an answer to the note in which he
had just asked for proof that the French Decrees were repealed.
Monroe made him a reply of which Foster seemed hardly to
appreciate the gravity.[155]
“He told me, a good deal to my disappointment I confess, that the
President did not think it would lead to any utility to order an answer
to be written to either of my last notes; that he could not now
entertain the question as to whether the French Decrees were
repealed, having already been convinced and declared that they were
so. He said that the case of the two American ships which were
burned could not be said to come under the Berlin and Milan Decrees,
however objectionable the act was to this Government; that the
declaration of the French commodore of his having orders to burn all
ships bound to or from an enemy’s port was given only verbally, and
might not have been well understood by the American captain, who
did not very well understand French; while the declaration in writing
only alluded to ships bound to or from Lisbon and Cadiz.”
Nothing could be more humiliating to Monroe than the resort to
subterfuge like this; but the President left no outlet of escape. The
Committee of Foreign Relations decided in favor of an embargo; and
April 1, the day after this interview, Madison sent to Congress a
secret Message, which was read with closed doors:—
“Considering it as expedient, under existing circumstances and
prospects, that a general embargo be laid on all vessels now in port or
hereafter arriving for the period of sixty days, I recommend the
immediate passage of a law to that effect.”
 CHAPTER X.
When news of this decisive step became public, the British
minister hastened to Monroe for explanations.[156] Monroe
“deprecated its being considered as a war measure. He even seemed
to affect to consider it as an impartial measure toward the two
belligerents, and as thereby complying with one of our demands;
namely, putting them on an equality.... He used an expression which
I had some difficulty in comprehending,—that it was the wish of the
Government to keep their policy in their own hands.” In truth
Monroe seemed, to the last, inclined to leave open a door by which
the anger of America might, in case of reconciliation with England,
be diverted against France. Madison had no such delusion. Foster
went to the President, and repeated to him Monroe’s remark that the
embargo was not a war measure.[157] “Oh, no!” said Madison,
“embargo is not war;” but he added that in his opinion the United
States would be amply justified in war, whatever might be its
expediency, for Great Britain was actually waging war on them, and
within a month had captured eighteen ships of the estimated value
of fifteen hundred thousand dollars. He said he should be glad still
to receive any propositions England might have to make, and that
Congress would be in session at the period fixed for terminating the
embargo. Neither Madison nor Monroe could properly say more to
the British minister, for they could not undertake to forestall the
action of Congress; but the rumor that France might be included in
the declaration of war as in the embargo, made the French minister
uneasy, and he too asked explanation. To him the secretary talked
more plainly.[158]
“Mr. Monroe answered me,” wrote Serurier April 9, “that the
embargo had been adopted in view of stopping the losses of
commerce, and of preparing for the imminent war with England; he
protested to me his perfect conviction that war was inevitable if the
news expected from France answered to the hopes they had formed.
He gave me his word of honor that in the secret deliberations of
 Congress no measure had been taken against France. He admitted
that in fact the affair of the frigates had produced a very deep
impression on that body; that it had, even in Republican eyes,
seemed manifest proof that the Imperial Decrees were not repealed,
and that this unfortunate accident had shaken (ébranlé) the whole
base of the Administration system; that the Executive, by inclination
as much as by system, had always wished to believe in this repeal,
without which it was impossible to make issue (engager la querelle)
with England; that its interest in this respect was perfectly in accord
with that of France, but that he had found it wholly impossible to
justify the inconceivable conduct of the commander of the frigates....
Mr. Monroe insisted here on his former declarations, that if the
Administration was abandoned by France it would infallibly succumb,
or would be obliged to propose war against both Powers, which would
be against its interests as much as against its inclination.”
The Embargo Message surprised no one. The Committee of
Foreign Relations made no secret of its decision. Calhoun warned
Josiah Quincy and other representatives of commercial cities; and on
the afternoon of March 31 these members sent an express, giving
notice to their constituents that the embargo would be proposed on
the following day. Every ship-owner on the seaboard and every
merchant in the great cities hurried ships and merchandise to sea,
showing that they feared war less than they feared embargo, at the
moment when Congress, April 1, went into secret session to discuss
the measure intended to protect ship-owners and merchants by
keeping their property at home. Porter introduced the bill laying an
embargo for sixty days;[159] Grundy declared it to be intended as a
measure leading directly to war; Henry Clay made a vehement
speech approving the measure on that ground. On the other side
Randolph declared war to be impossible; the President dared not be
guilty of treason so gross and unparalleled as that of plunging an
unprepared nation into such a conflict. Randolph even read
memoranda of Monroe’s remarks to the Committee of Foreign
Relations: “The embargo would leave the policy as respected France,
and indeed of both countries, in our hands;” and from this he tried
to convince the House that the embargo was not honestly intended
as a war measure. The debate ran till evening, when by a vote of
sixty-six to forty the previous question was ordered. Without
listening to the minority the House then hurried the bill through all
its stages, and at nine o’clock passed it by a vote of seventy to forty-
one.
The majority numbered less than half the members. In 1807 the
House imposed the embargo by a vote of eighty-two to forty-four,
yet the country failed to support it. The experience of 1807 boded ill
for that of 1812. In the Senate the outlook was worse. The motion
to extend the embargo from sixty to ninety days was adopted
without opposition, changing the character of the bill at a single
stroke from a strong war measure into a weak measure of
negotiation; but even in this weaker form it received only twenty
votes against thirteen in opposition. The President could not depend
on a bare majority in the Senate. The New England Democrats
shrank from the embargo even more than from war. Giles and
Samuel Smith stood in open opposition. The Clintons had become
candidates of every discontented faction in the country. Had the vote
in the Senate been counted by States, only six would have been
thrown for the embargo, and of these only Pennsylvania from the
North. In face of such distraction, war with England seemed worse
than a gambler’s risk.
Madison, watching with that apparent neutrality which irritated
both his friends and his enemies, reported to Jefferson the progress
of events.[160] He was not pleased with the Senate’s treatment of
his recommendations, or with “that invariable opposition, open with
some and covert with others, which has perplexed and impeded the
whole course of our public measures.” He explained the motives of
senators in extending the embargo from sixty to ninety days. Some
wished to make it a peace measure, some to postpone war, some to
allow time for the return of their constituents’ ships; some intended
it as a ruse against the enemy. For his own part he had regarded a
short embargo as a rational and provident measure, which would be
relished by the greater part of the nation; but he looked upon it as a
step to immediate war, and he waited only for the Senate to make
the declaration.
The President asked too much. Congress seemed exhausted by
the efforts it had made, and the country showed signs of greater
exhaustion before having made any efforts at all. The complaints
against France, against the non-importation, against the embargo,
and against the proposed war were bitter and general. April 6
Massachusetts held the usual State election. Gerry was again the
Republican candidate for governor, and the Federalists had little
hope of defeating him; but the Republican Administration had
proved so unpopular, the famous Gerrymander by which the State
had been divided into districts in party interests had so irritated the
conservative feeling, that the new embargo and the expected war
were hardly needed to throw the State again into opposition. Not
even the revelations of John Henry restored the balance. More than
one hundred and four thousand votes were cast, and a majority of
about twelve hundred appeared on the Federalist side. Caleb Strong
became governor once more at a moment when the change
paralyzed national authority in New England; and meanwhile
throughout the country the enlistments for the new army produced
barely one thousand men.
The month of April passed without legislation that could
strengthen Government, except an Act, approved April 10,
authorizing the President to call out one hundred thousand militia for
six months’ service. Congress showed so strong a wish to adjourn
that the Administration was obliged to exert its whole influence to
prevent the House from imitating the Senate, which by a vote of
sixteen to fifteen adopted a Resolution for a recess until June 8.
Secretary Gallatin ventured to bring no tax bills before Congress;
Lowndes and Cheves made a vigorous effort to suspend the Non-
importation Act; and a general belief prevailed that the Government
wished to admit English goods in order to evade, by increase of
customs-revenue, the necessity of taxation.
 Serurier, much discomposed by these signs of vacillation, busied
himself in the matter, declaring to his friends in Congress that he
should look on any suspension of the Non-importation Act as a
formal infraction of the compact with France. When he pressed
Monroe with remonstrances,[161] Monroe told him, April 22, that the
President and Cabinet had positively and unanimously declared to
the Committee of Foreign Relations against the suspension, because
it would seem to indicate indecision and inconsequence in their
foreign policy; that this remonstrance had caused the plan to be
given up, but that the Administration might still be obliged to
consent to a short adjournment, so great was the wish of members
to look after their private affairs. In fact, Congress showed no other
wish than to escape, and leave the President to struggle with his
difficulties alone.
If the war party hesitated in its allegiance to Madison, its doubts
regarded his abilities rather than his zeal. Whatever might be
Madison’s genius, no one supposed it to be that of administration.
His health was delicate; he looked worn and feeble; for many years
he had shown none of the energy of youth; he was likely to
succumb under the burden of war; and, worst of all, he showed no
consciousness of needing support. The party was unanimous in
believing Secretary Eustis unequal to his post, but Madison made no
sign of removing him. So general was the impression of Eustis’s
incapacity that when, April 24, the President sent to Congress a
message asking for two Assistant Secretaries of War to aid in
conducting the Department, the request was commonly regarded as
an evasion of the public demand for a new Secretary of War, and as
such was unfavorably received. In the House, where the subject was
openly discussed, Randolph defended Eustis in the style of which he
was master: “I will say this much of the Secretary of War,—that I do
verily believe, and I have grounds to believe it to be the opinion of a
majority of this House, that he is at least as competent to the
exercise of his duties as his colleague who presides over the Marine.”
The Senate, wishing perhaps to force the President into
reconstructing his Cabinet, laid aside the bill creating two Assistant
Secretaries of War; and with this action, May 6, ended the last
chance of efficiency in that Department.
While Eustis ransacked the country for generals, colonels, and
the whole staff of officers, as well as the clothing, arms, and
blankets for an army of twenty-five thousand men who could not be
found, Gallatin labored to provide means for meeting the first year’s
expenses. Having no longer the Bank to help him, he dealt
separately with the State Banks through whose agency private
subscriptions were to be received. The subscriptions were to be
opened on the first and second days of May. The Republican
newspapers, led by the “National Intelligencer,”[162] expressed the
hope and the expectation that twice the amount of the loan would
be instantly subscribed. Their disappointment was very great.
Federalist New England refused to subscribe at all; and as the
Federalists controlled most of the capital in the country, the effect of
their abstention was alarming. In all New England not one million
dollars were obtained. New York and Philadelphia took each about
one and a half million. Baltimore and Washington took about as
much more. The whole Southern country, from the Potomac to
Charleston, subscribed seven hundred thousand dollars. Of the
entire loan, amounting to eleven million dollars, a little more than six
millions were taken; and considering the terms, the result was not
surprising. At a time when the old six-per-cent loans, with ten or
twelve years to run, stood barely at par, any new six-per-cent loan to
a large amount, with a vast war in prospect, could hardly be taken at
the same rate.
The Federalists, delighted with this failure, said, with some show
of reason, that if the Southern States wanted the war they ought to
supply the means, and had no right to expect that men who thought
the war unjust and unnecessary should speculate to make money
from it. Gallatin put a good face on his failure, and proposed soon to
reopen subscriptions; but the disappointment was real.
“Whatever the result may be,” wrote Serurier to his Government,
[163] “they had counted on more national energy on the opening of a
 first loan for a war so just. This cooling of the national pulse, the
resistance which the Northern States seem once more willing to offer
the Administration, the defection it meets every day in Congress,—all
this, joined to its irritation at our measures which make its own
system unpopular, adds to its embarrassment and hesitation.”
Gallatin made no complaints, but he knew only too well what lay
before him. No resource remained except treasury notes bearing
interest. Neither Gallatin, nor any other party leader, cared to
suggest legal-tender notes, which were supposed to be not only an
admission of national bankruptcy at the start, but also forbidden by
the spirit of the Constitution; yet the government could hardly fail to
experience the same form of bankruptcy in a less convenient shape.
After the destruction of the United States Bank, a banking mania
seized the public. Everywhere new banks were organized or planned,
until the legislature of New York, no longer contented with small
corporations controlling capital of one or two hundred thousand
dollars, prepared to incorporate the old Bank of the United States
under a new form, with a capital of six millions. Governor Tompkins
stopped the project by proroguing the legislature; but his message
gave the astonishing reason that the legislature was in danger of
yielding to bribery.[164] The majority protested against the charge,
and denounced it as a breach of privilege; but whether it was well or
ill founded, the influence of the banking mania on State legislatures
could not fail to be corrupting. The evil, inherent in the origin of the
new banks, was aggravated by their management. Competition and
want of experience or of supervision, inevitably led to over-issue,
inflation of credit, suspension of specie payments, and paper-money
of the worst character. Between a debased currency of private
corporations and a debased currency of government paper, the
former was the most expensive and the least convenient; yet it was
the only support on which the Treasury could depend.
Early in May a double election took place, which gave more cause
of alarm. New York chose a Federalist Assembly, and Massachusetts
chose a General Court more strongly Federalist than any one had
ventured to expect. In the face of such a revolution in two of the
greatest and richest States in the Union, President, Cabinet, and
legislators had reason to hesitate; they had even reason to fear that
the existence of the Union might hang on their decision. They knew
the Executive Department to be incompetent for war; they had
before their eyes the spectacle of an incompetent Congress; and
they saw the people declaring, as emphatically as their democratic
forms of government permitted, their unwillingness to undertake the
burden. Even bold men might pause before a situation so desperate.
Thus the month of May passed, full of discouragement. Congress
did not adjourn, but the members went home on leave, with the
understanding that no further action should be taken until June. At
home they found chaos. Under the coercion of embargo, commerce
ceased. Men would do little but talk politics, and very few professed
themselves satisfied with the condition into which their affairs had
been brought. The press cried for war or for peace, according to its
fancy; but although each of the old parties could readily prove the
other’s course to be absurd, unpatriotic, and ruinous, the war men,
who were in truth a new party, powerless to restore order by
legitimate methods, shut their ears to the outcry, and waited until
actual war should enforce a discipline never to be imposed in peace.
The experiment of thrusting the country into war to inflame it, as
crude ore might be thrown into a furnace, was avowed by the party
leaders, from President Madison downward, and was in truth the
only excuse for a course otherwise resembling an attempt at suicide.
Many nations have gone to war in pure gayety of heart; but perhaps
the United States were first to force themselves into a war they
dreaded, in the hope that the war itself might create the spirit they
lacked. One of the liveliest and most instructive discussions of the
session, May 6, threw light upon the scheme by which the youthful
nation was to reverse the process of Medea, and pass through the
caldron of war in confidence of gaining the vigor of age. Mr. Bleecker
of New York, in offering petitions for the repeal of the embargo,
argued that the embargo could not be honestly intended. “Where
are your armies; your navy? Have you money? No, sir! Rely upon it,
there will be, there can be, no war—active, offensive war—within
sixty days.” War would be little short of treason; would bring shame,
disgrace, defeat; and meanwhile the embargo alienated the people
of States which must necessarily bear much of the burden. These
arguments were supported by John Randolph.
“I am myself,” he said, “in a situation similar to what would have
been that of one of the unfortunate people of Caracas, if preadvised
of the danger which overhung his country. I know that we are on the
brink of some dreadful scourge, some great desolation, some awful
visitation from that Power whom, I am afraid, we have as yet in our
national capacity taken no pains to conciliate.... Go to war without
money, without men, without a navy! Go to war when we have not
the courage, while your lips utter war, to lay war taxes! when your
whole courage is exhibited in passing Resolutions! The people will not
believe it!”
Richard M. Johnson undertook first to meet these criticisms.
Johnson possessed courage and abilities, but he had not, more than
other Kentuckians of his day, the caution convenient in the face of
opponents. He met by threats the opposition he would not answer.
“It was a Tory opposition, in the cities and seaports; and an
opposition which would not be quite so bold and powerful in a time
of war; and he trusted in that Heaven to which the gentleman from
Virginia had appealed, that sixty days would not elapse before all the
traitorous combinations and opposition to the laws and the acts of
the general government would in a great measure cease, or change,
and moderate their tone.” Calhoun, who followed Johnson,
expressed the same idea in less offensive form, and added opinions
of his own which showed the mental condition in which the young
war leaders exulted: “So far from being unprepared, sir, I believe
that in four weeks from the time that a declaration of war is heard
on our frontiers the whole of Upper and a part of Lower Canada will
be in our possession.”
Grundy, following in the debate, used neither threats like
Johnson, nor prophecies like Calhoun; but his argument was not
more convincing. “It is only while the public mind is held in
suspense,” he said; “it is only while there is doubt as to what will be
the result of our deliberations,—it is only while we linger in this Hall
that any manifestations of uneasiness will show themselves.
Whenever war is declared, the people will put forth their strength to
support their rights.” He went so far as to add that when war should
be once begun, the distinction between Federalists and Republicans
would cease. Finally, Wright of Maryland, whose words fortunately
carried little weight, concluded the debate by saying that if signs of
treason and civil war should discover themselves in any part of the
American empire, he had no doubt the evil would soon be radically
cured by hemp and confiscation; and his own exertions should not
be spared to employ the remedy.
The President himself had no other plan than to “throw forward
the flag of the country, sure that the people would press onward and
defend it.”[165] The example he had himself given to the people in
1798 tended to cast doubt on the correctness of his judgment,[166]
but his candidacy for the Presidency also shook confidence in his
good faith. So deep was the conviction of his dislike for the policy he
supported as to lead the British minister, May 3, to inform his
Government that the jealousies between the younger and older
members of Congress threatened an open schism, in which the
President was supposed likely to be involved.[167]
“The reason why there has been no nomination made in caucus
yet, by the Democratic members, of Mr. Madison as candidate for the
Presidency is, as I am assured in confidence, because the war party
have suspected him not to have been serious in his late hostile
measures, and wish previously to ascertain his real sentiments. I have
been endeavoring to put the Federalists upon insinuating that they
will support him, if he will agree to give up the advocates for war.”
This intrigue was stopped by the positive refusal of the eastern
Federalists to support Madison on any terms,—they preferred
coalition with DeWitt Clinton and the Republican malcontents; but
the time had come when some nomination must be made, and when
it arrived, all serious thought of an open Republican schism at
Washington vanished. The usual Congressional caucus was called
May 18, and was attended by eighty-three members and senators,
who unanimously renominated Madison. Seventeen senators, just
one half the Senate, and sixty-six members, almost one half the
House, joined in the nomination; but only three New York members
took part, and neither Giles nor Samuel Smith was present,—they
had ceased to act with the Republican party. Only a few weeks
before, Vice-President Clinton had died in office, and whatever
respect the Administration may have felt for his great name and
Revolutionary services, the party was relieved at the prospect of
placing in the chair of the Senate some man upon whom it could
better depend. The caucus named John Langdon of New Hampshire;
and when he declined, Elbridge Gerry, the defeated Governor of
Massachusetts, was selected as candidate for the Vice-presidency.
So little cordiality was felt for President Madison by his party that
only the want of a strong rival reconciled a majority to the choice;
but although Clay, Crawford, and Calhoun accepted the necessity,
the State of New York flatly rebelled. At Albany, when the news
arrived that the Washington caucus had named Madison for the
Presidency, the Republican members of the State legislature called
for May 29 a caucus of their own. Their whole number was ninety-
five; of these, all but four attended, and eighty-seven voted that it
was expedient to name a candidate for the Presidency. Ninety
members then voted to support DeWitt Clinton against Madison, and
Clinton formally accepted the nomination. This unusual unanimity
among the New York Republicans raised the movement somewhat
above the level of ordinary New York politics, and pointed to a
growing jealousy of Virginia, which threatened to end in revival of
the old alliance between New York and New England. Even in quiet
times this prospect would have been alarming; in face of war, it
threatened to be fatal.
During the entire month of May Congress passed, with only one
exception, no Act for war purposes. While the absent members
attended to their private affairs, Government waited for the last
despatches from abroad. The sloop-of-war “Hornet,” after long delay,
arrived at New York, May 19, and three days afterward the
despatches reached Washington. Once more, but for the last time,
the town roused itself to learn what hope of peace they contained.
 As far as concerned Great Britain, the news would at any
previous time have checked hostile action, for it showed that the
British government had taken alarm, and that for the first time a real
change of policy was possible; but this news came from unofficial
sources, and could not be laid before Congress. Officially, the British
government still stoutly maintained that it could not yield. Lord
Wellesley had given place to Lord Castlereagh. In a very long
despatch,[168] dated April 10, the new Foreign Minister pleaded
earnestly that England could not submit herself to the mercy of
France. The argument of Lord Castlereagh rested on an official
report made by the Duc de Bassano to the Emperor, March 10, in
which Napoleon reasserted his rules regarding neutrals in language
quite as strong as that of his decrees, and reasserted the validity of
those decrees, without exception, in regard to every neutral that did
not recognize their provisions. Certainly, no proof could be imagined
competent to show the continued existence of the decrees if
Bassano’s report failed to do so; and Castlereagh, with some reason,
relied on this evidence to convince not so much the American
government as the American people that a deception had been
practised, and that England could not act as America required
without submitting to Napoleon’s principles as well as to his arms.
Embarrassing as this despatch was to President Madison, it was
not all, or the worst; but Serurier himself described the other
annoyance in terms as lively as his feelings:[169]—
“The ‘Hornet’ has at last arrived. On the rumor of this news, the
avenues of the State Department were thronged by a crowd of
members of both Houses of Congress, as well as by strangers and
citizens, impatient to know what this long-expected vessel had
brought. Soon it was learned that the ‘Hornet’ had brought nothing
favorable, and that Mr. Barlow had as yet concluded nothing with your
Excellency. On this news, the furious declamations of the Federalists,
of the commercial interests, and of the numerous friends of England
were redoubled; the Republicans, deceived in their hopes, joined in
the outcry, and for three days nothing was heard but a general cry for
war against France and England at once.... I met Mr. Monroe at the
Speaker’s house; he came to me with an air of affliction and
 discouragement; addressed me with his old reproach that decidedly
we abandoned the Administration, and that he did not know
henceforward how they could extricate themselves from the difficult
position into which their confidence in our friendship had drawn
them.”
Serurier had no reason for uneasiness on his own account. The
President and his party could not go backward in their path; yet no
enemy could have devised a worse issue than that on which the
President had placed the intended war with England. Every Act of
Congress and every official expression of Madison’s policy had been
founded on the withdrawal of the French Decrees as they affected
American commerce. This withdrawal could no longer be maintained,
and Madison merely shook confidence in his own good faith by
asserting it; yet he could do nothing else. “It is understood,” he
wrote to Jefferson at this crisis,[170] “that the Berlin and Milan
Decrees are not in force against the United States, and no
contravention of them can be established against her. On the
contrary, positive cases rebut the allegation.” Yet he said that “the
business has become more than ever puzzling;” he was withheld
only by political and military expediency from favoring war with
France. He wrote to Joel Barlow,[171] after full knowledge of
Napoleon’s conduct, that “in the event of a pacification with Great
Britain the full tide of indignation with which the public mind here is
boiling will be directed against France, if not obviated by a due
reparation of her wrongs; war will be called for by the nation almost
unâ voce.”
A position so inconsistent with itself could not be understood by
the people. Every one knew that if the decrees were not avowedly
enforced in France against the United States, they were relaxed only
because Madison had submitted to their previous enforcement, and
had, in Napoleon’s opinion, recognized their legality. The Republican
press, which supported Madison most energetically, made no
concealment of its active sympathies with Napoleon, even in Spain.
What wonder if large numbers of good citizens who believed
Napoleon to be anti-Christ should be disposed to resist, even to the
verge of treason, the attempt to use their lives and fortunes in a
service they regarded with horror!
 CHAPTER XI.
Castlereagh’s long note of April 10, communicated by Foster to the
American government, contained a paragraph defining the British
doctrine of retaliation:—
“What Great Britain always avowed was her readiness to rescind
her orders as soon as France rescinded, absolutely and
unconditionally, her decrees. She never engaged to repeal those
orders as affecting America alone, leaving them in force against other
States, upon condition that France would except, singly and especially,
America from the operation of her decrees. She could not do so
without the grossest injustice to her allies, as well as all other neutral
nations; much less could she do so upon the supposition that the
special exception in favor of America was to be expressly granted by
France, as it has been hitherto tacitly accepted by America, upon
conditions utterly subversive of the most important and indisputable
maritime rights of the British empire.”

Long afterward Madison objected[172] to the common accounts

of the war, that they brought too little into view “the more
immediate impulse to it” given by this formal notice communicated
to him officially by Foster, which left no choice between war and
degradation. He regarded this notice as making further discussion
impossible. His idea was perhaps too strongly asserted, for Foster
offered, under other instructions, a new and important concession,—
that England should give up altogether her system of licensing trade
with the Continent, and in its place should enforce a rigorous
blockade;[173] but Madison and Monroe declined listening to any
offer that did not admit in principle the right of the United States to
trade with every European country.[174] Thus at the last moment the
dispute seemed to narrow itself to the single point of belligerent
right to blockade a coast.
Acting at once on the theory that Castlereagh’s instructions of
April 10 gave the last formal notice intended by the British
government, President Madison prepared a Message recommending
an immediate declaration of war. This Message was sent to Congress
June 1; the two Houses instantly went into secret session, and the
Message was read. No one could dispute the force of Madison’s long
recital of British outrages. For five years, the task of finding excuses
for peace had been more difficult than that of proving a casus belli;
but some interest still attached to the arrangement and relative
weight of the many American complaints.
Madison, inverting the order of complaints previously alleged,
began by charging that British cruisers had been “in the continued
practice of violating the American flag on the great highway of
nations, and of seizing and carrying off persons sailing under it.” The
charge was amply proved, was not denied, and warranted war; but
this was the first time that the Government had alleged impressment
as its chief grievance, or had announced, either to England or to
America, the intention to fight for redress,—and England might fairly
complain that she had received no notice of intended war on such
ground. The second complaint alleged that British cruisers also
violated the peace of the coasts, and harassed entering and
departing commerce. This charge was equally true and equally
warranted war, but it was open to the same comment as that made
upon the first. The third grievance on which the President had
hitherto founded his coercive measures consisted in “pretended
blockades, without the presence of an adequate force and
sometimes without the practicability of applying one,” by means of
which American commerce had been plundered on every sea,—a
practice which had come to its highest possible development in the
fourth grievance, the sweeping system of blockades known as the
Orders in Council. These four main heads of complaint covered
numbers of irritating consequences, but no other separate charge
was alleged, beyond an insinuation that the hostile spirit of the
Indians was connected with their neighborhood to Canada.
On the four great grievances thus defined every American could
in theory agree; but these admitted wrongs had hitherto been
endured as a matter of expediency, rather than resort to war; and
the opposition still stood on the ground that had been so obstinately
held by Jefferson,—that war, however just, was inexpedient. If union
in the war policy was to be hoped, the President must rather prove
its expediency than its justice. Even from his own point of view, two
doubts of expediency required fresh attention. For the first time,
England showed distinct signs of giving way; while on the other
hand France showed only the monomania of insisting on her
decrees, even to the point of conquering Russia. In the face of two
such movements, the expediency of war with England became more
than ever doubtful; and if the President wished for harmony, he
must remove these doubts. This he did not attempt, further than by
alluding to the sense of Castlereagh’s late despatch, as yet not in his
possession. What was still more remarkable, he said nothing in
regard to the contract with France, which since November, 1809, he
had made the ground for every measure of compulsion against
England. Indeed, not only was the contract ignored, but if any
meaning could be placed on his allusions to France, the theory of
contract seemed at last to be formally abandoned.
“Having presented this view of the relations of the United States
with Great Britain, and of the solemn alternative growing out of them,
I proceed to remark that the communications last made to Congress
on the subject of our relations with France will have shown that since
the revocation of her decrees, as they violated the neutral rights of
the United States, her government has authorized illegal captures by
its privateers and public ships; and that other outrages have been
practised on our vessels and our citizens. It will have been seen, also,
that no indemnity had been provided, or satisfactorily pledged, for the
extensive spoliations committed under the violent and retrospective
orders of the French government against the property of our citizens,
seized within the jurisdiction of France. I abstain at this time from
recommending to the consideration of Congress definite measures
with respect to that nation.”
The war of 1812 was chiefly remarkable for the vehemence with
which, from beginning to end, it was resisted and thwarted by a very
large number of citizens who were commonly considered, and who
considered themselves, by no means the least respectable,
intelligent, or patriotic part of the nation. That the war was as just
and necessary as any war ever waged, seemed so evident to
Americans of another generation that only with an effort could
modern readers grasp the reasons for the bitter opposition of large
and respectable communities which left the government bankrupt,
and nearly severed the Union; but if students of national history can
bear with patience the labor of retaining in mind the threads of
negotiation which President Madison so thoroughly tangled before
breaking, they can partially enter into the feelings of citizens who
held themselves aloof from Madison’s war. In June, 1812, the
reasons for declaring war on Great Britain, though strong enough,
were weaker than they had been in June, 1808, or in January, 1809.
In the interval the British government had laid aside the arrogant
and defiant tones of Canning’s diplomacy; had greatly modified the
Orders in Council; had offered further modifications; and had atoned
for the “Chesapeake” outrage. In 1807 England would have
welcomed a war with the United States; in 1812 she wanted peace,
and yielded much to secure it. In 1808 America was almost
unanimous, her government still efficient, well supplied with money,
and little likely to suffer from war; in 1812 the people were greatly
divided, the government had been weakened, and the Treasury was
empty. Even Gallatin, who in 1809 had been most decided for war,
was believed in 1812 to wish and to think that it might be avoided.
Probably four fifths of the American people held the same opinion.
Not merely had the situation in every other respect changed for the
worse, but the moral convictions of the country were outraged by
the assertion of a contract with Napoleon—in which no one believed
—as the reason for forcing religious and peaceful citizens into what
they regarded as the service of France.
The war Message of June 1 rather strengthened than removed
grounds of opposition. The President alleged but one reason for
thinking war expedient at that moment rather than at another; but
when in after years he insisted that Castlereagh’s instructions were
the immediate cause which precluded further negotiation, he
admitted his own mistake, and presumed that had Congress known
what was then passing in England the declaration of war would have
been suspended and negotiations renewed.[175] Such a succession
of mistakes, admitted one after another almost as soon as they were
made, might well give to Madison’s conduct the air so often
attributed to it, of systematic favor to Napoleon and equally
systematic hostility to England.
The House went at once into secret session; the Message was
referred to the Committee of Foreign Relations; and two days
afterward, June 3, Calhoun brought in a report recommending an
immediate appeal to arms. As a history of the causes which led to
this result, Calhoun’s report was admirable, and its clearness of style
and statement forced comparisons not flattering to the President’s
Message; but as an argument for the immediate necessity of war,
the report like the Message contented itself with bare assertions.
“The United States must support their character and station among
the nations of the earth, or submit to the most shameful
degradation.” Calhoun’s arguments were commonly close in logic,
and avoided declamation; but in the actual instance neither he nor
his followers seemed confident in the strength of their reasoning.
After the House had listened in secret session, June 3, to the
reading of this report, Josiah Quincy moved that the debate should
be public. The demand seemed reasonable. That preliminary
debates should be secret might be proper, but that war with any
Power, and most of all with England, should be declared in secret
could not be sound policy, while apart from any question of policy
the secrecy contradicted the professions of the party in power.
Perhaps no single act, in a hundred years of American history,
showed less regard for personal and party consistency than the
refusal by the Republicans of 1812 to allow society either rights or
privileges in regard to the declaration of war upon England. Quite
apart from military advantages to be hoped from secrecy, Henry Clay
and his friends were weary of debate and afraid of defeat. Only a
few days before, May 29, Clay forced Randolph from the floor by
tactics which showed that no more discussion was to be allowed.
The secret session gave the Speaker absolute power, and annihilated
opposition. By seventy-six votes to forty-six, the House rejected
Quincy’s motion; and a similar motion by Randolph shared the same
fate.
This demand being refused, the minority declined further
discussion. They said that any act of theirs which admitted the
validity of what they held to be a flagrant abuse of power could do
no good, and might create a dangerous precedent. Henceforward
they contented themselves with voting. On the same day Calhoun
presented the bill declaring war against England, and on the second
reading the opposition swelled to forty-five votes; while of the
Republican majority, numbering about one hundred and five
members, only seventy-six could be brought to the test. June 4 the
third reading was carried by a vote of seventy-eight to forty-five, and
the same day the bill passed by a vote of seventy-nine to forty-nine.
Proverbially wars are popular at their beginning; commonly, in
representative governments, they are declared by aid of some part
of the opposition. In the case of the War of 1812 the party in power,
instead of gaining strength by the declaration, lost about one fourth
of its votes, and the opposition actually gained nearly one fifth of the
Administration’s strength. In the Senate the loss was still greater.
There too the President’s Message was debated in secret, but the
proceedings were very deliberate. A select committee, with Senator
Anderson of Tennessee at its head, took charge of the Message, and
consumed a week in studying it. June 8 the committee reported the
House bill with amendments. June 11 the Senate, by a vote of
seventeen to thirteen, returned the bill to the committee for further
amendment. June 12 the committee reported the amendments as
instructed. The Senate discussed them, was equally divided, and
accordingly threw out its own amendments. June 15 the Senate
voted the third reading of the House bill by a vote of nineteen to
thirteen. June 16, after a strong speech for delay from Senator
James A. Bayard, the Senate again adjourned without action; and
only June 18, after two weeks of secret discussion, did the bill pass.
Nineteen senators voted in its favor; thirteen in opposition. Samuel
Smith, Giles, and Leib, the three Republican senators most openly
hostile to Madison, voted with the majority. Except Pennsylvania, the
entire representation of no Northern State declared itself for the
war; except Kentucky, every State south of the Potomac and the
Ohio voted for the declaration. Not only was the war to be a party
measure, but it was also sectional; while the Republican majority,
formerly so large, was reduced to dependence on the factious
support of Smith, Giles, and Leib.
The bill with its amendments was at once returned to the House
and passed. Without a moment’s delay the President signed it, and
the same day, June 18, 1812, the war began.
“The President’s proclamation was issued yesterday,” wrote
Richard Rush, the comptroller, to his father, June 20;[176] ... “he
visited in person—a thing never known before—all the offices of the
departments of war and the navy, stimulating everything in a manner
worthy of a little commander-in-chief, with his little round hat and
huge cockade.”
In resorting to old-fashioned methods of violence, Congress had
also to decide whether to retain or to throw away its weapons of
peaceful coercion. The Non-importation Act stopped importations
from England. If war should be considered as taking the place of
non-importation, it would have the curious result of restoring trade
with England. Opinions were almost as hotly divided on the question
of war with, or war without, non-importation as on the question of
war and peace itself; while even this detail of policy was distorted by
the too familiar interference of Napoleon,—for the non-importation
was a part of his system, and its retention implied alliance with him,
while the admission of English merchandise would be considered by
him almost an act of war. The non-importation was known to press
severely on the industries of England, but it threatened to paralyze
America. In the absence of taxation, nothing but the admission of
British goods into the United States could so increase the receipts of
the Treasury as to supply the government with its necessary
resources. Thus, two paths lay open. Congress might admit British
goods, and by doing so dispense with internal taxes, relieve the
commercial States, and offend France; or might shut out British
goods, disgust the commercial States, double the burden of the war
to America, but distress England and please Napoleon.
War having been declared June 18, on June 19 Langdon Cheves
introduced, from the Committee of Ways and Means, a bill partially
suspending the Non-importation Act. He supported his motion by a
letter from Gallatin, accepting this bill as an alternative to the tax
bills. On the same day news arrived of more American vessels
burned by French frigates. Chaos seemed beyond control. War with
England was about to restore commerce with her; alliance with
France was a state of war with her. The war party proposed to
depend on peace taxes at the cost of France their ally, in the
interests of England their enemy; the peace party called for war
taxes to discredit the war; both parties wanted trade with England
with whom they were at war; while every one was displeased with
the necessity of assisting France, the only ally that America
possessed in the world. Serurier went to the Secretary of State to
discuss this extraordinary situation, but found Monroe in no happy
temper.[177]
“He began by complaining to me of what, for that matter, I knew
already,—that a considerable number of new American ships, going to
Spain and Portugal and returning, had been very recently burned by
our frigates, and that others had been destroyed on the voyage even
to England. The Secretary of State on this occasion, and with
bitterness, renewed to me his complaints and those of the
Government and of Congress, whose discontent he represented as
having reached its height. I am, Monseigneur, as weary of hearing
these eternal grumblings as of having to trouble you with them; but I
think myself obliged to transmit to you whatever is said of an official
character. Mr. Monroe averred that for his part, as Secretary of State,
since he had never ceased down to this moment to maintain the
repeal of our decrees, he found himself suddenly compromised in the
face of his friends and of the public, and he must admit he had almost
lost the hope of an arrangement with us. Such were, Monseigneur, his
expressions; after which he retraced to me the system that the
Administration had never ceased pursuing with constancy and
firmness for eighteen months, and the last act of which had at length
been what I had seen, a formal declaration of war against England by
the republic,—‘at a moment,’ he added, ‘when it feels ill-assured of
 France, and is so ill-treated by her.’ He finished at last by saying to
me, with a sort of political coquetry, that he was among his friends
obliged to admit that they had been too weak toward France, and that
perhaps they had been too quick in regard to England.”
Serurier wrote that the bitterness against France was really such
as would have caused a declaration of war against her as well as
against England, if the Administration had not stopped the
movement in Congress; nothing prevented the double war except
the military difficulties in its way. At the moment when, June 23, the
French minister was writing in these terms to the Duc de Bassano,
the House of Representatives was considering the action he feared.
Cheves had proposed to modify the non-importation,—the
Federalists moved to repeal it altogether; and although they were
defeated that day in committee, when Cheves’s bill came before the
House no less a champion than Calhoun rose to advocate the
reopening of trade.
Whatever Calhoun in those days did, was boldly and well done;
but his speech of June 24, 1812, against commercial restrictions,
was perhaps the boldest and the best of his early efforts. Neither
great courage nor much intelligence was needed to support war,
from the moment war became a party measure; but an attack on
the system of commercial restriction was a blow at Madison, which
belittled Jefferson, and threw something like contempt on the
Republican party from its beginning twenty years before, down to
the actual moment. How gently Calhoun did this, and yet how firmly
he laid his hands on the rein that was to guide his party into an
opposite path, could be seen in his short speech.
“The restrictive system, as a mode of resistance,” he said, “and a
means of obtaining a redress of our wrongs, has never been a favorite
one with me. I wish not to censure the motives which dictated it, or
to attribute weakness to those who first resorted to it for a restoration
of our rights.... I object to the restrictive system, and for the following
reasons,—because it does not suit the genius of our people, or that of
our government, or the geographical character of our country.”
With a single gesture, this young statesman of the new school
swept away the statesmanship of Jefferson and Madison, and waved
aside the strongest convictions of his party; but he did it with such
temperate statement, and with so serious a manner, that although
he said in effect little less than had been said for years by Federalists
and enemies, he seemed rather to lead than to oppose. “We have
had a peace like a war: in the name of heaven let us not have the
only thing that is worse,—a war like a peace.” That his voice should
be at once obeyed was not to be expected; but so many Republican
members followed Calhoun, Cheves, and Lowndes, that the
Federalists came within three votes of carrying their point; and so
equally divided was the House that, June 25, when the Federalists
returned to the attack and asked for a committee to report a bill
repealing the non-importation, the House divided sixty against sixty,
and the Speaker’s vote alone defeated the motion.
Greatly to the French minister’s relief the storm passed over; but
the heroic decision of Congress not only to punish England, but to
punish itself by deprivation of everything English,—not only to fight
Napoleon’s battles, but also to fight them under every disadvantage
that Napoleon chose to exact,—could not but increase the
vehemence of Northern hatred against the war, as it was certain to
increase Southern hatred against taxes. Gallatin knew not what to
expect. June 26 he wrote to a friend,[178]—
“We have not money enough to last till January 1 next, and
General Smith is using every endeavor to run us aground by opposing
everything,—treasury notes, double duties, etc. The Senate is so
nearly divided, and the division so increased by that on the war
question, that we can hardly rely on carrying anything.”
Although Gallatin caused the necessary bills for the war taxes to
be reported to the House June 26, he had no idea of passing them,
and was not surprised when by a vote of seventy-two to forty-six the
House postponed them to the next session, Calhoun and Cheves
voting with the Federalists against postponement. This chronic
helplessness could not last in face of war without stopping
government itself; and Congress, with a bad grace, yielded at last to
necessity. Even while Gallatin was complaining, the Senate passed
the bill for issuing five millions in treasury notes. June 30 it passed
the bill doubling the duties on imports. In rapid succession, such
other bills as were most needed by Government were put upon their
passage; and July 6 the exhausted Congress adjourned, glad to
escape its struggle with the novel problems of war.
In American history few sessions of Congress left a deeper mark
than that of 1811–12; but in the midst of the war excitement several
Acts of high importance almost escaped public notice. As far-
reaching as the declaration of war itself was the Act, approved April
8, 1812, declaring the State of Louisiana to be admitted into the
Union. Representatives of the Eastern States once more protested
against the admission of new territory without consulting the States
themselves; but Congress followed up the act by one more open to
question. West Florida had remained hitherto in the condition of its
military occupation a year before. Congress had then found the
problem too hard to solve on any theory of treaty or popular rights;
but in the excitement of the war fever Government acted on the new
principle that West Florida, which had been seized because it was a
part of Louisiana, should be treated as though it were a conquered
territory. An Act of Congress, approved April 14, divided the district
in halves at the Pearl River, and annexed the western half—against
the expressed wishes of its citizens[179]—to the new State of
Louisiana; the eastern portion was incorporated in the Mississippi
Territory by an Act approved May 14, 1812.
To the territory of West Florida the United States had no right.
Their ownership of the country between the Iberville and the
Perdido was a usurpation which no other country was bound to
regard; indeed, at the moment when Congress subjected the shores
of Mobile Bay to the Mississippi Territorial government, Mobile was
still garrisoned by a Spanish force and ruled by the Spanish people.
The case of West Florida was the more curious, because in after
years the United States government, in order to obtain a title good
beyond its own borders, accepted the territory as a formal grant
from the King of Spain. Ferdinand VII., the grantor and only rightful
interpreter of his own grant,[180] inserted an article into the treaty of
1819 which was intended by him to discredit, and did in fact ignore,
the usurpations of the United States: “His Catholic Majesty cedes to
the United States, in full property and sovereignty, all the territories
which belong to him situated to the eastward of the Mississippi,
known by the names of East and West Florida.”[181] According to the
Acts of Congress, no territory known as West Florida belonged to the
King of Spain, but had been ceded to the United States as a part of
Louisiana. The admission by treaty in 1819 that Ferdinand VII. was
still sovereign over any territory known by the name of West Florida,
threw discredit on the previous acts of President and Congress, and
following the confusion due to the contradictory systems they had
pursued, created a chaos which neither proclamations, Acts of
Congress, treaties, nor decisions of the courts, numerous and
positive as they might be, could reduce to order. History cannot tell
by what single title the United States hold West Florida.
East Florida threatened to become a worse annoyance. In
January, 1811, as the story has told, the President, under authority
of a secret Act of Congress, sent George Matthews and John McKee
to take possession, under certain circumstances, of Mobile and
Fernandina. Their written instructions were singularly loose.[182] In
general they were to take possession of East Florida only in case the
Spanish authorities or “the existing local authority” should wish it, or
in case of actual British interference; but their conduct was to be
“regulated by the dictates of their own judgments, on a close view
and accurate knowledge of the precise state of things there, and of
the real disposition of the Spanish government.” Besides these
written instructions, Matthews professed to be guided by verbal
explanations of a stronger character. With the precedent of Baton
Rouge before his eyes, Matthews could not but assume that he was
sent to St. Mary’s for a practical object; and he found there a
condition of affairs that seemed to warrant him in acting with
energy. St. Mary’s River was filled with British vessels engaged in
smuggling British merchandise into the United States in defiance of
the Non-importation Act; while Amelia Island, on which the town of
Fernandina stood, was a smuggling depot, and the Spanish authority
an empty form, useful only for the protection of illicit trade.
Matthews’s official reports assumed as a matter of course an
intention in his Government to possess itself of East Florida. His
letters made no disguise of his own acts or intentions. After six
months of inquiry, he wrote to Secretary Monroe, Aug. 3, 1811, a
plain account of the measures necessary to be taken:[183]—
“I ascertained that the quiet possession of East Florida could not
be obtained by an amicable negotiation with the powers that exist
there; ... that the inhabitants of the province are ripe for revolt. They
are, however, incompetent to effect a thorough revolution without
external aid. If two hundred stand of arms and fifty horsemen’s
swords were in their possession, I am confident they would
commence the business, and with a fair prospect of success. These
could be put into their hands by consigning them to the commanding
officer at this post, subject to my order. I shall use the most discreet
management to prevent the United States being committed; and
although I cannot vouch for the event, I think there would be but little
danger.”
In October, Matthews communicated freely his plans and wishes
to Senator Crawford, and commissioned him to explain them to the
Government.[184] The President was fully acquainted with them, and
during six months offered no objection, but waited in silence for
Matthews to effect the revolution thus prepared.
Matthews carried out his mission by following the West Florida
precedent as he understood it. March 16, 1812, some two hundred
self-styled insurgents crossed the river, landed on Amelia Island, and
summoned the garrison of Fernandina to surrender. At the same
time the American gunboats, stationed on the river, took a position
to watch the movement. The Spanish commandant sent to inquire
whether the American gunboats meant to assist the insurgents, and
receiving an answer in the affirmative, he capitulated to the so-
called patriots.[185] Independence was declared; an independent
flag was raised; and when this formality ended, the patriots
summoned General Matthews, who crossed the river with a company