Henry Adams

“ We wish to know what measures they are willing to adopt for the safety of the nation. The crisis is awful. The time has come to unite the people of America. We join issue with the gentlemen as to a temporizing policy. We have not,—we will not now temporize. We say there is no middle course. We are in the first place for cutting off all intercourse with those Powers who trample on our rights. If that will not prove effectual, we say take the last alternative, war, with all its calamities, rather than submission or national degradation. ”

“ If they wish to appropriate a portion of the public revenue toward roads, canals, or for the purchase of arms and the improvement of their militia, they must consent that you who purchase your own arms, and have already roads, canals, and militia in most excellent order, shall have another portion of it devoted to naval protection. If they in the spirit of chivalry are ready to rush into an unnecessary and ruinous war with one nation, they must suffer you to pause before you bid an eternal adieu to your independence by an alliance with another. ”

“ With astonishing rapidity Virginia succumbed to ruin, while continuing to support the system that was draining her strength. No episode in American history was more touching than the generous devotion with which Virginia clung to the embargo, and drained the poison which her own President held obstinately to her lips. The cotton and rice States had less to lose, and could more easily bear bankruptcy; ruin was to them—except in Charleston—a word of little meaning; but the old society of Virginia could never be restored. Amid the harsh warnings of John Randolph it saw its agonies approach ”

“ Insane as such a policy might seem, Lord Grenville’s charge against ministers had solid ground.
Special interests were commonly blind to the general good. That the navy, the mercantile marine, and the colonies should have favored war with America was not surprising; but that the mania should have seized upon the English nation at large was a phenomenon to be explained only by general causes. The true explanation was not far to seek; the secret, if secret it could be called, was the inevitable result of Jefferson’s passion for peace,—social and political contempt. ”

“ The Spaniards themselves, the least progressive people in Europe, became by necessity democratic; not only the people, but even the governments of Austria and Germany felt the movement, and yielded to it; the Tories of England joined with the Whigs and Democrats in cheering a revolution which could not but shake the foundations of Tory principles; confusion became chaos, and while all Europe, except France, joined hands in active or passive support of Spanish freedom, America, the stronghold of free government, drew back and threw her weight on the opposite side. ”

“ So deeply diseased was American opinion that patriotism vanished, and the best men in the Union took active part with Lord Castlereagh and George Canning in lowering and degrading their own government. Not even Rufus King could see the selfishness of that Tory reaction which, without regard to Napoleon’s decrees, swept Great Britain into collision with the United States, and from which no act of Jefferson could have saved American interests. ”

“ Scandalized at the rapid evaporation of American courage, Turreau could explain it only as due to the natural defects of “a motley people, that will never have true patriotism, because it has no object of common interest;” a nation which looked on the most shameless outrages of its own virtue as only “unfortunate events.” Yet one point remained which, although to every American it seemed most natural, was incomprehensible to the Frenchman, whose anger with America was due not so much to the dependence of the United States on England, as to their independence of France. ”

“ Is the embargo a substitute, a milder form of compliance, with that harsh demand, which if exhibited in its naked and insulting aspect the American spirit might yet resent? Are we still to be kept profoundly ignorant of the declarations and avowed designs of the French Emperor, although these may strike at our liberty and independence? And in the mean time are we, by a thousand irritations, by cherishing prejudices, and by exciting fresh resentments, to be drawn gradually into a war with Great Britain? ”

“ The British nation was sometimes slow-witted, and often narrow-minded, but was not insane.
For a thousand years every step in the progress of England had been gained by sheer force of hand and will. In the struggle for existence the English people, favored by situation, had grown into a new human type,—which might be brutal, but was not weak; which had little regard for theory, but an immense and just respect for facts. America considered herself to be a serious fact, and expected England to take her at her own estimate of her own value ”

“ Going beyond either Perceval or Portland, he urged the expediency of stopping all trade with the enemy except through the medium of England,—“the effect of which must be either to distress them to such a degree as to induce a relaxation of their decrees, or to cause a great trade from this country. Its effect in case of an extension of hostility can certainly not be ascertained; but I am disposed to think that we cannot carry on war allowing our enemy advantages of commerce as in peace, and that if we only do what is right we must take our chance for the consequences.” ”

“ Whether this confederacy of the men of talents and property be regarded as a diversion of the power of the nation, as an efficient means of resistance to the general government in the event of a war, or the nucleus of an English party that will soon be formidable enough to negotiate for the friendship of Great Britain, it is in all respects very important; and I have well-founded reason to hope that a few months more of suffering and the suspension of everything collateral to commerce will reconcile the multitude to any men and any system which will promise them relief. ”

“ Desperate physical courage was the common quality on which all great races had founded their greatness; and the people of the United States, in discarding military qualities, without devoting themselves to science, were trying an experiment which could succeed only in a world of their own.
In charging America with having lost her national character, Napoleon said no more than the truth. As a force in the affairs of Europe, the United States had become an appendage to England. ”

“ Jefferson must have asked himself in vain what lessons of heroism or duty were taught by his system of peaceable coercion, which turned every citizen into an enemy of the laws,—preaching the fear of war and of self-sacrifice, making many smugglers and traitors, but not a single hero.
If the cost of the embargo was extravagant in its effects on the Constitution, the economy, and the morals of the nation, its political cost to the party in power was ruinous. War could have worked no more violent revolution. The trial was too severe for human nature to endure. ”

“ The result was that while embargo saved perhaps twenty millions of dollars a year and some thousands of lives which war would have consumed, it was still an expensive system, and in some respects more destructive than war itself to national wealth.
The economical was less serious than the moral problem. The strongest objection to war was not its waste of money or even of life; for money and life in political economy were worth no more than they could be made to produce. A worse evil was the lasting harm caused by war to the morals of mankind, which no system of economy could calculate. ”

“ The Peace of Tilsit, the Tory reaction in England, the bombardment of Copenhagen, the execution of the Berlin Decree in Holland, the threatened retaliation by Great Britain were events calculated to raise more than a doubt of the benefits which war could bring. In any case, the risks of commerce had become too great for legitimate trade; and every one felt that the further pursuit of neutral profits could end only in bringing America into the arms of one or the other of the Powers which were avowedly disputing pre-eminence in wrong. ”

“ If you do not resist, you are no longer a nation; you dare not call yourself so; you are the merest vassals conceivable.... I appeal to the minority, who hold the destinies of the nation in their grasp,—for they can enforce embargo without the bayonet,—I beg them, if they will not declare war, that they will do the best they can for their country.”
No one then wondered to see South Carolina almost on her knees before Massachusetts, beseeching her, on her own terms, for her own honor, to do the best she could for the common country ”

“ To defy danger, to rush into competition with every foreign rival, to take risks without number, and to depend wholly on themselves were admitted characteristics of Americans as individuals; but the same man who, when left to his own resources, delighted in proving his skill and courage, when brought within the shadow of government never failed to clamor for protection. As a political body the American people shrank from tests of its own capacity. “American systems” of politics, whether domestic or foreign, were systems for evading competition. ”

“ If the President, the Secretary of State, and great numbers of their stanchest friends hesitated to fight when a foreign nation, after robbing their commerce, fired into their ships of war, and slaughtered or carried off their fellow-citizens,—if they preferred “peaceable means of repressing injustice” at the moment when every nerve would naturally have been strung to recklessness with the impulse to strike back,—it was in the highest degree unlikely that they would be more earnest for war when time had deadened the sense of wrong. ”

“ Jefferson had hoped to make his country forever pure and free; to abolish war, with its train of debt, extravagance, corruption, and tyranny; to build up a government devoted only to useful and moral objects; to bring upon earth a new era of peace and good-will among men. ”

“ The rich could alone profit in the end; while the poor must sacrifice at any loss the little they could produce.
If war made men brutal, at least it made them strong; it called out the qualities best fitted to survive in the struggle for existence. To risk life for one’s country was no mean act even when done for selfish motives; and to die that others might more happily live was the highest act of self-sacrifice to be reached by man. War, with all its horrors, could purify as well as debase; it dealt with high motives and vast interests ”

“ Madison observed to me that it must be evident that the United States would enter upon measures of hostility with great reluctance, as he acknowledged that they are not at all prepared for war, much less with a Power so irresistibly strong as Great Britain; and that nothing would be thought to be too great a sacrifice to the preservation of peace, except their independence and their honor. He said that he did not believe that any Americans would be found willing to submit to (what he termed) the encroachments upon the liberty and the rights of the United States by the belligerents ”

“ Thus, on the eve of the session, the most careful critics agreed that Congress would avoid war, and would resist England, if at all, by commercial measures. The President and Madison, Turreau and Erskine, were united in expecting the same course of events. No one knew that Napoleon had enforced against American commerce the provisions of his Berlin Decree. France counted for nothing in the councils of America; but the conduct of England obliged Congress to offer some protest against aggression,—and the easiest form of protest was a refusal to buy what she had to sell. ”

“ England had never learned to strike soft in battle. She expected her antagonists to fight; and if they would not fight, she took them to be cowardly or mean. Jefferson and his government had shown over and over again that no provocation would make them fight; and from the moment that this attitude was understood, America became fair prey. Jefferson had chosen his own methods of attack and defence; but he could not require England or France to respect them before they had been tried. ”

“ To suppose that law so elastic, or lawyers with minds so fertile, could discover no warrant for Berkeley’s act was preposterous. To neutral commerce England had no legal right; yet she took it, and her lawyers invented a title. To her citizens and seamen she actually had a legal right, recognized by every court in Christendom; and if after a fair demand on the neutral government she found that her right could be satisfied only by violating neutral jurisdiction, the lawyers, in view of all their other decisions, must hold that such violation was a matter of expediency and not of law. ”

“ Whatever transient sacrifices war may occasion, they will not believe it consistent either with their interest or dignity to acknowledge the monstrous principle and the anarchy which that government wishes to establish on the seas. If it be useful and honorable for all nations to cause the true maritime law of nations to be re-established, and to avenge the insults committed by England against every flag, it is indispensable for the United States, who from the extent of their commerce have oftener to complain of those violations. War exists then in fact between England and the United States ”