Ms Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924091024665 In compliance with current copyright law, Cornell University Library produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1992 to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. 2001 HISTORICAL SKETCH SECOND WAR BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND GREAT BEITAIN, DECLAKED ET ACT OF CONGRESS, THE 18th OP JUNE, 1812, AND CONCLUDED BY PEACE, THE 15th OF FEBRUARY, 1815. BY CHARLES J. INGERSOLL. EMBRACING THE EVENTS OF 1814. PHILADELPHIA: LEA AND BLANCHARD. 1849. Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by LEA AND BLANCHARD, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. PHILADELPHIA: T. K. AND P. a, COLLINS, PRINTERS. TABLE CHAPTERS AND CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Conquest of Canada, 17, 19. Parties in United States, state of, 19, 21. Loans, American and English, of 1814, 21, 22. Militia withheld by State of Massachusetts, 22, 23. Lawrence's funeral discountenanced, 23, 24. General Eastern dissatisfaction, 24. Opposition to war in Maryland, 24. Luther Martin's charge to Grand Jury, 24, 25, and Judge Poindexter's charge in Mississippi, 25. Governors of New England States, 25, 26. Governor Chittenden orders back militia of Ver- mont, 26. Sharp's resolutions thereupon in Congress, and Otis's resolutions in Legislature of Massachu- setts, 27. Boston project of sectional peace, 27. Prisoners of war released by Massachusetts, 28,29. , Pennsylvania legislation thereon, 29. Resolutions of Legislature of Massachusetts, 29, 30. Dexter's letter, disapproving opposition, 30. Return of remnant of garrison of Chicago, 31, 32. Newfoundland Fisheries — proceedings at St . Johns, 32. Texas, Mexico, Spanish American revolutions, 33, 34. Neutrality of American government thereupon, 35. European war — Napoleon orders frigates on American model, 34. English Regent's speeches in Parliament against United States — make an issue of naval superi- ority, 35, 36. Washington and New Orleans threatened, 36. Duke of Sussex, at public meeting in London, de- clares that war is to put down French demo- cracy, 36. Canning urges in Parliament perpetual war fill British naval reverses are smothered in vic- tories over Americans, 37, 38. War between Great Britain and the United States prosecuted by the former forcing the latter, fortunate for the- United States, 37. CHAPTER U. Second session of war Congress, 38. Embargo urged by President, and enacted, 38, 39. License and illicit trade with the enemy exten- sive till condemned judicially, 39, 40. Allen, British Consul at Boston, prosecuted for it, escapes, 41. His activity in it censured by the British admi- rals and minister — their correspondence on the subject, 42, 43. Swiss informer's disclosures, 4i, 45. Count Stuarton's application, 43. John Graham's secret mission to Massachusetts, 45, 47. Sir George Prevost's detected secret instructions, 45. Royalist Secret Association, 47. Swiss informer's letters, 47, 50. British minister and consid-general detected dis- tributing licenses, 50. Debate on embargo, 50, 51. British government bills, 52. Blockade extended to New England, 53. Blue light signals to enemy deuouncedty Deca- tur, 53. Impressment of Hiram Thayer, 54, 55. Impressment of John Lewis, 55. Execution of Joseph Warburton, 55. Arrival of brig Bramble with rejection by Eng- land of Russian mediation, 55, 56. News of British European success, 56. Act of Congress to preserve and display cap- tured flags, 57. French influence charged in Congress, 58. Question in Congress of appropriation without estimates, 58. Naval estab'ishments of "United States, 59. English deprecation of, 59. Army of United States, 60-62. Lieutenant-general proposed, 62. Contemplated changes of administration, 62. Treasury report — Timidity of government, 63. Debate on the Loan Bill — Webster, . Forsyth, Calhoun, 64-67. Embargo repealed, and restrictive system con- demned, 69, 70. Supplies, whether withheld, 72, CONTENTS. Laws proposetl, but not passed, 73. Resolutions in Senate questioning President's power to fill vacant places, 74. CHAPTER III. Crogban and Sinclair's expedition to Michili- macinac, 75. Its failure, 76. British naval gallantry, by surprise and capture of United States schooners Tigress and Scor- pion, 77, 78. CHAPTER IV. Canadian Parliament, 78. " Indian treaty, 79. Captain Holmes' expedition, 80, 81. British repulsed at Otsego, 81, 82. " " Plattsburg, 82. '• Big Sandy Creek, 82. Americans repulsed at La Cole Mill, 82, 83. British enterprise at Pettipaug, 84. Brown's Canadian campaign, 85-87. Fort Erie taken, 88. Battle of Chippewa, 89-92. Battle of Bridgewater, 95-99. General Brown's diary, 100-105. General Jessup's narrative, 106-108. Reflections on war and its effects in the United States, 110-112. Importance of Brown's campaign, 113, 114. CHAPTER V. Penobscot valley claimed by England, 114. Eastport captured, 115. And Castine, 116. Sloop of war, the John Adams, destroyed, 117. Penobscot valley disgracefully surrendered, 118. Holmes' speech on the defection of Massachu- setts, 119. The ships of the line and frigate Constitution at Boston and Portsmouth, abandoned by the State authorities, 120, 121. Defended by Bainbridge and the people of Bos- ton, ]21i Disloyalty of Massachusetts repaid by British depredations, 122. CHAPTER VI. Battles of Plattsburg, 123. General Izard's departure thence, and Prevost^s advance, 124. Macomb's force and preparations, 125. British and American squadrons on Lake Cham- plain, 126. Battle on the lake, 127. Land battle, 128. British retreat, 129. Account by a Vermont volunteer, 131. Macdonough's exemplary piety, its tendency to a great maritime reform, 132, Governor Chittenden's proclamation, 133, 134. Testimony of the English press to the superiority of the Amarican navy, 135, 137. English deprecation of any peace till their naval reverses are atoned for, 138. Prevost's expedition to penetrate New York, ordered by English ministry, 139. American and British navy, 140, 141. British vessels of vi'ar ordered to avoid Ameri- cans — remarkable similarity of early Ameri- can and subsequent British orders in this respect, 141, 142. English complaints of American naval enter- prises, 143, 144. CHAPTER VII. Siege and assault of Fort Erie, 145, 146. General Izard's march to Niagara, 147-149. Brown's" sortie from Fort Erie, 150. General Jessup's account of it, 151, 152. Izard's junction with Brown, 153. General Bissell defeats Marquis of Tweedale, 154. American forces abandon Canada, 154. American and British fleets on Lake Ontario, 155. General McArthur's expedition, 156. CHAPTER VIII. British hostilities in the Chesapeake, 156. Barney's flotilla there, 157. False confidence at Washington, 158. Cochrane's fleet with Ross' army enters the Chesapeake, 158, 159. British barbarous hostilities, 160. Cockburn induces Ross to march to Washington, when in pursuit of Bsirney, 161. Barney's flotilla burned by order of government, 162. Alarm at Washington — Cabinet meeting, 162. Tidings from France of British successes and Bourbons restored, 162, 163. Admiral Cockburn ofEcially announces war of devastation, 164. General Winder appointed to command new military disti'ict, comprehending Washington, 164, 165. Alarm at Washington, 165. Troops march thence, but are not allowed to encounter the enemy, 165. British march to Washington, 166. American forces at Battalion Old Field, 167. Baltimore troops at Bladensburg, 168. Distraction of government and troopsflSO. Inquiry by Congress into the cause of American discomfiture, 170. Superseded by news of Jackson's success, 171. British views of battle of Bladensburg, 172. Battle of Bladensburg, 173. American malformation — British hesitation, at- tack, and instant success, 174. Madison's retreat, 177. Battle resumed, and British worsted by Barney and Miller, 178, 179. Minor's Virginia regiment, 180. Evacuation and burning of Washington, 181-5. Ross and Cockburn sup by the light of the Pre- sident's house in flames, 1 86. Intelligence oflioe burned — Post-office saved, 188. CONTENTS. General Rosa deplores his conduct at Washing- ton, 190. General Koss hastily retreats by night, after a vioient storm, in great alarm, 190, 191. Account by an inhabitant of Bladensburg, 191-5. Barbarity of the sack of Washington, 196. Its beneficial effects at home and abroad, 197. Not more formidable than Dutch at london, 198. Denounced in Parliament by Mackintosh, 199. British accounts of their alarm and retreat, 200. French minister at Washington, 201. Alexandria plundered, 202. Defeat and death of Sir Peter Parker, 203. Removal of archives from Washington, 204. Mrs. Madison's stay and flight, 205-7. Her saving the picture of Washington, 206. Madison's flight into Virginia, 208, 209. His return to Washington, 209. Armstrong compelled to resign, 210. CHAPTER IX. British attack Baltimore, 210. Battle of North Point and death of Ross, 211. Attack and defence of Fort McHenry, 212. British, worsted by land and water, retreat pre- cipitately in the nightj 213. The " SlarSpangled Banner," written by Francis Key during bombardment, 214. American basis for peace presented by American ministers at Ghent the day that Washington was burned, 215. Mr. Clay's note to the British ministers there, informing them of the defeat and death of Ross, 21.5. British ministerial mistake as to effect of capture of Washington, 2 1 5. Little effect of British hostilities in America, 215. Their permanent benefits to manufactures more than compensatory for temporary interruption of commerce, 215. Retributive justice inflicted everywhere, espe- cially at New Orleans, on British prolongation of war for vengeance and conquest, 216. CHAPTER X. Hartford Convention, 216. Its guilt denied, but infamy confessed, 217. Plumer's account of its origin in 1803 on the acquisition of Louisiana, 218. Design of disunion denounced to Jefferson by Adams in 1808, 218. Henry's mission — he exonerates the people of New England, 219. Purchase of Louisiana, 220. Proposed meeting thereupon at Boston, 221. Plumer's and Adams' averments of disunion de- nied, 221,222. Conclusions and question resulting, 222. No legal treason, but extreme disaffection, 224. Publications for disunion — meeting for it, 225. Otis and Quincy, 226. Noah Webster's account of origin of the Hartford Convention, 226, 227. Daniel Webster's aversion to it — Otis' account, 227. Otis' resolutions for State army, and denounce- ment of Federal Constimtion, 227. Protests of minorities in Legislature of -Massa- chusetts, 228. Violence of leaders checked by timidity, 229. Convention odious out of New England, 229. States not unanimous in New England, 229, 230. Connecticut mediates — New Hampshire de- clines — Vermont rejects, 230. Polity of Connecticut — legislation — partisans op- pose governor, 230, 231. Meeting of Convention at Hartford, 232. Timorous and harmless resolves, 233. Holmes' speech in Senate of Massachusetts, 234. Lieutenant-Colonel Jessup's recruiting rendez- vous at Hartford, and secret mission tliere, 235. Public sentiment of Connecticut and British opinion, 236. Jessup's suggestion to Goodrich, 237, 238. Act of Assembly against enlistment of minors, 239. Adjournment of Convention, 239. Delegates to visit Washington, 240. Suspicious disclosure by letter from Washington, 240. Boston Gazette proclaims submission to England, 241. Conditions of that submission, 241, Convention delegates, on their way to Washing- ton, encounter news of Jackson's victories and peace, 241. Mr. Adams' averment of treason controverted by Connecticut members of Congress, 243. Disaffected in Massachusetts dismayed by Jack- son's victories, 244. Disgrace of Hartford Convention pronounced by John Quincy Adams, 244. His death, character and obsequies, 244— 248. CHAPTER XI. Bank of United States attem„ptedin 1814, 249. New York petitions presented in Congress, 249. Simon Snyder's veto of new banks in Pennsylva- nia, 250. All banks south of New England stop payment on the capture of Washington, 251. Treasury distress and infirmity, 252. George W. Campbell appointed Secretary, 253. His resignation, 254. Alexander James Dallas appointed, 255. Recommends national bank as the only relief, 256. Bill reported accordingly. Mr. Calhoun's project of a bank, 255. Rejected, 257. Senate's plan, 258. Stock controversies, 258, 259. Bank rejected by Speaker Cheve's vote, 260.' Agitation thereupon, 261, 262. McKee's plan passes both Houses, 260, 261 . Vetoed by the President, 261. News of peace discountenances bank projects, 261, 262. Bank Bill indefinitely postponed, 262. Taxes imposed by Dallas' recommendation — his resignation, 263. CONTENTS. CHAPTER XII. Bank chartered, 263. United States seldom without national bank — recommended by every Secretary of the Trea- sury, 263, 264. President Jackson opposed to it, 264. Change of his cabinet, 265. Van Buren rejected by the Senate, and recalled from England, 266. Clayton's committee — report, 267. Jackson's successive cabinets favorable to re- charter of bank, and the v/ar republican party, 268. Nicholas Biddle at Washington soliciting re- charter, 269. Senate majority for the bank, 269. Mr. Biddle advised not to urge recharter till after Jackson's re-election, 269. His difficulties and efforts to overcome them, 269. Bank bill, passed by both Houses, vetoed, 270. Made a party question, in which Jackson tri- umphed, 27J,-272. Affair of the 3 per cent, stocks, 272. " French draft, 273, 274. Jackson determined to withdraw deposites, 275. Jackson's eastern journey, 276. Mr. Duane, 277. Cabinet council, 278. Mr. Duane dismissed — and Mr. Taney appointed, 279. Removal of deposites, 280. Proceedings in Congress, 281. Deposite act of 1836, 282. Jackson's plan of bank, 283, 284. State banks stop payment, 285. Nicholas Biddle, 285, 286. Bank vetoed by Tyler, 287. CHAPTER XHL Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Bayard at St. Petersburg, 288. Russian mediation rejected, 289. French opinion of it, 290. English vengeance on America, 291. Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Bayard in London, 292. Mr. Gallatin's letters, 293, 294. London festival for peace, 294, 295. Mr. Gallatin's interview with Alexander, 296. Spanish designs on IiOuisiana, 297, 298. Commissioners at Ghent, 298, 299. English designs of conquest, 299, 300. Cobbett's animadversion on them, 301. Overture of conference at Ghent, 302. British sine qua uon, 304. Probable rupture of negation, 305. Reaction in the United States on disclosure of terms, 306, 307. British terms denounced in Parliament, 308. Sudden change of hostile tone, 309. Signature of treaty, 310. Approved by Wellington at Paris, 310. Peace rumors and belief in United States, 311. The treaty unwelcome to British pride necessary to British peace, 312, 313. State of England, 314, 315. England at the Congress of Vienna, 316. Peace welcome, but not needful to this country, 317. HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WAR OF 1812. CHAPTER I. CANADA— STATE OF PARTIES— LOANS— MASSACHUSETTS OPPOSITION— LAWRENCE'S FUNERAL— MARYLAND OPPOSITION— LUTHER MARTIN'S CHARGE TO GRAND JURY —JUDGE POINDEXTER'S CHARGE IN MISSISSIPPI— GOVERNORS OF CONNECTICUT, RHODE ISLAND, NEW HAMPSHIRE AND VERMONT— GOVERNOR CHITTENDEN'S RE- FUSAL OF MILITIA— SHARP'S RESOLUTIONS IN CONGRESS THEREUPON— OITS'S RESOLUTIONS IN THE LEGIS^LATURE OF MASSACHUSETTS, WHO DISCHARGE PRI- SONERS OF WAR FROM THE PRISONS OF THAT STATE— SEPARATE PEACE FOR NEW ENGLAND PROPOSED IN BOSTON— JOINT COMMITTEE OF LEGISLATURE RE- PORT VIOLENT MEASURES— DEXTER'S LETTER— RETURN OF THE GARRISON OF CHICAGO — NEWFOUNDCAND FISHERIES — MEXICO— SOUTH AMERICA— EUROPEAN WARFARE — ENGLAND — REGENT'S SPEECHES TO PARLIAMENT — ENGLISH SUC- CESSES— BERNADOTTE AND MOREAU— SPEECH OF THE DUKE OF SUSSEX— CAN- NING PROCLAIMS WAR FOR NAVAL ASCENDANT. The capitol was the observatory from ■which events and impressions of the years 1812 and 1813 were described in a former volume of this historical sketch. As the war went on, American disasters de- creased ; and the year 1814, to be presented in this volume, with severer trials, better fortunes, and admirable exploits, will bring us before it ends to satisfactory and lasting peace. Surveying the state of this and other countries, from the close of the first -Beasion of the Thirteenth Congress, early in August, wiU prepare us for the opiening of the second session in December, 1813. Having imposed a tolerable system of stiU deferred taxation, and made other in- adequate provision for war, Congress ad- journed, hoping that the future would be less disastrous than the past, the whole government flattering themselves that se- verer trials of republican institutions might be avoided ; for European convictions were much more prevalent then than now, when they are still by no means extinct, that republics are incapable of hostilities. A government by the tenure of popular favor cannot save itself, in war, from the dis- credit of defeated armies by changing a ministry : but Madison's administration could maintain power as well as place by nothing less than victory or peace. Eigh- teen of the first months of that war were unfortunately sacrificed to hopes of peace without due efforts of war. When delusive 2 " hope ceased, strenuous exertion began, and as usual, fortune favored bravery,- even though constrained and tardy. In the ardor of his temper declaring that peace must be dictated under the walls of Quebec, Mr. Clay spoke the voice of the whole West, most of the South and Central States, in short, of nearly all the six millions of su})- porters of the administration and the war. The disgraceful failure of their greatest Canadian enterprise, under Wilkinson and Hampton, with Armstrong'spersonal super- intendence as Secretary of War on the scene of action, ending with the stiU more igno- minious surprise and capture of Fort Niagara, the American Gibraltar, extin-. guishing all' immediate prospect of the conquest of Canada, gave the one-fourth of the country opposed to the war and ad- ministration, represented in Congress by one-third of the members of both Houses, unexpected and great advantage. War of conquest by that invasion, contra- distinguishing it from defensive war, was a principal theme of the peace party, while the advocates of administration argued its necessity as the best means of defence. As the Canadas must be ours eventually, our most strenuous endeavors should be to realize, it was said, what the patriots of the Revolution attempted as indispensable to American ascendency and continental security. One ,of those British provinces embraces and commands the outlet and 18 entrance, sharing, if it does not engross, the commerce of the great valley of the St. Lawrence, which in magnitude and im- portance corresponds north to the valley of the Mississippi, south. Quebec, like New Orleans, by nature is the only vesti- bule from sea of a greater extent of coun- try than any other in the world. More than ten millions must ultimately inhabit the borders of the St. Lawrence, and de- velop its resources ; either French or Ame- ricans, nearly all averse to English do- minion, and needing only American coun- tenance to manifest their attachments to the United States. The people of the west, Ohio and Kentucky and Michigan, were clamorous for the incorporation with them of contiguous regions overrun by nomadic barbarians, continually excited by- the En- glish to check American extension by drenching the frontiers in blood. Canada, if not part of the United States, they con- tended, would soon oppose them by form- ing with New England a hostile combina- tion to impede western growth: and the longer the prevention of that eventuality was put off, the more difficult would it be to prevent it at all. With Canadian neighbors under British sway, there is no chance of national north-eastern enlarge- ment or even vicinal tranquillity ; but a hostile kingdom, three thousand miles off, may control or sunder naturally united States, colonize and monopolize them, an- nihilating advantages by nature Ameri- can, republican and vast. Facilities and advantages of traffic and intercourse, since considerably realized without national union of the opposite sides of the St. Lawrence and the Lakes, were argued by far-sighted views, short of the present and infinitely short of the indubitable future of those regions. Without foresight of the prodigious trade, travel, and growth of what is called the western country, by rapid transportation of men and things from New Orleans by Chicago, Sandusky, Buffalo, New York and Boston, prov- ing that unrestricted communication all through and round North America is the obvious destiny and incalculable advan- tage of its free inhabitants, it was in 1813 urged as feasible by a few simple and cheap improvements, though railroads were not contemplated and canals only hoped for, to convey flour and other produce from the Ohio to the St. Lawrence in twenty-five days, for a dollar per hundred weight ; and troops with similar celeritj and economy. The government of the United States could collect an army of a hundred thousand men on the St. Lawrence in a few weeks ; so that Quebec, once taken, might be held in spite of England, at inconsiderable ex- pense, readily estimated and provided. Once ours, the Canadas would be forever divorced from British sovereignty ; and CANADA, [1813. I our means of effecting it were as obvious as hers were impracticable.. All exertion of British force in Canada must always be extremely hazardous, expensive and un- certain ; whereas distances, seas, seasons and tempests were our unconquerable al- lies. No expedition or armament from Europe can take place, except in five of the twelve months, from June to October, while the whole twelve months are at our command, and winter, v,rhen nature by frost and snow turnpikes the earth, winter, if well used, is the best time of all. No European enterprise could reach Canada till we have timely notice to frustrate it. British troops, even landed at Quebec, en- counter immense difficulties to get as far as Montreal or Kingston. To send ten thou- sand loads of provisions or anything else from Montreal to Kingston, between De- cember and March, the best if not the only- time for it, requires that a train or sled must be loaded- every three minutes in every day during eight hours, which is impossible. Ordnance, barrack or naval stores could not be carried in time ; which no contractor would incur the ruin of un- dertaking ; adding space as another of our defences. Napoleon's army, exterminated by the Bussian winter of 1812, was pleaded as the fate of any English attempt to retake Canada after Kingston, Montreal and Que- bec were once garrisoned by American troops. Such views sometimes embraced all North America, not confined to the Canadas alone, and New Brunswick was indicated as the most certain way to the conquest of Canada. The province of New Brunswick, adjoining Maine, then part -of Massachusetts ; the Canadas conterminous for hundreds of miles with Vermont and New York, by the lakes with Pennsylvania and Ohio ; Passamaquaddy Bay and the River St. Croix, disputed ground between Maine and New Brunswick ; the Grand Bank whence American fishermen had gathered their gains from a nursery of British seamen, began to be considered as legitimate pursuits of American warfare ; and if New England had co-operated in 1814, would have been attempted, perad- venture taken from Great Britain. Besides the Canadian territorial there was also an ocean view of the subject, pre- sented chiefly by the farming and planta- tion Americans, foremost in waging war for maritime rights. How, said they, can we make our mighty foe most sensible of American power? Not on the ocean, but in his landed possessions. To harass Eng- land by sea, or even striking the trident from her gripe, may lower the British crest, mortify her pride, and 'affect indeed the European sentiment of British naval supe- riority. It is no doubt theoretical and future advantage, but will not injure lite wresting from iier grasp most of the Tast CffAf. I.] CANADA. — • — -territories held on this continent. The Bword-fish has stung the Leviathan of the -deep, but without destroying, or much diminishing his present powers. The mon- ster furiously lashes the waves, more in anger than from injury or suffering. His jiaval superiority is undermined ; leave it to decay, while our marine, without fur- ther risk, reposes on its glorious lau- rels. The naval means of the United States are too small to conquer either indemnity ibr the past, or complete security for the juture. British American soil is the natu- ral and certain element of both. American armies occupying British territories pre- liminary to their annexation to the United .States, would make Great Britain feel the superior power of a despised and injured nation to redress its wrongs. To these reasons for persevering in the conquest of Canada, the government jour- nal added another. .At all times opposing that invasion, the peace party insisted that at any rate during the pending of the Bus- -sian mediation, it was especially unjustifi- able ; Mr. Gaston and other members of Congress proposing to suspend not only (that, but all other hostilities pending sup- .posed negotiation. Protesting, of course, -that it spoke without authority, or even knowledge of the views of government, the .semi-official organ divulged not only a set- -tled resolve to prosecute the invasion of Canada, but to hold it if taken, notwith- standing and after peace. Suppose Mon- .treal in our possession, as we trust it will •be, said the Intelligencer, whenever peace is made, surely that case will be provided -for by any treaty that may be made. The American commissioners will be guilty of .gross inattention not to provide for our .holding whatever we possess when war ends. In England, there was an opinion cur- -rent throughout the years 1809, '10, '11, and '12, that it would be better for England that the Canadas should belong to the United States. The question, it is believed, was con- sidered in council, but opposed on account of the fisheries, the West India supplies, -and the Neivfoundland nursery for seamen. When Foster was appointed British min- -ister, the cession of Canada was suggested as the best means of avoiding collision with the United States. Nova Scotia was the place of refuge of many of the American .refugees in the revolution, who cherished the hostile feeling which tended to produce .the war. They and their descendants in Canada and England, planted seeds of hos- .tOity extremely bitter and vindictive. But -the wise, provident, and pacific of England .argued, that peace and commerce with the ^United States would be more profitable for • Great Britain than Canada or Nova Scotia. - The chances of war by an overruling -Providepce disappointed all American-raad 19 British expectations of territorial conquest, and planted peace on the basis of mere cessation of hostilities, with their causes. If, by the uti possidetis, England expected to keep New Orleans, and the United State? hoped to get Quebec, both of their-greatest military enterprises, and all territorial ag- grandizement, ours north, and theirs south, perhaps fortunately failed. In this volume, little will be said of the negotiations and their principles terminating m the treaty of Ghent. But it may be premised here, that since that second pacification, two other territorial treaties with Great Britain prove, as every treaty with her does, that this country is better matched with that in arms, than its government in negotiations. The United States, from the peace of Inde- pendence in 1783, achieved by war, and , merely acknowledged by treaty, have al- ways lost by treaty, but never by war with England. By the Maine treaty we sur- rendered more of old Massachusetts than the English Conquered in 1814; and by the treaty of Oregon what has been justly called the New England, that is the mari- time part, of Oregon: on both occasions, un- der that dread of war with England,of which the occurrence is improbable, and suffer- ings exaggerated. That unfounded. appre- hension, haunting the Atlantic States, by inconsiderate deprecation of war, is Eng- land's greatest American power. Less than five hundred, thousand British sub- jects, scattered over North America in 1813-14, with all their European reinforce- ments, could not withstand eight miUiona of Americans, if duly marshalled for con- flict and the conquest, not of Canada only, but all British America. With the more than twenty millions at present, nearly equal to the population of Great Britain, the apprehension is as injurious as humili- ating, that on this continent, this country cannot cope with England. Rational ast- surance of the contrary, in spite of a por- tion of New England most interested and able to realize it- by English expulsion from America, began to be impressed by the events of 1814, when England, sud- denly abandoning extensive invasion with proclaimed violations of civilized warfare, and corresponding enormity of oouditioiLS of peace, by concessions prevented ano- ther campaign, which might have repaid all the -American cost and sufierings of the contest, by North Western and, perhaps, North Eastern annexations to the. United States ; leaving them, indeed, with the be- neficial honors of defensive, but without what might have been the still greater ad- vantages of offensive war. The numbers and zeal of the war's sup- porters increased with its progress. Mis- fortunes and trials did not diminish or. cool deep-rooted 'popular feelings, eventually cultivated by triumph. The electipnsj.^f 20 STATE OF PARTIES. [1813. 1813, between the first and second sessions of Congress, were favorable to the admin- istration. Party antagonism and acerbity indeed augmented, as hostilities became exacerbated: but the polls indicated, gene- rally, that the heart of the American peo- ple was for war. New York, the principal theatre of hostilities, and line of separation between the non-combatant Eastern States and those of the centre, west, and south, all inclined for war, and that by Canadian conquest — New York was, as since, called from the numbers and wealth of her peo- ple, her commerce and improvements, then the Empire State, because the contest and, perhaps, the Union depended on her fidelity. By re-electing Governor Tompkins, the peo- ple not only seconded his ardor for the war, but in effect instructed him to say to New England emphatically, disunion goes no farther than your own borders ; here it will be crushed. Virginia, by her state authori- ties and delegations in Congress, supported the war with energy. Pennsylvania stood forth with all her twenty-two members of Congress and both Senators unanimous for war, offensive and defensive ; and nearly to a man for the administration as well as for the war. Of ninety-five members in the House of Representatives of that State; eighty-five were of that adherence, includ- ing the metropolitan city of Philadelphia, and all but three counties of the whole State, which three counties sent only ten members to the State House of Representa- tives. The only federalist in Congress, John Gloninger, elected by a majority of three hundred votes to represent the mid- land German counties of Lancaster, Dau- phin, and Lebanon, having voted against the taxes and resigned, Edward Crouch, of the war and administration party, was chosen to his place by a majority of seven- teen hundred. Michael Lsib, a war Sena- tor, but opposed to Madison's administra- tion, venturing to exchange his scat in the Senate for the place of Postmaster at Philadelphia, by appointment of Gideon Granger, the Postmast«r-Gcneral, also un- friendly to Madison's administration. Gran- ger was removed, and the warlike Governor of Ohio, Return Jonathan Meigs, put in his place ; Leib was removed and Dallas' son- in-law, Richard Baohe, put in his place; and Jonathan Roberts, an active member of the House of Representatives, earnestly supporting the war and the administration, was elected to succeed Leib in the Senate. The war and Madison's administration, sus- tained by New York, Virginia, and Penn- • sylvania, relied on the three first rank States with all branches of thoir governments and ■ large majorities of their people. Of States of the second rank, Kentucky and South Cai'olina were for the war and government unanimously. North Carolina nearly so ; yf hose State Senate, on the motion of John Branch, by a large majority, censured Da- vid Stone, one of their Senators in Congress, for backwardness to second the administra- tion. Of second rank States, Massachusetts was the disaffected one, by a large majority opposed to the federal administration, but not to the extent of the violent, if not trea- sonable opposition, imputed by John Quincy Adams to certain federalists there. Of the third r^nk States, Ohio, Tennessee, and Georgia, were unanimous for war, and Jersey joined them in 1813 ; to which Con- necticut and Maryland were opposed ; Con- necticut, by a unanimous delegation sent to Congress by State vote ; Maryland in her State government, but not in Congress, where the members were chosen by dis- tricts. Vermont and New Hampshire, also third rank States, nearly balanced in votes, were represented in Congress, Vermont by war. New Hampshire by peace members, all chosen by general -ticket. Of the fourth rank States, Rhode Island and Delaware were represented in both branches of Con- gress by peace, and Louisiana by war mem- bers. Thus, twelve States supported, four or five opposed, war, for which there were at least five or six millions of the people to between one and two millions, if so many, against it. District, instead of State elec- tions, would have divided the delegations in Congress from Connecticut, New Hamp- shire, and Vermont, which were unani- mous, the two former against, the latter for war. The votes and population of Rhode Island and Delaware were not important, except by their disproportionate weight in the benate, while opposition, as usual, in- creased in violence as it decreased in num- bers, popularity, and strength. Under every discouragement, however, the war spiritpre- dominated. The martial west, Ohio, Ken- tucky, and Tennessee, were all in arms, ready to march anywhere, to wage war offensive as well as defensive. More than seventeen thousand volunteers marched from Kentucky alone. Was not their pa- triotism wiser than the disloyalty, at once calculating and passionate, of the East? Referred to tliat selfish test by which all men must bo tried, war, with its expendi- tures, was even more lucrative than sullen refusal to share its trophies and emolu- ments. An Eastern federal merchant, writing in 1813, from Lexington, Kentucky, to Boston, stated in a published letter — " I find, in this country, an entire reverse of New England in regard to business. Hero there is no competition, and every- thing brisk and profitable. The war, so far from depressing the people of the West- ern States, is making the greater propor- tion of them rich. 'To this you may attri- bute a part of their patriotism, although to do them Justice, they are the most patriotic people 1 have ever soon or heard of. When Governor Shelby issued his late proolama- Chap. I.] LOANS. — » — tion for volunteers, a large proportion of those who marched, were respectable farm- ers with large possessions — many entirely independent in property, leaving large and respeotabte families ; and some at the age of fifty years and a great many over forty, with no expectations of benefit or pay, find- ing their own horses and equipments. — This singular patriotism is glorious and astonishing. Many men of the first charac- ter have, in former campaigns, volunteered, and some have lost their lives. These things to a New .Englandroau look like madness — here it is considered glorious, as it really is. With such ardor and patriot ism, should it pervade all ranks of the United States, our country could war suc- cessfully against aU the forces England and France could bring against us. Here are a few opposers to the war, but no enemies to our country; we have a few who are termed federalists, but not like those of New England. I am considerably altered in my opinions of the effect of the war, and although I believe it will be injurious to the merchants on the seaboard, yet it will teach our countrymen that they are more independent than was ever considered ; and will induce men of enterprise to engage in profitable branches of manufacturing, that otherwise would not have been known for many years to come." With such popular and State support, act- ing Secretary Jones siicceededin 1813 in ef- fecting another smaU loan, seven millions and a half, of dollars, authorized by Act of Congress in August of that year. Many persons of influence and authority, Timothy IPickering by newspaper publications, and Alexander Hanson in his Federal Repub- lican newspaper, both members of Con- gress, with several other presses, declared it a duty of patriotism to defeat the Go- vernment by destroying its credit,, and urged that national debts contracted for £0 unjust a war should notbe paid. The State rate of interest, seven per cent, in two States and eight in a third, together with brokers depreciating loans for specu- lation and merchants from party opposition, conflicted with a national loan at six per cent. Moreover, the taxes laid did not go into operation till the beginning of the next year, 1814. Without taxation or victory the last measure of momentary fiscal relief was with difficulty accomplished. The sums borrowed in the United States and England that year for hostilities were in remarkable contrast as to amount and facility of obtaining them: resembling each other only in both being dearly pur- chased, owing to their payment in bank notes of depreciated paper, unconvertible into gold or silver. Napoleon's immense contest of his final year was maintained without loans and on a coin basis. While Has Fait.ed States, aUnost fr^e froni debt, 21 and with great substantial resonjces of capital, in land, industry, and other na- tional wealth, but without artificial credit, with difficulty borrowed about a million and a half pounds sterling ($7,500,000), Eng- land, enormously taxed and indebted, by the magic of mere credit and enthusiasm, which are both no more than public confi- dence, founded, indeed, on taxation, had no difficulty in borrowing one hundred and thirty millions of dollars (£27,000,000 ster- ling). In neither country was any money paid or received in these transactions. In England payment was made to create and found a new stock by transfer of other stocks to the sinking fund, and by exchequer bills and bank notes. The Bank of Eng- land had then been dealing by law for sixteen years under what is called suspen- sion of cash or specie payments ; which is stoppage or bankruptcy from inability to pay any money at all, but bank notes sub- stituted, and by Act of Parliament made legal tender as money. Though less depre- ciated than American continental njoney during the He volution, yet the Bank of England paper.by legal inconvertibility into coin,was inl813much more depreciated than the national stocks, treasury notes, or notes . of respectable State banks of the United States then, or at any time during the war of 1812. The Bank of England circulation in 1813 was forty-three millions, risen from twelve millions in 1807 ; and the worth of its notes depreciated in that proportion, which depreciation exceeded one-third of their coin and former value. A one pound note, by Act of Parliament, declared good for twenty shillings sterling, would iaot buy as much as three dollars, which were valued at four shillings and sixpence each ; that is, the Bank of England note was worth only fourteen shillings and sixpence, while the doUar in 1813 was advanced to six shillings and ninepence. One ounce of Portuguese gold, worth in the United States seventeen dollars and sixty cents, was worth in England twenty-three dollars and thirty-one cents, or five pounds and five shillings sterling. So that forty per cent, advance was the medium English value or productiveness of gold or silver compared with Bank of Eng- land notes.. To raise twenty-seven millions, therefore, the amount of the English loan of 1813, the British Government had to give forty-fiv« millions nine hundred thousand pounds sterling : twenty-nine millions seven hundred thousand pounds of which, at three per cent., and sixteen millions two hundred thousand pounds at four per cent., pro- ducing together an interest of one million five hundred and twenty-nine thousand pounds for the whole sum borrowed, which was nominally something less than six per cent, on the money raised by the loan. But adding the bonus, premiums, and discount allo.wedj rgduped the twenty-seven millions 22 OPPOSITION OF MASSACHUSETTS. [181*. Supposed to be borrowed to less than twenty- five millions, and raised the interest above six per cent. If the United States loan had been payable in coin, aa constitutionally it must at least be supposed to be and should be, eighteen millions of American money would be equal to, and pay for the twenty-seven millions of English loan, for which forty-five millions were given to get twenty-five and a half millions into the exchequer. The Eng- lish interest was^ thus really nine percent., a larger rate than was ever paid by Govern- ment in the United States. In 1803, when England renewed the war with France, the interest actually paid seldom exceeded five per cent, on English loans of money. Such were some of the realities of the mysteries of finance in both countries, when the English boast and well-nigh universal belief was that the credit of England was inexhaustible, as it seemed to be ; and that the United States were without alniogt any credit at all, as was also the case_._'.J[n'T8T?r^vioe3. to the President for the defence of — 1 — A : j.^i-.-j^^'^'".' ;.• — j:.„ — j:j. their country were accepted and organized, and have been furnished with arms on ap- plication to the proper officer of the general government. Soon after the commence- ment of the present war, when the services ,if the detached militia were withheld from when 'American- triffinpEs 'over discredit and governmental dread of taxation accom- panied those over military indiscipline and mexperience.it became evident that in funds as well as arms the United States were • capable of much greater exertion, and then peace soon follo wed su c h man ifestations. / the general government, I aided the war The price of bread in England iSBfease? department in organizing such a volunteer from a shilling to twenty pence in 1812, and the value of the pound sterling in quar- tern loaves decreased from twenty shillings to twelve; the wages of husbandry labor increased from twelve to fifteen shillings ; the poor taxes from about six millions to about sixteen and a half millions of pounds sterling, and the number of paupers from about twelve hundred thousand to more than two millions : efieots of war, luxury, and unrepresentative government, from which the United States were mostly free, while they were gnawing night and day at the pampered entrails of Great Britain. Yet British loans were in universal favor, and American disparaged with unscrupu- lous opposition, of which a single instance may suffice to manifest the spirit. Pursuant to resolution of Congress, the President having proclaimed a fast day for the 9th September, 1813, the Federal Re- publican assailed the loan and the war through that solemnity ; " Let no-man who wishes to continue the war, by active means, by vote, or by lending money, dare pros- trate himself at the altar that day, for these are virtually as much partaking in the war, as the soldier who thrusts the bayonet ; and although they may not be consumed at the altar, yet the judgments of the Almighty await them." That malediction was but an ebullition of a press, whose paragraphs, however, were supposed to be written by more than one member of Congress. The authoritative oppugnaAiou of tie coftstit^ted a^uthorities of the State of Massachusetts was solemn and more formidable. The Legislature of the State appointed a joint committee of both Houses, who follow- ed up Mr. Quincy's resolution of the 15tb June, 1813, against rejoicilig for naval vic- tories, by an official letter of the 18th of that month, addressed to Gen. Wm. King, inquir- ing whether he had accepted any agency or concern under the United States, or re- ceived from them any arms or munitions of war by order of the U . States Executive.^ Oup commission is accompanied with authority to send for persons and papers, added Samuel Putnam, acting chairman of the joint com- mittee, executing a legislative resolution to punish officers of the Massachusetts volun- teers for taking up arms under the national government to defend their homesteads from invasion. On the 21st of June, 1813, from Bath in Maine, General King replied. The volunteers who tendered their ser- corps as was considered necessary for the defence of this district. After two regi- ments were organized, the services of such a number of volunteer companies more were offisred as would have made three other re- giments if necessary. As citizen of the United States I have duties to perform as well as citizen of the State, in this just and necessary war." Of the three brothers, dis- tinguished in the war, Rufas King was a statesmanlike leader in the Senate, opposed to Madison's administration ; his half bro- ther, Cyrus, one of its most violent oppo- nents in the House of Representatives ; and William, the immediate subject of this no-, tice, its decided supporter. That eorrespondence was only one of numerous proofs that but for the illegal disloyalty of the government of Massachu- setts, every branch of it, no part of the State would have been disgracefully -without re- sistance, as large part of it was, subjected to. the British yoke. The journals, public festivals, party fulminations, and other pronounced sentiments of Massachusetts, particularly Boston, teemed with defiance of the national government, abuse of the war, and applause of the enemy. When the eloquence of our orators fails to secure our rights, they said, it will be done by the thunder of our- cannon ; our militia are d«^ termined to resent the injuries of domestic oppression, as much as to resist the assaults of foreign foes ; we desire honorable peace with the land of our ancestors, with which we are too closely connected ia feeling; CShap.I.] LAWRENCE'S FUNERAL, 23^ Bianners, and principles, ever to have been at variance ; our patriots traduced, are not debased, but have still the spirit to rouse tiie people to defend their assaulted liber- ties. A federal member of Congress, being told, v?hen the President was ill in July, 1813, that he had vomited something very felack, said he supposed it was his con- Boience ; and it was not uncommon news- paper vilification of the Chief Magistrate to publish that Madison made himself happy by habitual intoxication. Mr. Quincy's reso- lution against rejoicing for naval victories, moved by a gentleman of his respectable social and political position, could not fail of pernicious encouragement to the anony- mous cowards of a prurient press, always foraging for ambushed defamation. Ten years after it passed the Senate, during the brief interval, when William Eustis was chosen Grovernor over his competitor, Harrison Gray Otis,~TVIr. Quincy's resolu- tion on the l7th January, 1824, by a vote of 22, ayes to 15 nays, was ordered to be expunged from the Journal, on motion of Seth Sprague, father of the present United States District Judge. " Adopted," says his resolution, " at a time of extraordinary po- litical excitement, upon an erroneous esti- mate of the nature and character of the late war between the United States and Great iPritain, involving and asserting principles Vinsound in policy, and dangerous and alarming in tendency ; not, therefore, to be hereafter considered as expressing the sense ef the Senate and people- of this common- wealth at this time of uncommon political tranquillity." In August, 1813, not long after the poison of the original resolutioUj the mortal re- mains of Captain Lawrence and Lieutenant Ludlow, brought from Halifax, were _ en- tombed at Salem, Massachusetts, a neigh- boring town as inimical to war as Boston itself, according to ceremonies arranged and published for the mournful occasion. As eoon as it was made public, that Captain Crowuinshield was going to Halifax for Lawrence's remains, a Boston journal, sneering at the generous act, said that " the privateering Captain Crowninshield, of Sa- lem, has obtained from government a flag of truce to proceed to Halifax to remove, with permission of the British, the remains of the lamented Lawrence. The body is, we understand, to- be brought to Salem, where an eulogy on the character of the deceased is to be pronounced by Judge ^tory, who has been" appointed to this office by nobody knows vvho." When they brought home the body, business in Salem — Crown- inshield's residence — ^was suspended, and the town crowded with performers or wit- nesses of the funeral honors paid to heroes, sacrificed almost within sight of Boston, to the national and naval glory of the country, in. whose maritime explpits Massachusetts had the deepest interest as well as in the na- tional honor. Brought from Halifax in the cartel Henry, commanded by Capt. George Crowninshield, and manned by ten respect- able shipmasters, who volunteered for the service, the bodies, followed by a train of eight boats rowed by sailors in uniform, keeping minute strokes, were landed from the cartel, that vessel and the United States brig-of-war. Rattlesnake, commanded by Captain Creighton, firing minute guns, i-e- peated by the Salem artillery. The Con- stitution frigate at Boston, some miles off, all the American and neutral merchant vessels in the harbors of Boston and Salem, the forts, gun-houses, and many other places displayed their colors at half-mast. The bodies, taken from the boats and placed on hearses, covered by the flags they so nobly vindicated, were followed by a procession, headed by the Vice-President of the United States, Generals Dearborn and Gushing, officers of the navy and army in full uni- form, ministers of the Gospel, several ma- rine societies, corporate bodies, citizens and strangers from Boston and the neighbor- hood, and escorted by a company of light infantry, slowly moving during two hours the long procession lasted from the wharf to the church. The streets were crowded, the windows filled with spectators, many of whom occupied the housetops, as hun- dreds did at Boston the first of June, to behold or hear of the unfortunate Chesa- peake, when her rash commander rushed to destruction. The tolling of the bells, military music, and recent recollections of the dead rendered the solemnity deeply impressive. In the church, Judge Story pronounced an affectionate eulogy on them, which, though he was then identified with the war and the administration that shortly before raised him to the Bench of the Su- preme Court of the United States, was purely national, without offensive allusion, and couched in the poetical diction in which that learned jurist was versed. Some fede- ralists attended the ceremony and mingled their regrets with those of the repubEoans, constituting most of the escort. . The com- mon people sympathized, as afterwards they threatened and prevented the Boston design to surrender the frigate Constitution and Independence ship of the line to save that town from British assault. But even such a solemnity was shunned and discounte- nanced by cold-blooded'disaffection. Though most of the Boston press exhorted their readers to attend the funeral, yet the Boston Daily Advertiser, representing the unge- nerous sullenness of the State Government, insolently asked, "what honor can be paid where a Crowninshield is chief mourner,' and a Story chief priest?" G-overnor Strong, his Council, and others of their persuasion, staid away from the ceremonies thus taunt- ed; and although no doubt a minority of 24 OPPOSITION OF MARYLAND. [1813. ■ the people, yet majorities of the State au- thorities, of the merchants, the bar, the church and the clergy turned their backs on national solemnities, and brooded nar tional disgrace. Boston disloyalty, extremely offensive at Washington, was contemptuously chid' at Halifax. " They expose their weakness," said the Halifax Jjjurnal, " by the revel rout of a naval dinner for Hull, and putting their vessels in mourning for Lawrence. The naval dinner and naval mourning of Boston, reflect, in a sallow hue, the picture of Massachusetts patriotism." "We shall try," added the Montreal Herald, of the 3d of July, 1813, " to prove that the remon- strance, published by the Massachusetts Legislature against the war with Britain, is but empty blustering, adopting no final or determined system successfully to ac- complish the pretended claims and redress of grievances so loudly vociferated. When a municipal or established law is violated, it becomes the duty of the Legislature to in- terfere ; and if remonstrance have not the effect of remedy, recourse to arms is the next and last alternative. If our memory is not treacherous, we think that Mr. Quin- cy and other Senators did threaten an appeal to~arms some years ago. But re- monstrances continue, and promises are unfulfilled. How ^iegenerated from the spi- rit of '75, '6, though that was an atrocious spirit." Harrison's victory over Proctor was pub- licly deplored. The Salem Gazette of the 22d October, 1813, announced, "At length the handful of British troops, which, for more than a year, have baffled the numerous armies of the United States in the invasion of Canada, deprived of the genius of the immortal Brock, have been obliged to yield to superior power and numbers." The Boston Daily Advertiser of the next day, 23d of October, 1813, added, "We shall surrender all our conquests at a peace. It is, indeed, a hopeful exploit for Harrison, with five thousand troops, who have been assembling and preparing ever since July, 1812, to fight and conquer four hundred and fifty worn out, exhausted British regu- lars, whom the Indians had previously de- serted." In Rhode Island, infected by con- tagion with Massachusetts, a journal pro- nounced Harrison's victory the triumph of a crowd of Kentucky savages over a handful of brave men — no more than a march and their capture without fighting. In Maryland, as in Massachusetts, and at Baltimore, where public sentiment was entirely different from that of Boston^ the press, and even much of the constituted authority, was extremely inimical to the war, and the national administration. — Levin Winder, the Governor, like Governor Strong, an ofiioerof the Revolution, together with a majority of the Legislature, withoiit the tendencies of some of the Massachusetts" partisans to disunion, which was impossi- ble and discountenanced by all parties in" Ma,ryland, nevertheless by strong language of opposition condemned the contest, its alleged causes and supporters. In a charge to the Grand Jury of Baltimore, Luther Martin, a learned lawyer, lately appointed Judge, denounced the American .doctrine of allegiance, the President and his ad- ministration, in terms to be preserved as part of the curious history of the violence with which a war of words is, and will be, always waged in a free .country in oppo- sition to war by arms against any other country ; mostly without much effect, often disgusting the community, and strengthen- ing the government it abuses. " The horrid atrocities of France are proofe," said Judge Martin to the Grand Jury, "that fallen man, for whose restraint governments were created, is a more de- formed and debased monster than the beasts of the earth. Wriggling themselves into place, republicans become demagogues ; and republicanism is by no means inseparably, •united with virtue. False philosophy, con- ceived in hell, and nursed by the devil, propagated in Europe all their wretched- ness, too extensively introduced into the United States. The American Revolution was completed by men of virtue, morality, and religion: but the sun does not shine on a people who have, since then, so deterio- rated in virtue, morality, and religion:' Their depreciation began with that of paper money, and for twenty years Europe has been spewing on- this devoted country an almost unremitting torrent of her filthiest feculency, tainting a mass, become still more rotten. Vainly do we attribute our evils to a violation of sailors' rights, or to a weak government. Providence punishes us for our sins with war, the worst of curses, worse than famine or pestilence. No guilt can be more inexpiable than that of him who, without just cause, plunges a. nation into war. In the sight of Heaven, such a man will be viewed as the wilful, deliberate murderer of every individual who loses his life in its prosecution, and his soul is stained by every drop of blood thereby. They who add sin to sin with greediness in prosecuting the war with which we are afflicted by an avenging God, are those truly guilty of moral treason." From such ethical lessons, which, together vrith their practical, judicial application, are part of the history of that crisis, the Judge; proceeding to the enumeration of crimes,- spoke of treason as the deepest malignity of guilt, and added, " I hold it, gentlemeh; as a sound and incontrovertible truth, a truth of which I cannot doubt, that no citi- zen can more righteously divest himself of his allegiance to his government without its consent, than his government can, with- Chap. I.] GOVERNORS OF THE EASTERN STATES. 25 out his consent, deprive him of its protec- tion. This truth is formed in the very na- ture of civil society. The contrary doctrine is the spawn of folly and knavery, whatever wiseacres of modern growth may tell us." The Baltimore Grand Jury,' of one-and- tfrenty members, by formal reply, protested against Judge Martin's charge, and argued ■the errors of most of its positions, especially, they said', "the absurd and unconstitu- tional ground of the Court's remarks in defence of perpetual allegiance." Soon afterwards, Judge George Poindexter, of Mississippi, charged a Grand Jury there, that, " The nature of our government and habits, of our people, forbid the idea that arms will often be taken up to enforce the visionary projects of abandoned dema- gogues. We must search for treason in mercantile cupidity, aided by the facilities afforded for gratifying it by the enemy. He who relieves the wants of the enemy is guilty of adhering to, and giving him aid and comfort. Giving him information is more dangerous than bearing arms" for him The editors of those licentious newspapers who have sold themselves to a British fao tion to overturn the only free government on earth, and justify the enormities of Great Britain, exciting unfounded expecta- tions of a severance of the Union, are, in that class of offenders, employed for Eng- land, where it is high treason only to -ima- gine the king's death." In matters of property, juTiicature, mostly right, may be always respectable : but when Judges undertake politics, their passions mislead more than those of juries, actuated by the simple common sense of the com- munity. About that time, died two remarkable types of the two distinct species of the same English race of Americans, Theophi- - lus Parsons, Chief-Justice of Massachu- setts, and Charles Scott, ex-Governor of Kentucky. Scott was a frontier pioneer, of that class of adventurers formed by settling new regions reclaimed from wilderness, and conquered from savages by intruders who despise property earned by tranquil industry, and covet lands, not by acres, but miles square. Uneducated, but intelli- gent and brav^, Scott rose from the ranks, in Washington's army, to command and ce- lebrity. Parsons, unequalled as a lawyer and judge' in New England, uncommonly learned, and as respected questions of pro- perty, of that perfect rectitude which cha- racterizes the American Judiciary, yet, straying,- as it often does, into politics, wandered into adjudged misconstructions of the militia laws, which discredited the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, endangered and perplexed the Union. It became the judicial function of a Massa- chusetts lavryer. Story, young and much inferior to Parsons when he died, to pro- nounce the unanimous judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States, re- versing that of Parsons and his associates, as one of the most palpajjle errors of the war. During the interval between the first and second sessions of the Thirteenth Congress, Governors John Cotton Smith, of Connecti- cut, William Jones, of Rhode Island, John Taylor Gilman, of New Hampshire, and Martin Chittenden, of Vermont, addressed the Legislatures of those States, most of them in disapproval of the war and national government; but none of them, except the latter, with the violent anti-federal opposi- tion of the constituted authorities of Massa- chusetts, whose unconstitutional sores were corroding to the rottenness in which they exfoliated next year by the Hartford Convention. Governor Jones' message, the 26th of October, 1813, paraded the power of Rhode Island to disturb the Union by the two cannon, of which it care- fully stated the cost. Governor Gilman's, the 27th October, 1813, without a word of dissatisfaction with the war, was said by Mr. Webster, by that moderation, to have thereby prevented his re-election. Portions of the five Eastern States, irritated by com- mercial restrictions, were goaded by parti- sans to pleasures which a minority branded into the mass of the people of New England steadfastly attached to the Union, however averse to its federal government, opposed - to the war, but unwilling to follow factious leaders to the extremes of disunion, sepa- rate peace and British alliance. -Governor Smith's speech in October 1813, in the form and method of the original presidential speeches to Congress (which Jefferson took a doubtful liberty when he abolished as English and royal, and substituted the message) — was a model of dignified and patriotic opposition. " The sentiments," said he, " of the people of Connecticut in' disapprobation of the unhappy contest in which we are involved were publicly de- clared through the proper organ soon after hostilities commenced, accompanied with an assurance that the obligations of the Constitution should, nevertheless, be strict- ly fulfilled. They have pursued that honor- able course which regards equally the le- gitimate claims of the confederacy, and the rights and dignity of their own govern- ment." The Governor cordially approved and seconded the alacrity with which the people of New London and Groton, without orders or adequate means, flew to arms to protect Decatur's blockaded and endanger- ed squadron. " It was no time," he told the Legislature, " to inquire into the cha- racter of the enemy or cause which made him such ; when no inconsiderable portion of our gallant navy -was exposed within our waters to instant capture and destruction." The conduct of the Connecticut militia cor^ 26 GOVERNOR CHITTENDEN'S REFUSAIi OF MIWTIA. tiaifc responded by honorable acts to the Go- vernor's approval. When the term of ser- ■vioe of the first requisition expired, on the 16th of October, 1813, they marched from their encampment through New London, and were discharged with the commenda- tion of the commanding officer. By a change in the paymaster's arrangements, they could not be immediately paid before they went home: whereupon the officers advanced most of the money and generous- ly distributed it amongthe men. Governor Smith requested the I'resident's instruc- tions, by whose request a considerable body of troops had been kept at that station, and from whom two thousand stand of arms had been received. The troops of Connec- ticut gave, as the Governor justly said, in- disputable evidence of their attachment to its Constitutions (with laudable felicity of^ phrase joining the Federal to the State Constitution). If such had been the lan- guage and spirit of aU the constituted au- thorities of New England, their annoy- ances by the war would have been as much less as their credit and emoluments would have been greater. But Massachusetts or Boston evil influence was at work with corresponding violence from members of Congress, to protract and embitter the struggle, and even in Connecticut, pervert the State counteraction which Governor Smith deemed lawful with many more of the wisest men of that intelligent common- wealth, next year constrained to appear as reluctant performers in the drama of dis- union, ending with a farce what its authors contrived for tragedy. Vermont, nearly balanced in the suf- frages of that frontier and martial State, Governor Chittenden attempted to push to the very verge of revolt and collision with the National authority. Chosen at the annual election by mere plurality without majority, of which he lacked near three hundred votes ; but thereupon being constitutionally preferred by the Legislature in joint ballot, by a majority of three votes over his competitor, Jonas Ga- lusha, who had a majority of six hundred popular votes; Chittenden, thus lawfully, but barely installed, took hia cue- entirely from Massachusetts prompters, and his speech to the Legislature, the 23d of Octo- ber, 1813, avowed their portentous ille- galities. "The militia," he declared, "ex- clusively assigned for the service and protection of the several States, except to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, or repel invasions. It never could, he said, have been intended that the whole body of the militia were, by any kind of magic, at once to be transformed into af regular army for the purpose of fo- reign conquest." Which position, officially announced, was soon enforced by the most wanton act of deflajace to natioiial author- ity that occurred during the war. At * crisis of great importance, Vhen Hampton'a wing of the northern army was marched into Canada to co-operate with Wilkinson's for the invasion of that province, a brigade- of Vermont militia having been marched to Plattsburg, and there put under orders of- United States officers, on the 10th of No- vember, 1813 — from Montpelier, Governor- Chittenden issued his proclamation as Cap^ tain-General and Governor, ordering them, to return to their residences, withm the,- territorial limits of their own brigade, there to repel, if need be, the enemy's invasion^, either in co-operation with troops of the United States, or separately, as might be necessary. Feeling the weight of his re- sponsibility, the Governor addedj,with re- gard to the constitutional duties of the, militia, he unequivocally declared, " that^ in his opiaion, the military strength and re- sources of the State must be reserved foe its own defence and protection exclusively, excepting in cases provided for by the Con- stitution of the United States ; and then under orders, derived only from the Com- mander-in-chief." To this attempt to en^ force the Massachusetts heresy,jlie Lieu-. tenant-Colonel Luther Dixon and other officers of a regiment of Vermont militia, from thew cantonment at Plattsburg, on. the 15th of November, 1813, replied, by addressing to the Governor, " the .reasons^ which induced them absolutely and posi-. tively to refuse obedience to the order of his proclamation. When ordered into tho;^ service of the United States, it becomes. our duty to march to any section of the Union ; not confined to the narrow limits of the town or State in which we reside. We are under a paramount obligation to bur common country, and the great con^ federacy of States. And while in actual service, your Excellency's power over us, aa Governor of Vermont, is suspended. If legally ordered into service of the United States, your Excellency has no power to order us out of it. An invitation or order to desert the standard of our country, will never be obeyed by us, although it proceeds from the Captain-General and Governor of Vermont." The officers, treating the sub- ject more at large, declared: their opinion that "the Governor's proclamation is a renewed instance of that spirit of disor- ganization and anarchy, carried on by a faction to overwhelm our country with ruin and disgrace. Your Excellency's object must be to embarrass the operations of the army, excite mutiny and sedition 'among the soldiers, and induce them, by deserting^ to forfeit their wages. Distributed among the soldiers by your agent, employed for the purpose, your proclamation has pror duoed no effisct. They regard it with minr gled emotions of pity and contempt for its author, and, as a strUpng monument of his SHARP'S AND OTIS' Chap.L] folly. A knowledge, of your Excellency's character induces us to believe that the folly and infamy of the proclamation to whicji you have put your signature, are ehiefly aacribable to the evil advisers by whom your Excellency is encompassed." By that military revolt, collision in arms and civil war were probably prevented ; by insubordination, more lawful, rational, and patriotic than the command : for the militia were sustained in their resistance by the Supreme Court of the TJnited States, whose decree condemned the militia ille- galities of the Supreme Court and other eonstituted authorities of Massachusetts, which, inisled the Governor of Vermont. General. Jacob Davis, of the Vermont militia, charged by Governor Chittenden with the execution of his proclamation, was arrested as soon as he attempted it, at Plattsburg, and put in confinement; General Hampton having gone into win- ter quarters there, after his and General Wilkinson's quarrelsome abandonment of their expedition to Canada. Not long after Congress were in session, on the 7th January, 1814, Solomon Sharp, of Kentucky, presented resolutions that the militia, when lawfully employed in the ser- vice of the TJnited States, are subject to the same rules and articles as the troops of the United States ; that every person, not sub- ject to • the rules and articles of war, pro- curing or enticing a soldier in the service of the United States to desert, is guilty of an infraction of the laws of the United States, and subject to punishment; that His JExcellency Martin Chittenden, Go- vernor of VemSOnt, by issuing his procla- mation at Montpelier the 10th November, 1813, did entice soldiers in the service of the United States to desert ; and that therefore the President should Idc requested to in- struct the Attorney-General of the United States to institute a prosecution against Martin Chittenden. James Fisk, of Ver^ mont, said that he spoke the sentiments of the whole Vermont delegation, when he regretted the- introduction of those resolu- tions. Few in Vermont approved the un- justifiable proclamation ; but it was the Governor's act. Moreover, if guilty of any breach of law," the courts of justice were the proper tribunals for his prosecution, not the House of Representatives, which Bhotfld not attempt to influence them or turn informers. If the resolutions were adopted, that should be conclusive of the law, but the House had no constitutional power over it. He therefore moved to lay the resolutions on the table. Mr. Sharp, finding, he said, the Vermont delegation " opposed to his resolutions, consented to their lying on the table. Thomas Grosve- nor said, that if the resolutions were cleared of that part which expressed the judgment of the House, and confined to RESOLUTIONS. 27 directing the Attorney-General to institute a prosecution, he had no objection to eubi mitting the constitutioh?,l question to the judicial tribunals. Governor Wright added that he too was for a prosecution, but for treason, by aid and comfort to the enemy, instead of a mere peccadillo by violation of law. William Pindley said a few words again.st resolutions giving the opinion of the House on instituting a prosecution. No good, he thought, could come of the resolutions ; which were laid on the table, and never called up again for considera- tion. It was believed to be Mr. Madison's opinion, that Governors and Legislatures of States are not liable to prosecution for any authoritative interruption of the Fede- ral Government. No prosecution was ever instituted for any such misconduct, on which public sentiment has passed sen- tence more efiectual than the ordinary measure of common punishment. No judicial proceedings or federal inter- ference took place against the Governor of Vermont ; the general, Davis, was enlarged on recognizance and bail, to appear at Al- bany for.trial. Not long after, when the Legislature of Massachusetts met, Mr. Otis, by another step toward the Hartford Conven- tion, on the 14th January, 1814, laid on the table of the House of Representatives at Bos- ton, a resolution expressive of the duty of Massachusetts to aid the Governor and peo- ple of Vermont, or any other State, to sup- port their constitutional rights, when in dan- ger of infringement from any quarter ; and when requested by the Governor of Ver- mont or any other State, upon evidence of such infringement, to provide by law for their effectual support. A pamphlet was about that time actively circulated in Bos- ton, entitled " Some Thoughts on a Separa- tion of the Original Thirteen United States from Louisiana and the Western Country." As soon as unofScially apprised of Governor Chittenden's proclamation and Mr. Otis' motion, the Legislature of Pennsylvania directed Governor Snyder to lay before Congress and the President resolutions by which they strongly denounced the Go- vernor to punishment, and Mr. Otis with intent by intimidation to prevent it: and the determination of the Government of Pennsylvania to support the General Go- vernment in all constitutional and lawful measures for punishing all violators and infractors of law, their aiders or abettors, however elevated in station, directly or in- directly aiding or comforting the common enemy. The Boston party, which did not com- prehend even most of Massachusetts, par- ticularly Maine, nor New Hampshire or Vermont, nor even Connecticut, in the rupturing and violent schemes contem- plated, made great exertions -to excite the Legislatures and Governments of all New 28- PEOJECT OP SECTIONAL PEACE. England to a separate peace, which must have led to disunion and alliance of the dismembered States with England. What was called in derision the Kingdom of New England, was the dream of some to make a separate confederacy of the Eastern States, including, if it could be accomplished, New York, or a separate peace between that portion of the United States and Great Britain. In the autumn of 1813, the Bos- ton press labored to bring about a separate peace ; contending that it was feasible with- out violence, civil war, or even separation of the States from their federal union. In November, 1813, a project for. the restora- tion of peace was calmly and speciously argued in the Boston Daily Advertiser, urging every legislator of New Eng- land to ponder and prepare himself to meet the question the ensuing winter. It being well ascertained, was the argument, that all New England is opposed to the ruinous and unjust, war, how should they restore the blessings of peace, without civil commotions, separation or any other ex- treme remedy that would be worse than the disease ? By the Constitution of the United States, any State, with the consent of Congress, is authorized to enter into a treaty with a foreign power : and Congress should not refuse New England or Massa- chusetts leave to save themselves by doing so. Parts of the confederations of Holland and of Germany, the State of Holland by itself, have often done so : and during our own Revolution it was agreed by acts of Congress to suffer the Island of Bermuda to remain neutral. Let then all New Eng- land ujiite peaceably to ask Congress to grant permission, pursuant to the Consti- tution of the United States, for New Eng- land States to make a separate peace with Great Britain, leaving in full force all their obligations and connections with the United States. The other States preferring it may carry on the war, while we enjoy peace, without injury to each other or the federal Constitution uniting the whole. History abounds with examples of such transac- tions by confederated States. There can be no impropriety for the New England States to ask permission from Congress to stand neuter in a war which they opposed ^unanimously, and which proves fatal to their interests. The timid, moderate and prudent need not be alarmed by a proposi- tion contemplated and provided for by the Constitution itself, of which the only effect will be peaceable and harmonious resto- ration of the blessings of peace to those most suffering by war. Connecticut has already acted on that clause of the Federal Constitution which forbids States, except in time of war, to keep troops, by raising a body of them by act of the Legislature of that cautious commonwealth, construing the war to import an affirmation of that [1813.'' right, to raise and keep forces by the. State. The fact -assumed that New England was unanimous against the war, as the basis of that argument, was mistaken. AU the delegation from Vermont in Congress, one from Massachusetts, together with one Senator, were war members ; and though majorities of all the Eastern States were opposed to the federal administration, if they were also against the war, tiey proved when the Hartford Convention was at- tempted next year, that at least three of the 5ve New England States and large majorities of the people of the whole five were equally averse to extreme remedies, worse, than the most exaggerated fears of the disease. To the project of a separate peace attempted in 1813, the Boston recom- mendation of it nevertheless added, if Con-- gress unreasonably refuse, it will then re- main for the wise and prudent to decide what we ought to do, when a just, and reasonable and constitutional request is refused. Governor Strong's speech to the Legislature the 12th of January, 1814, high-wrought against the war, the Federal Government and the embargo act just en-,, acted by Congress, gave no apparent coun- tenance "to separate peace or disunion. In order to effectuate Mr. Otis' resolution, for support of Governor Chittenden's revolt, not only the Legislature, but the Governor of Massachusetts must have joined in it. But the Vermont Governor was the only one so illegally anti-federal, and he in 1814 veered round from extensive opposition to warm support of the war, by contradictory proclamations equally remarkable. The Legislatures of Massachusetts and Connec- ticut both went beyond the Governors of those States in opposition to the Federal Government. And no act of constituted' authority throughout the contest was more mischievously or ungraciously detrimental and defying, however constitutional, than that of the Legislature of Massachusetts, soon following Mr. Otis' resolution to sup- port Governor Chittenden. On the 7th February, 1814, it was resolved to withdraw the State j ails from the use of the United States for their prisoners of war at a mo- ment when much needed. When prisoners on parole were seized and imprisoned as hostages, threatened with deaui, England had great advantage over the United States for the execution of that cruel retaliation.. American prisoners at Halifax and Berr muda, or in England, found no sympathies j whereas, British prisoners in America, treasonably aided and copforted by some, enjoyed the regret of many, and commise- ration of nearly all. On the 10th Nor vember, 1813, three hundred American prisoners were crowded into two small vessels at Halifax, for transportation to England ; while English prisoners, mostly Chap. I.] PRISONERS OF WAR RELEASED. 29 paroled and kindly treated in America, if imprisoned as hostages, were often encou- raged and assisted to escape. Col. Charles Y. Grant, Major Vallette, and several other British officers, on parole, by_ order of the Commissary-General, were confined as hos- tages- by the Marshal of Massachusetts, James Prince, in the county jail at Wor- cester. Having no federal prisons, the United States Government have always used the State jails for national oifenders : •for which an Act of the Legislature of Mas- sachusetts, as early as the 26th of February, 1790, put the jails of that State at the ser- vice of the United States. Without special leave from the local powers, Marshal Prince imprisoned his hostages in the county jail at Worcester, taking care by increased pre- cautions to secure their custody. But as ■public repugnance contested all his mea- sures, while in the act of lodging the Eng- lish in jail, their lawyer, as he said he was, denied in their presence the right of go- vernment to confine them, declaring that if ■British officers were arrested he was ready for rebellion : which ebullition was followed as well as preceded by intimations from "other interlopers that their imprisonment, if it could not be prevented, should not last long, but their escape be effected, and a person ofTered his chaise and horse to one ■of the prisoners for flight. The Marshal, - alarmed by such appearances, and fearing that the jail-keeper could not be relied on, determined to remove the hostages to Al- bany as a safer place : which becoming known, caused their early evasion. Abijah and Jacob Bigelow, with J. W. Jenkins, of ■the neighboring town of Barre, were said to have contrived the means, and on the night of the 12th December, 1813, the pri- soners knocked down, tied and gagged the deputy keeper, and gpt off. The Marshal advertised a reward for their recapture, and ■ five of nine who broke out were retaken, but the other four escaped entirely. During all these proceedings, which occasioned much public sensation, the aid and comfort of many of the presses of Massachusetts were openly bestowed on the English. The Wor- " cester Gazette accused the Marshal of rude, • unfeeling behaviojur to the prisoners, in whose escape from "Marshal Prince, a lynx- ■eyed, full-blooded blood-hound of Mr. Madi- son," the Boston Daily Advertiser warmly exulted; calling them "gallant officers, whom •Jilr. Madison desired to answer for the lives of self-acknowledged traitors — -victims of a barbarous and cruel policy." The sequel ■ of such sentimentality soon followed in the Act of the Tth'J'ebruary, 1814, providing ■that " nothing in the Act of the 26th Febru- ary, 1790, should be donstrued to authorize the keepers of jails within" the common- ■wealth of Massfichusetts to take custody of, and keep any prisoners committed by any ; other than the JudiciaF authority of the United States;" " and whereas, several pri- soners have been committed under the Executive authority of the United States, the keepers of the State jails are authorized and required to discharge all prisoners of war within thirty days from the passing of this Act." Debtors of the United States might be confined in the State jails, and oiFendefs committed by Judicial authority, but prisoners of war and others placed in custody by presidential order were set free ; and the national government was deprived by the State government of any place of confinement for prisoners of war in Massa- chusetts. On that repudiation by Massachusetts, the President appealed to Pennsylvania, where he never failed to find redress on such occasions. By letter of the 23d Feb- ruary, 1814, the Secretary of State requested Governor Snyder to authorize John Smith, the Marshal of that State, to confine the hostages in the Penitentiary at Philadel- phia. The Governor immediately, on the first of March, communicated the Secre- tary's letter to the Legislature, calling their attention to the subject, who, forthwith, on the third day of that month, passed a bill, which the Governor at once approved, plac- ing all the prisons, sherifis, and jail keepers of Pennsylvania at the ser-vice of the Presi- dent and orders of the Marshal for safe keeping hostages, prisoners, or any other persons, whose safe custody the general government might desire. The Pennsyl- vania Act was as favorable in spirit and performance as the Massachusetts Act was churlish and repulsive ; and thus it often happens that the extreme opposition of one State to the Federal government, by reac- tion produces entire concurrence of other States. Some of the hostages, however, escaped for want of sufficient custody and State co-operation. Abusing the right of popular petition, a remnant of English freedom extremely lia- ble to American perversion, and by no means always indicating the true public sentiment, such a number of places repre- sented in the Massachusetts Legislature, as with their numerous names and members appeared imposing, representing ninety thousand of the seven hundred thousand people of the State, petitioned the Le- gislature, setting forth grievances, which were referred to a joint committee of both Houses, headed by a respectable gentle- man, James Lloyd, of Boston, who re- ported in February, 1814, elaborate and indignant denunciation of the embargo, war, and national administration, and sig- nifi_cant intimations of the disappointment experienced by Massachusetts from the ex- pected benefits of the federal union, the value of which was, on that official oc- casion, coldly calculated. Violent debates ensued, in which John Holmes, and a small 30 IHASSACHtrSETTS.— DEXTER. [18-13. minority, breasted bravely a formidable majority. Crowds in the- galleries, many of tbem interested in smuggling, or trea- sonable traffic, and British agents frequent- ing all places of public resort with great influence in this country ,~loudly applauded the most seditious speeches. A Convention was proposed ; but the joint committee re- ported that it would be best to wait for another Legislature to appoint delegates to meet others, altogether to devise some plan of relief from sufferings more intolerable than those inflicted by the Boston port-bill, " which their ancestors fought and bled to resist, and it would be pusillanimous in their descendants to submit to. We have seen a power grow up in the southern and western sections of the union, by the ad- mission and multiplication of States not contemplated by the parties to the Consti- tution, and not warranted by its principles, with an almost infinite progress in this system of creation, which threatens event- ually to reduce the voice of New England,, once powerful and eSfectual in the national councils, to the feeble expression of colonial complaints, unattended to and disregarded. It is no longer a question of force or of right with this Legislature, but of time and ex- pediency. We do not see the approach of peace in the vast arma.ment8 preparing, the fast expense accruing, the demands for Canada in one quarter and Florida in an- other ; in the late, appointment of envoys, one of whom was the prominent author and adviser of the war ; the other a submissive ai'ent in producing it ; and the more recent addition to the mission of a man supposed to be the secret controller of the former mission, and vested with powers to impede its pacific course." In such terms were Mr. Clay and Mr. Gallatin denounced by those who became their ardent supporters. In Samuel Dexter, that conjuncture brought forth a patriot federalist, superior to party and independent of Executive favor ; excellent specimen of the party to which, if to any, Washington belonged. From Washington, where he was attend- ing the Supreme Court of the United States, Mr. Dexter, on the 18th February, 1814, addressed a letter through the Bos- ton Palladium to the electors of Massa- chusetts, which nearly placed him at the head of that commonwealth, at the ensu- ing election, instead of Governor Strong. Denying with great force the constitu- tionality, expediency, and efficiency of the embargo, or any other restrictive mea- sure, and arguing that the whole strength of the nation on the- ocean would be much more effectual than frontier and territorial invasive war, Mr. Dexter, conceding the " unquestionable privilege of every citizen to examine the conduct of rulers, though in speaking to his country he may be over- borne by its enemies, yet condemned the abuse of that right by publications and speeches to prove that we are absolved from allegiance to the national government, and hint that an attempt to diTide the empire might be justified. The Eastern and South- ern States," said he, " are made for each other; A man and woman might as rea- sonably quarrel on account of the difference in their formation. New England would soon be restored from inability in the po- litical system if improper expedients for sudden relief were abandoned." .The sen- sation and effect of such patriotic appeals were powerful. " The principles of his let- ter," said a Boston press, "will paralyze the efforts of New England and promote the views of the administration. Of what consequence is his theoretical opposition to the embargo, if he practically supports the war and taxes, and denounces the federal- ists as active spirits and ambitious men." No part of his argument was more conclu- sive than that which preferred war to re- striction. "The history of civil society,'^ said he,- "proves that with all the crimes, desolation and misery of war, it is a terrible necessity, and man must submit to his ders- tiny. Still, greater evils are produced by pusillanimous shrinking from conformity to the mysterious law of his present con- dition." Philosophy like this taught by an eminent citizen of New England, Secre- tary of War in John Adams' federal ad- ministration, vouched by that venerable personage from his retirement near Boston, and by his distinguished son, then almost the only American minister in Europe, could not fail of important inculcation. Continual resistance of their own govern- ment and disparagement of the union, with extravagant vindication of all English hos- tilities, naturally suggested suspicions of treasonable collusion with the enemy, which the British press, if* not government, pro- vincial as well as metropolitan, counte- nanced. A Halifax journal, of the 8th October, 1813, deploring Perry's victory, exclaimed, " Had we not the means of being as well prepared as the Americans ? Cer- tainly we had every superiority in that respect and every other ; but most wisely forbore to make offensive war in Canada, lest our friends of the Northern States should be offended, and therefore made actual invasion of the Southern with a force inadequate to cause a diversion." By the mortifying separation and dis- graceful retirement into winter quarters of the disjointed wings of Wilkinson's and Hampton's army, and of Governor Chit- tenden's alarming recall of the Vermont militia from New York, when the northern frontiers were disturbed by uneasiness, that the enemy was preparing sleds and other appliances for a winter invasion of Vermont and New York, to attack 'our outposts and subdue our dishevelled and aAHBlSON OF CHTCAGD. ■Cha'p. I.] •dispirited troOps, arrived in November, ■1813, at Plattsburg, from Quebec, sad remnants of the infernal brutalities vrith ■which by savage instrumentality the ■wslt ■(vas inhumanly inaugurated in August, ■1812. On the 17th of July that year, Michilimacinac ■was" surprised and taken -by a British Canadian and Indian expe- -dition from St. Joseph's, led by Captain Roberts, whose summons to surrender, the American commander Captain Heald offi- cially -wrote to his superior, General -Hull, was (to the everlasting disgrace of our government) the first information he had of the declaration of war. Cap- ^tain Heald, with a garrison of fifty-four ■regulars of the first regiment of United -States infantry and twelve mUitia, garri- ■&oned Fort Dearborn on Lake Huron, where -there was no town, now the ^flourishing city of Chicago, of more than •twenty thousand inhabitants. On the 9th August, 1812, Captain Heald was ordered by General Hull to evacuate Fort Dear- born, and transfer his people by land to Detroit. In so remote a frontier post, with a few soldiers, there were many women • and children, and a considerable quantity 'of such stores as the neighboring India'ns heeded. Soon after General Hidl's orders, Captain "Wells from Fort ■ Wayne, "with thirty ' Miami Indians, arrived at Fort Dearborn, -to serve as part of the escort to Detroit. 'The neighboring Indians, learn- ing that the Fort was to be evacuated and ■Btores distributed among them, flocked in to Fort Dearborn, to whom all the goods in the factory and a considerable quantity of pro^visions were given. Such arms and ammunition as Captain Heald could not take away he deemed it prudent- to de- 'Btroy, together -with all the liquor. Though the number of Indians was large, four or five hundred, yet their crafty conduct was or- derly, while maturing plans of destruction. On the morning of the inauspicious day of Hull's surrender at Detroit, 15th August, 1812, the little garrison, encumbered by women, children, large quantities of bag- gage and other impediments, began that always fatal movement, a retreat in pre- sence of a superior number of ferocious savages, whose treachery, rapacity and re- morseless cruelty were well known, though no war existed with them. Captain Wells with his Miamis led the van and brought up the rear of the departure, which the configuration of the country rendered it necessary to take up on the beach of Lake Huron, between its waters and a high sand bank, about a hundred yards'on the other flank. In thalt defile the garrison had not inoved more than a mile and a half on the vast prairies _of marshy sand which margin the lake, when the alarm vras given that the Indians were "preparing an attack; PottOTptivity, except Lieutenant Helm, who was able to ransoin himself from savage custody. Of the re- 32 NEWFOUNDLAND FISHERIES. maining twenty-five men, eleven women and children, thirty-six altogether, twenty- seven were butchered with every barbarous refinement of indecent cruelty. The hearts of Captain Wells, Ensign Romayne and Dr. Voorhis were torn from their disfigured corpses and broiled, and their heads cut off by the savages before -surviving prisoners, witnesses of the horrible exultation. In one wagon several children were massacred and scalped with yells of demoniac delight. The wife of Phelim Cabin, in an advanced state of pregnancy, was tomahawked to death, scalped, ripped open, the child dragged from her womb, and its head cut off. A child of John Neads-, another sol- dier, was tied to a tree to prevent its fol- lowing his wife, the mother of it, after whom the child went crying for food. The wretched mother perished on the march from hunger and fatigue. Hugh Logan, an Irish, and Augustus Mott, a German soldier, worn out with fatigue and unable to walk, were tomahawked for that reason. Nelson, another, was frozen to death afterwards in the winter when serv- ing as a bondsman among the Indians. - The nine survivors of the whole garrison taken to the banks of Fox River, Illinois, were there parcelled out as servants to . different Indian masters : in which aggra- , vation of captivity and bondage they re- mained all that summer, autumn, winter, and 'part of next spring, allowed scarcely sustenance enough to keep them alive, compelled to the severest drudgery, with- out clothes, beds, or any kind of comfort, - the derision and sport of the worse than Spartan masters, of worse than American - helots. At length taken back to Chicago for sale, they were there purchased by an- other French Canadian, by General Proc- tor's direction sent to Amherstburg, and thence to Quebec, where they arrived the 8th November, 1813. Exchanged and liberated there, the nine miserable remains of the garrison of Fort Dearborn, when evacuated the 9th August, 1812, reached Plattsburg, the last stage of their deplora- ble pilgrimage, in November, 1813, after -fifteen months of hardships, privations and cruel sufferings, which to most of their companions proved fatal, and by many persons may be deemed incredible, yet an authenticated tale of war calamitous and atrocious. The autumn of 1813 admonished New England of their dependence on the na- tional government of all the United States tp maintain an essential element of though feneral, yet more especially Eastern, bene- t^— the Newfoundland fisheries. The peo- ple of New England had been for seven or eight years loud complainants of their national government ; first, for unresisted English and French depredations on their ■ commerce, then for the embargo and buc- [1813. cessive stages of the restrictive system, which, like changes of position on an un- easy bed, scarcely relieved, if they did not aggravate the disorder, and at last for war, which brought on its most painful and alarming crisis. War, not resorted to when they urged it, soon ceased to have commerce for a cause. Nothing remained but pro- tection of seamen, for any one of whom, impressed and imprisoned and forced to fight against his country, as many mariners of New England were, Great Britain would have gone to war long before the United States ventured it for thousands. A great nursery once of the French marine, when it nearly equalled the English, and then of the English and American, was in danger of being wrested from its New England oc- cupants, and made the exclusive property of England. What once employed twenty thousand French seamen, and after them fifteen hundred American fishing smacks, on the coasts of Newfoundland, war enabled the English navy to hold exclusively. A meeting of merchants and principal resident inhabitants, interested in the trade and fish- eries of Newfoundland, at the Merchants' HaU in St. John's, the 27th October, 1813, James Macbraire, a shrewd and enter- prising Scot, presiding, memorialized Sir Richard Goodwin Keats, the Governor of the Island, by an application which he undertook to bear to England and lay at the King's feet, in terms, said the Boston Centinel, alarmingly interesting. No peace without the fisheries, was their cry. - " Con- ceiving that our existence as a great and independent nation must chiefly depend, upon our preserving the sovereignty of the seas, the policy of excluding France and America from the advantages those nations have heretofore enjoyed, in times of peace, in this fishery, must be evident." The wisdom of British exclusive occupation of all the North-Eastern seas and coasts of America was then argued by the memo- rialists, not only as a nursery of seamen, but as a means of preventing illicit trade— ^ and the infusing insubordinate notions by the Americans among the British people of Newfoundland : evils extending to their West India and European commerce, and disturbing their colonial fidelity. "Our existence as a great and independent na- tion depends on our dominion on the ocean, and the wise policy of shutting out other nations leagued against us in war from a future participation in so important a branch of commerce. Hostilities with America increase our trade and mariners, decreasing theirs in the same proportion." This subject will be fully treated when the negotiations of Ghent are considered. At present the English provincial suggestion of an attempt so fatal to American naviga- tion, is mentioned in the order of events as one of those which British successes and Chap. I.] TEXAS— MEXrCO— SPANISH AMERICA. 33 spirit of aggrandizement encouraged, to unite the American nation and illustrate their resistance to Great Britain. Not a ■word was uttered from the South or West against war for the Eastern fisheries, the preservation of which for New England, the Eastern States, most interested, felt depended on national efforts, which all New England, unanimously joined to- gether, could never have achieved without the co-operation of American people and cStates, apparently without interest in the -question. The Newfoundland fisheries ■were, moreover, near those settlements of exiles of the Revolution, who tooK refuge ■ -there from the pursuit of countrymen they had left to take side with the mother coun- try in that struggle, and remained ever after vainly plotting to contrive its resto- ration to American supremacy. In 1813, American and British North America were not the only disturbed parts of the western hemisphere, destined by its political innovations to shake the European continent with similar commotions. In the heart of Mexico, a band of revolutionary patriots attempted the cause of freedom; seized- Acapulco, the most considerable and ■important port on the South Sea, and were said to be uniting with great force. Carac- cas, Coro, and Santa Ee in South America had established republican governments. New Granada was made kuo'wn as the re- public of Candinamarca, where the people .published a manifesto asserting self-sove- reignty. Carthagena had many priva- teers at sea against Spain, which kingdom . sent several thousand troops to subdue the ■insurrection at Buenos Ayres. Nearer the United States, Texas was in motion. On the 4th July, 1813, Don Joae Bernardo <3utieres, from the government house of St. Bernardo de Bexar, in the third year of in- dependence, proclaimed that of Texas to the friends of the Mexican cause. On the 27th September, 1813, from the palace of the Executive power of the province of Texas, at San Antonio, the government of that independent state, by proclamation of Don Jose Alvarado Toledo, to foreigners of every nation excepting those of Spain, de- nounced the'barbarous laws of the Spanish government to prevent the establishment lof foreigners in their provinces, and- an- nounced a free government to succeed the ancient tyranny, with tranquil enjoyment of all social rights and religious opinions, in a climate remarkably healthy and soil favoured by the gifts of Nature. Henry Wheaton, afterwards, so long American envoy in different parts of Eu- rope, distinguished, by his works on the laws of captures and ef nations, asked, in his journal, the National Advocate, "Why are we not at war with Spain ? Whilst the republican patriots of Spanish America are struggling, with- their tyrants, those tyrants TOL. II.— 3 are committing hostilities against the United States in every possible form, and under every circumstance of aggravation; their flag received with honor in our ports, burs treated with indignity in theirs. Whilst their subjects are received in this country with hospitality, our citizens are loaded with chains and plunged in dungeons in their colonies. The indemnities for spoli- ations long since acknowledged to be due and liquidated, are still withheld. The savages receive the arms and ammunitions with which they slaughter our frontier set- tlers, from the Governor of Pensacola. The President has repeatedly recommended the occupation of the Floridas, which would have effectually secured us against the coin- mission of those horrors; but the Senate have as often rejected this proposition, and the inhabitants of the Mississippi territory are now reaping the bitter fruits of the fac- tious temper of those who distract and dis- grace that once august body. No honorable or safe alternative remains, but an open, manly declaration of war against the coun- tries in possession of the royalists of Spain. " This measure would invigorate and ren- der effectual the war against Great Britain. The neutrality of Spain is advantageous only to our enemy. Her courts of admiralty dis- regard the Spanish veil, which our mer- chants attempt to draw over their property ; whilst our courts, from a scrupulous regard to neutral rights; restore almost everything claimed by Spaniards. A declaration of war against them would uncover a vast mass of British property, and insure to our cruisers a golden harvest ; whilst it would deprive the British of the supplies they now dravr from this country under the Spanish flag. " The vast regions of Spanish America would open a boundless field for the enter- prise of our young countrymen who aspire to fortune and to fame. The banners of republicanism invite them to flock thithen This sacred, cause demands the sympathy of every free people. Our aid and inter- ference would be decisive, and insure the eternal separation of the New from the Old World; an event which sound policy de- mands that we should hasten by every means in our power. The Spanish royat ists are, in fact, at war with us, and none of the sacrifices we now make would be en^* hanced by a war against them. On the contrary, the pressure of the war with Great Britain would be alleviated by it. They are mere tools in her hands, and as such ou ght to be treated. An animating prospect of glory and of gain would open upon us, in such a contest. In the veins of the republicans of Spanish America flows the mingled blood of the Mexicans and CE^stilians. They are worthy of our friendship; whilst the rest are the refuse and scum of old Spain^-the ostensible deputies of tyrants exercising their, usurped authority in the name of .si 34 NAPOLEON. [1813. prince, who is a prisoner in France, but the reat viceroy of England, from whom they receive their orders, and whose man- dates they obey." The south of North America, and South America, were shaken with those political tempests, which, in Spanish colonies up- rooting European, have since done little more than plant American misgovernment ; while the wonderful tranquillity and pros- perity of Texas finally become one of the United States, seems to prove that the Saxon is more capable than the Moorish race of self-government. On the 6th November, 1813, the Ameri- can Executive, by a semi-official publica- tion in the National Intelligencer, declared those American principles respecting Texas and Mexico, which have been since always observed. " The revolution in Mexico, to which our attention has been recently more particu- larly drawn, by the notorious fact that many of our citizens had unlawfully em- barked in it, appears to be at last arrested in its progress, by the, recent defeat of the forces of those who called themselves the republicans or patriots, and whose avowed and no doubt real object was to subvert the existing regal government, and substitute therefor a government of kindred nature with that which prevails in these states. The strife is probably not terminated ; be- cause, without a real head to the government it is impossible that a monarchical sway, very nearly allied to despotism, can long prevail, in a country in the immediate vici- nity of a nation of freemen, with which it must daily and hourly have a more free and generous intercourse. " The part which our government has pur- sued in regard to the intestine commotions in the territ-ory in question, has been such as harmonized with that integi'ity of cha- racter it has never failed to maintain. Solicited to take part in the war, it has mildly but positively refused its interference in the broil, and avowed and maintained a perfect neutrality between these minor bel- ligerents. It has spoken to them this lan- guage: — We can only know in a foreign territory its constituted authorities. So long as the royalists hold the reins of government, we are bound, provided they deal justly by us, to recognize their autho- rity. Our ideas of government, our preju- dice in favor of republican principles, our desire that they shall diffuse themselves throughout the world, cannot alter the fact that the royalist parly are at present the legal sovereigns of the country, and as such we shall respect them. On the other hand, to the representatives of the republican party who sought our aid, our govei-nment have no doubt expressed their perfect readi- ness to recognize them, should they obtain possession of the government, and become by the consent of the people its governors ; at the same time declaring its indisposition to afford them aid or support. Such, we believe, has been the conduct of our govern- ment, which we believe no good citizen can condemn. It has been fair, honorable, and consistent with our relations to both parties." Revived like Antaeus from the catastrophe of his mad winter invasion of Russia, the Emperor of the French with armies sprung as the men of Cadmus also from the earth, at first discomfited and disheartened once more his desperate enemies, led by Berna- dotte and Moreau ; and the delusive armi- stice of Prague preluded his destruction. Twice was his great genius blind to Ameri- can views which might have saved him; first, when he permitted a scientific board to re- ject Fulton's steam navigation, and again when he failed to perceive that a French squadron sweeping the American coast would have relieved his French, Dutch, and Italian ports from English blockade, and peradventure turned the ebbing tide of fortune in his favor. Amazed by unlooked- for and incredible naval victories of the Americans over the English, who had so easily and utterly demolished the marines of France, of Holland, and of Spain, Na- poleon, awaking too late from his fatal negligence of American hostility to Great Britain, important, even vital as it might have been rendered to prevent his own downfall, in the midst of overwhelming mi- litary occupations, political negotiations, personal and dynastic anxieties at Dresden, found time to write, on the 7th August, 1813, an official letter to his long tried minister of Marine, Decr6s, Joseph Bona- parte's nephew by marriage, directing him to have frigates built like the Americans. That part of a long letter full of naval de- tails is as follows: — "You will receive a decree, by which I order the building at Toulon, at Rochefort, and at Cherbourg, of a frigate of American construction. lam certain that the English have had built a con- siderable number of frigates on that model. They go better, and they adopt them ; we must not be behindhand. Those which you will have built at Toulon, at Rochefort, and at Cherbourg, will manoeuvre in the roads, and give us to understand what to think of the model." Such an order a year sooner, and the frigates sent to manoeuvre on the American coasts instead of in French roadsteads, might have kept Na- poleon on the throne, even though every one of the French frigates built on the American model had been captured by the English enemy of France and the United States. His wish was, that the Congress of Prague should be composed of ministers from the United States, as well as France, Denmark, and other states, if any, not combined against him, together with those from Russia, Prussia, England, and the rest Chap. I.] REGENT'S SPEECHES IN PARLIAMENT. 35 of Europe confederated for his overthrow : tardy, and as it were, posthumous atone- ment for his misappreciation of the Ame- rican war. Madison's administration, pro- testing with truth, and publishing in the National Intelligencer, that neither in Na- poleon's prosperity iior tribulation, had it any connection with the monarch called by the English the French Ruler ; yet we hoped that European peace, the sequel of his triumphs, would check the aggran- dizement of Great Britain, put an end to all pretext for impressment, and with it, American war, on the basis of that mari- time freedom which all the European mari- time states, like the United States, desire. The opponeUts of Madison's administra- tion, particularly Governor Strong, in his next speech to the Legislature of Massachu- setts, January 1814, seized on the collusion implied from Napoleon's hope of American incidental naval aid to his territorial war- fare, to renew the Anglo-American mistake of French influence in America, when it was American influence in France. Instead of Madison asking, he rejected the help of Na- poleon ; while Napoleon, at first disregard- ing, at last sought that of the United States, hoping by European maritime sympathies for a transatlantic marine to counterpoise English power in. the wars. Congresses and negotiations of tnat continent. , Absorbed by stupendous exertions, and intoxicated by. prodigious successes, fol- lowing twenty years of continued reverses, during the twelve months after the peace conquered at Paris the 31st March, 1814, Great Britain had neither time nor temper in 1813 to ponder the perils and count the cost of her second war with America, fruit- ful of more debt and disaster to her, of greater powers and freer principles to the American Republic. Never in the proud annals of Plantagenet, Tudor, or Stuart kings, did monarch of that glorious empire in such state and exultation meet Parlia- ment as the Prince Regent on the 22d July, 1813. His corpulent, unwieldy and unmar- tial person was tight-bound in regimentals, on flie throne in the House of Lords, as though any other than a military garb would be unfit for the crisis of universal soldiery. Surrounded by Saxon nobles- and Norman gentry, despising the dull German dynasty they upheld, and the ambassadors of Rus- sia, Spain, and Portugal, the Speaker of the House of Commons reiterated to his master Canning's vow, that " we must put forth, in pur contest with America, the whole strength of Great Britain to maintain, with our an- cient superiority on the ocean, those mari- time rights which we have resolved never to surrender. We have furnished our supplies with a large and liberal aid to enable your royal highness to take all such measures as the emergencies of public affairs may re- quire." With aU humility, said the official report, they Untreated his majesty's royal assent to a bill to enable him to raise five millions of pounds sterling. After con- descending to assent, the Prince Regent replied, merely and coldly regretting the continuance of the war with the United States of America, briefly and disdainfully adding his desire to re-establish friendly relations; "but I cannot consent to pur- chase the restoration of peace by any sacri- fice of the maritime rights of the British empire." During these menacing vows of British hostility. Lord Liverpool, bear- ing the sword of state before the Regent, pledged the realm to int«rminable war, to retrieve the ancient superiority of Great Britain on the ocean, which, after monarch, peers and commons resolved never to sur- render, next year they, nevertheless, wholly surrendered ; and, as the British press de- plored, with the stripes of ignominy still smarting on their backs. On the 4th No- vember, 1813, the Prince Regent again addressed Parliament when it reassembled. Repeating the common English misrepre- sentation that, "England was not the ag- gressor in the war, I have not hitherto," said the Regent, "seen any disposition on the part of the government of the United States to close it, of which I could avail myself with due attention to the interests of his majesty's subjects," adding, in order rather to conciliate Russia than America, " I am at all times ready to enter into discussion with that government for a conciliatory ad- justment of the differences between the two countries upon principles of perfect recipro- city, not inconsistent with the established maxims of public law, and with the mari- time rights of the British einpire." On the same day that the Regent deliver- ed that speech to Parliament, Lord Castle- reagh wrote to Mr. Monroe his letter of the 4th November, 1813, enclosing Lord Cath- cart's of September the first, from Toplitz to Count Nesselrode, declining the Russian mediation. By the suggestion of a direct application for peace, without mediation, the British government had then, therefore, no idea of conceding, modifying, or mitigat- ing what were called the maritime rights of Great Britain, but of merely granting peace to American solicitation on relin- quishment of resistance to impressment of naturalized Americans bom British sub- ject; while, pending negotiation, the ancient superiority of Great Britain on the ocean was to be re-established, by naval triumphs. Such was the issue of 1813 ; a question of naval superiority, made by England, to be decided against her, in almost every encoun- ter, at sea and on the lakes, by squadrons, frigates and sloops of war, privateers, and the numbers of prizes, by inefliciency of her blockades to prevent the egress and return of American military and commer- cial vessels; in a word, by every test of 36 SPEECH or THE DUKE OF SUSSEX. maritime superiority, except in numbers of ships of war. About that time it was that hostile enter- S rises against Baltimore, Washington, and ^ew'Orleaus began to be indicated from the British press. As early as the 17th June, 1813, a ministerial journal, the Lon- don Cpurier, stated : " There are arguments in our colonial journals tending to prove that there exists a necessity for our govern- ment's taking possession of the province of New Orleans. We extract the following observations on that subject : — If Great Britain will only take New Orleans, she will divide the States. By shutting that outlet to the fruits of Western industry, she will make herself known and respected by those States, in spite of the power of the rest of the Union. If, in the war of 1755, France had been as superior at sea as Bri- tain then was, we should never have heard of the United States of America. The back country would have been as well settled before this with Frenchmen, as it now is with the descendants of Britons. We ought at present to take the benefit of former les- sons, and make those people our friends when so much is in our power. Take New Orleans, which is at the threshold of our West India islands, and which could fur- nish them with provisions at half the price they have been accustomed to pay. By such conduct, firm allies would be created on the continent, our West India planters would be gratified, and the integrity of the Spanish dominions in America guaranteed from traitorous insults." And the London Globe of the 18th October, ,1813, detailing Admiral Warren's movements in the Chesa- peake, stated that "great alarm for Bal- timore existed, and troops destined for Canada had been recalled. The alarm at one time reached Washington, within 70 miles of which city our parties had ap- proached, and occasioned much temporary bustle, and the packing up of the papers at the public offices, in case removal had been rendered necessary:" statements of unea- siness which never disturbed our govern- ment till too late. While North America, from the Bay of Fundy to the southern borders of Mexico, was agitated with hostilities, and the ele- ments of a western hemisphere, political, military, judicial, and altogether agitated to their foundations, European warfare broke out afresh with unexampled ubiquity and intensity, and everywhere, from the Tagus to the Categat, marvellous English success. Liberty and credit, servitude and despair, leagued Europe under British lead agamst her conqueror, armed with conscrip- tion, coin, and reluctant allies. On the 3d March, 1813, Great Britain purchased the alliance of Sweden, defensive and offensive, by a treaty negotiated at Stockholm by Ed- ward Thornton, who had been Robert Lis- [181S. ton, the British minister's, secretary of le- gation in the United States. For an army of thirty thousand Swedes, led by Bernadotte, the monarchs of Europe combined to de- throne the lawful heir of the Swedish crovrn, and violate the revered, if not rational prin- ciple of legitimacy, by putting in his place a French adventurer, once appointed Govern- or of Louisiana by the self-made Corsican Emperor of the French. Denmark, immense- ly tempted and urged by both parties to the conflict, alone stood aloof. When the United States were resisting by war the English dog- ma of perpetual allegiance, in violation of it another French soldier of fortune, Moreau, was brought from America to carry arms against his countrymen. Necessity over- ruled the rules of legitimacy and allegiance, when, except Denmark, every nation of Eu- rope was enlisted against an individual Dicr tator, stipendiaries of irredeemable English expenditures, and still more desperate pro- fusion of perfidious royal promises of free- dom, finally enforced by tremendous popu- lar convulsions, revolutionizing nearly all Europe. At a public meeting in London the 22d April, 1813, to promote the independence of Germany, the Prince Regent's royal bro- ther, in the fulness of joyful anticipation, confessed a precious truth. The most de- mocratic in his professions of George the Third's thirteen adult children, the Duke of Sussex, remarkable, after the American war, for hospitalities to Americans and liberality of politics, for which George the Fourth, apostate from such opinions, ban- ished his brother from court, told the assem- bled multitude in a speech that Austi;ia and Prussia, with the other German principali- ties, leagued against republican France, had combined to quell the insolence of French democracy by the complete dismemberment and annihilation of the French regicide nation. Such exterminating warfare, event- ually, as war begat war, and British tri- umphs emboldened further hostilities, a war of politics was waged by English monarchy against American republicanism, with pre- tensions and calculations as atrocious and preposterous as those avowed by the Duke of Sussex against France. In 1814, down with democracy was a watchword for the British armies and navies devastating Ame- rica. In 1813, war no longer commercial, but, by repeal of the Orders in Council, ex- clusively naval, the American flag bore no impressment, and that of Great Britain na- val dominion. Re-colonization, punishment, overthrow of republican principles, the vin- dictive resolve of 1814, were brought on by conflict for the recovery of naval supremacy' in 1813 ; while endeavor to sunder the States was a perennial British hope en- couraging all their warfare. The New England States, in 1812 and '13, not block- aded like the rest from that vain hopej Chap. I.] CAJSWING. 37 before the undeviating course of American naval victories set in, adding squadrons to single combat, and privateers to frigates, while consternation convulsed England for the easy capture of the first two, Ajueriean war and union and nationality were vouch- safed by a navy neglected here and despised there. For a moment relieved by the mis- fortune of the Chesapeake, joy for that gleam betrayed, in Bell's Weekly Messen- ger of the 6th September, 1813, the belief, that "In addition to that gratifying intel- ligence the Eastern States of America have, in the most unanimous manner, expressed their determination of seceding from their allegiance, unless the government makes peace with England." Before the Chesapeake's capture the most brilliant statesman of Great Britain invoked from Parliament interminable war for naval supremacy, the issue of 1813. To subdue the navy was first undertaken, to conquer the country the attempt that followed — the country of democratic institutions. In a speech on the 18th February, 1813, au- thenticated, as his biographer published, by the orator's own careful revisal. Canning raised his potential voice in Parliament for war, till victory redeemed the stricken flag of England. "I am afraid," said he, wi ' elaborate sarcasm, "that neither the hardy valor, the ardent patriotism, and the lofty magnanimity of ancient Greece and Kome, nor the gentle manners and artificial refine- ment of Genoa and Florence are to be traced in the hard features of transatlantic demo- cracy. The heartless and selfish policy pursued by the Americans, &c. , The loss of those two fine ships of war, the Guerrier and Macedonian, produced a sensation in this country scarcely to be^ equalled by the most violent convulsion of nature. I do not attribute the slightest blame to our gallant sailors. They always do their duty. But neither can I agree with those who complain of the shock of consternation throughout Great Britain as having been greater than the occasion justified. • "Who would represent the loss as insignificant, and the feelings of shame and indignation excited by it as exaggerated and extrava- gant? That indignation was a wholesome feeling, which ought to be cherished and maintained. It cannot he too deeply felt, that the sacred spell of the invincibility of the British navy was broken by those unfor- tunate captures ; and however we must all wish the war to terminate, I hope I shall not be considered as sanguinary a-nd un- feeling when I express my devout wish that it may not be concluded before we have re-established the character of our naval superiority, and smothered in victorres the clisasters which we. have now to lament, and to which we are so little habituated." Brightest star of the rotten borough orb, which sheji select influences on the Com- mons House, and elected him by a con- stituency of *thirty-six votes ; man of let- ters, wit, poet, epigrammatist, elegant up- start, if born of Sheridan and an actress, both father and son from humble origin rising to fashionable, literary and political distinction, practically refuted the dogma of high life, which they flattered, that manners depend on birth, wealth, or other aristocratic tuition. Canning's contempt for the vulgar American democracy, as for the fir-built frigates with bits of bunt- ing at their mast-heads, was soon turned into respect so profound as to invoke inter- minable war, to recover from the convul- sion and consternation caused by their first two victories, bellum inexplicabile, which the least blood-thirsty Briton should prefer to peace, till war smothered those fatal reverses in British naval triumphs. In desperate devotion to the shivered spell of naval superiority,, the future premier pro- claimed perpetual conflict, which only mul- tiplied American victories. In 1813, war for the naval palm brought on, in 1814, an issue of politics. American resistance to impressment in peace compelled republi- can, assaulted by monarchical government, to put the still greater issue before the world, of Ameri can democracy aga innti TJ^-i— th-j-tiail.af istocracjj^ In i.8ia, peace by Russian mediation, lluropean negotiation, or any other than belligerent means, became, for- tunately for the United States, their disap- pointed expectation. No terms were to be had from the justice of Great Britain ; whose fears and injuries were the only American hope. Common as our mistake is, to sup- pose that mighty empire, unlike all other nations, incapable of yielding, it is, never- theless, the pleasant task of this volume to prove, undema piy , ina.t. wh en A rm eri can fea r o t war ana nope oi peace gave place to dis - cipSnea nostiiities, and arepupiican people put lorth their energies. American trophies were the rich spoils of every encounter! save one, not unuseiui, nowever aisgracelul ais- aster: and left this country ready for an- other campaign, to sweep every British ves- tige from the American- continent ; when the greatest maritime empire in the world, from vast vindictive and monstrous hostili- ties, with corresponding enormity of terms of peace, fell suddenly and inexplicably, unless caused by American hostilities, to reasonable concessions, fortunately, per- haps, vfithout an inch of ground on either side surrendered; but with more than all jhe objects of the American governme Btje- alized by IastinK£ea£e;_J<^tune, no"doubt, ha3riS'^1W3ys''"great' influence ; and_other than" belligerent operations contributed to reconcile, it may be said reduce, Great Britain to terms. Manufactures, the income tax, European maritime sympathies with this country, were not without effect. Still it was war that made peace ; and when war with America had become much more for- midable ttan it ever was before to England, 38 MEETING OF CONGRESS.— EMBARGO. [1813. CHAPTEE n. MEETING OF CONGRKSS— EMBARGO— TRADE WITH THE ENEMY— LICENSE TRADE- BATTLE IN BOSTON HARBOR— BRITISH CONSUL'S ARREST— BRITISH CONSULS IN THE UNITED STATES— ANDREW ALLEN— ADMIRAL COCKBURN'S COMPLAINT OF THE LICENSE TRADE— LORD CASTLEREAGH'S LETTER THEREUPON TO MR. ALLEN —COUNT STUARTON— SWISS INFORMER— PREVQ.ST'S SECRET INSTRUCTIONS TO BRITISH AGENTS IN THE UNITED STATES— GRAHAM'S SECRET MISSION TO MASSA- CHUSETTS—SWISS INFORMER'S SECRET LETTERS— FOSiTER AND BAKER DETECTED WITH LICENSES— PRESIDENT URGES, AND CONGRESS ENACTS EMBARGO— INEF- FECTUAL— BRITISH GOVERNMENT BILLS— BLUE LIGHTS— HIRAM THAYER- JOHN LEWIS— JOSEPH WARBURTON— ARRIVAL OF THE BRAMBLE— REFUSAL BY ENG- LAND OP RUSSIAN MEDIATION— MR. CLAY AND JONATHAN RUSSELL ADDED TO THE PEACE COMMISSION— LANGDON CHEVES ELECTED SPEAKER— PROCEEDINGS OF CONGRESS — WAR ACTS — ARMY— NAVY— TREASURY— WEBSTER— FORSYTH- CALHOUN— EMBARGO REPEALED AND CONDEMNED— SAMUEL A. OTIS— OPPOSITION —SUPPLIES— MASON'S RESOLUTIONS— GORE'S RESOLUTIONS— UNEXECUTED PRO- POSALS IN CONGRESS. The second session of the "War Congress began December 6th, 1813, in bad temper, and with disappointed expectations. Har- rison had only recovered in 1813, at best, by Indian rather than English defeat, part of what Hull lost in 1812 ; and Jackson's Ti«toriea ojcBt-Indians^ij: jio means made amends for the total failiie of the great enterprise against English antagonists in Canada. Perry's victory was our only great consolation ; conquest of Canada less probable than ever; and that, the great American undertaking, whose failure was the principal ^argument of the peace party against the administration and offensive war. Great Britain rejected the Russian mediation, enforced retaliation, resolved on severe hostilities with nearly all the world, her .allies. Spain almost joined her in fur- nishing forts and posts in Florida for Eng- lish succor to the Creeks.. One of Porter's prizes was peremptorily,., ordered.by. the Portuguese government of Brazil instant- ly to leave the harbor of Rio Janeiro. Throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, the United States were without an ally or sympathy, while England had them everywhere, was ostensibly rich as we were apparently poor, with the tide of fortune running strong in her favor and against us in both hemispheres. The President's mes- sage, the 7th December, 1813, under these circumstanQes, could only regret the failure of the Russian mediation, denounce yet threaten murderous retaliation, confess that there was no prospect of peace, and war the only alternative, argue some of its resi- lient advantages, and tell Congress that the nation, proud of its rights, was conscious of its strength to support them. So, in- deed, the nation proved; more conscious of strength when Congress declared war than the Executive failing to begin it vigorously, or than Congress when it failed to support the Executive striving to end it well. For at diiferent stages of the struggle, the vari- ous branches of government faltered, both executive and legislative, but the people never ; either in submission to taxation and privation, or to bear arms bravely when duly marshaled. The Senate, sometimes more energetic, but always less harmonious or united, was more intractable than the House of Representatives. Five or six Senators of the war party opposed the administration : among them, William B. Giles, of Virginia, who, besides votes and speeches in Senate, attacked the President by long publications against the nomina- tions of Albert Gallatin and Jonathan Russell, involving disputed rights and du- ties of the President and Senate. Party violence in the capitol and throughout the country kept pace with hostilities ; though party violence and estrangements in the United States are never so implacable aa in Great Britain. The President was- bent on the embargo, for which the Senate had rejected a bill pass- ed by the House at the close of the prior ses- sion. Though it proved of little avail, and was soon revoked, yet the fraudulent and illegal, if not treasonable, commercial in- tercourse between parts of New England and the British possessions was extremely injurious, and provoked, if it did not justify, that last spasm of the expiring restrictive system. The twelfth Congress, on the 6th July, 1812, soon after declaring war, en- acted some inadequate provisions, and the common law of nations, marine and inter- national, as judicially enforced, was strong against trade by enemies' licenses. But people so much akin and alike as Ameri- cans and Britons, so disaffected and enter- - prising as the descendants of the pilgrims, required unusual restraints to prevent their consorting and trafficking together. As soon as war was known in England, on the 9th November, 1812, a British order in Chap.H.] ILLICIT TKADB WITH THE ENEMY. 39 council established a system of surrepti- tious dealing by license, contrary to inter- national law ; and, moreover, aggravated by distinguishing the Eastern from the other States. " Whatever 'importations are pro- posed to be made under the order from the United States of America should be by your licenses, (was the instruction of the Lords in Council,) confined to the ports in the Eastern States exclusively, unless you have reason to suppose that the object of the order vrould not be fulfilled if licenses are not granted for the importation from the other parts of the United States." The British government thus actually establish- ed a commercial alliance with the discon- tented, restricted, and rapacious of the East, countenanced by some of their State governments, judiciary, merchants, bar, church, and partisans. Without waiting for any order in council, their consular and other agents in the United States a,rranged similar contrivances here as soon as war was declared. The Act of Congress of the 6th July, 1812, imperfectly prohibitory of licenses, was hardly public before Andrew Allen, the English consul at Boston, on the 18th of that month addressed a letter to the British naval commander-in-chief on the American station, Vice Admiral Herbert Sawyer, at Halifax, proposing the ma- chinery of licensed trade to supply the ene- my and his allies with provisions, carried by American vessels wherever wanted. On the 5th August, 1812, the admiral officially answereJ'the consul, approving the device, which he put in use the- 4th of that month. Profitable as the sale of such indulgences was to themselves, tempting to American avarice and disloyalty, and extremely in- jurious to this country, a more effectual method could hardly be devised for reliev- ing, clandestinely, the unworthy from the burdens of war, enriching them, proscrib- ing the innocent, unconscious community, and prolonging war indefijiitely. ■ British America and the West Indies, particularly Halifax and Bermuda, the allied armies in Spain and Portugal succored, and the enemy's cause everywhere aided and pro- moted, ' the Swedish and Spanish flags, as neutral covers for vessels owned arid manned by Americans, were prostituted for similar operations. Hundreds of Ame- rican citizens frequented Halifax with sup- plies, smuggling bacS: European and Asiatic goads in return. Seventeen thousand bar- rels of American flour were said to be landed there in one day. Many Americans were employed in driving cattle for food across the lines separating Vermont and New York from Canada. The numbers, artifices, audacity, and it may be added, re- spectability of persons engaged in these for- bidden ways to wealth, by land and sea, were incredible. The Federal District Court, at Eutiaadj Vermont, in Qetobsr; 1813, had no less than forty-three cases of such mis- demeanors for trial, involving importations of goods and export of provisions, which our armies on the frontier found it impos- sible to prevent and hazardous to interrupt, for the parties implicated would harass them with suits in State courts, to be tried by jurors often interested in the proceed- ings. A sheriff's ofScer in New Hampshire detected a letter, dated August 16th, 1813, from- Stephen Wilson, Thomas Carlisle, Benjamin Boardman, William Lovejoy, and Thomas Eames, respectable citizens there, to Josiah Sawyer, of Eaton, Lower Canada, interceding for Curtis Coe, of Bamstead, Hew Hampshire, who was arrested and imprisoned as a spy at Three Rivers, in Canada. "From our acquaintance with Mr. Coe," said the letter; "his character and politics, we are confident that his ob- ject IS far from being unfriendly to the motives which induced your government in repelling the attacks made on you by our Executive. His politics have uniformly been what we style staunch federalism, and his object, we believe, no other than traf- ficking vdth your citizens in defiance of some of our laws. His language and con- duct with us have uniformly belied even the semblance of an enemy to your govern- ment, or any of your usages in repelling the measures which our Executive has tried' to enforce." John and Ebenezer Hussey were committed for trial, after examination by Judge Story ; against whom it was in proof, that they drove cattle down to the beach, at Princeton, for the enemy's ship of the line, the Majestic, lying ofi' the coast; from on board of which vessel a lieutenant went ashore with a boat to bring back the cattle, who had a conversa- tion on the beach with the Husseys. Illicit trade, like illicit love, or Spartan theft, is seldom deemed criminal or disre- putable unless detected. And not only illicit but treasonable trade was an invete- rate offence of New England ; whose in- habitants, according to an English travel- ler's account of them, in the war of 1756, traded with their French enemies as their descendants in 1813 did with English. " Not scrupulous," said this authority, " in. taking liberties detrimental to other pro- vinces, but even to the nation, especially in times of war, by carrying on an illicit trade ■with the enemy, and supplying them with the most material articles. This they have repeatedly done with impunity, to my cer- tain knowledge, in the course of the late war, when many scores of vessels went loaded with beef, pork, flour, &c., under the pretext of flags, which, for a certain consideration, could at any time be pro- cured from their governor; when, at the same .time, perhaps, they carried not more than one or two French prisoners, dividing .the crew of one French merchantman they. 40 THE LICENSE TRADE. had taken" among a whole fleet of flags of truce, laden with articles more welcome to the enemy than all the prisoners, with the ship and cargo they took from them." Such were the ties of national intimacy between Americans and English — associations of hlood, habit, and business — that it was ex- tremely difficult to make them comprehend that they were traitors if they dealt toge- ther. , The press teemed with printed copies of letters and other papers captured on board British vessels, betraying that na- tjiral incredulity by glaring proof. The Yankee privateer captured a letter, dated Morley, Eng-land, 3a August, 1813, from Joseph Asqueth for Joseph Dixen to James Webster, Quebec, explaining how goods were clandestinely taken from Canada to Albany, New York, and Philadelphia, and mentioning as their recipients many notable merchants. Among these letters, exposed to public animadversion, was one, dated Sheffield, 8 mo., 3d, 1813, from William Hodgson & Co., to Henry Cox, Quebec, of which the Quaker phraseology was in ludi- crous contrast with the unscrupulous de- sign. " If thou does attempt to get any goods into the country thou alludes to in thy No. 3, it will require great care and caution on thy part, and thou must be sure to act safely or not at all." During the winter of 1813-14, our advices were, that, among other preparations made in Canada, with exemplary industry and effect, for the next summer's campaign, one hundred pieces of ordnance were drawn by four hundred oxen from Montreal to Kingston, attended by the men who smuggled them from Vermont and New Hampshire into Canada ; for which, and driving them to Kingston, they were paid four hundred dollars a-piece. The revenue laws of the United States were continually fi-ustrated by legal pro- ceedings in, and often of the States. James Fisk stated, in the House of Representa- tives, that he knew one instance where fifty-six writs were served on one collector in the same week; and unless prevented by Act of Congress, the State courts might and would levy on property seized for taxes due to the United States. The license trade was extensively pro- secuted with an open disregard of even the appearance of American allegiance, till Judge Story put a stop to it on his, the most extensive maritime circuit, and in the most disaffected region of country, by vir- tue of common Admiralty law and national jurisprudence, independent of any act of Congress. On the 31st December, 1812, the frigate Chesapeake, Captain Evans, captured a licensed vessel called the Julia, on her return to Boston with a cargo of salt, after having gone to Lisbon from Bal- timore, with provisions, altogether docu- mented as American property. After her [1813. capture the license was stolen from the prize-master, who had taken a copy of it however, being a permit signed and sealed the 4th August, on board his majesty's ship Centurion, at Halifax, by Vice Ad- miral Sawyer, stating, that "whereas Mr. Andrew Allen, his majesty's consul at Bos- ton, has recommended to me Mr. Robert Ewell, a merchant of that place, well in- clined toward the British interest, who is desirous of sending provisions to Spain and Portugal for the use of the allied armies ; and it has been deemed expedient by his majesty's government, notwithstanding the hostilities between Great Britain and the United States, that every degree of en- couragement and protection should be given to American vessels laden with flour, bound to Spain and Portugal;" on which docu- ment Judge Story, by a luminous judgment in May, 1813, decreed a condemnation of vessel and cargo to the captors, which was confirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States, and became the established prize law. On the 2d August, 1813, the English vice admiralty judge at Halifax, Dr. Croke, gave judgment by an elabo- rate decree, that license granted by Lord Sidmouth as British Secretary of State, the 11th September, 1812, protected from capture for breach of blockade, an Ameri- can vessel called the Orion, with a cargo of fiour and com, which sailed from New York for Lisbon the 15th May, 1813. The object of these licenses, said the judge, was for the benefit of the British military service. The armies employed in the cause of liberty were starving in Spain. It was necessary to have recourse to the United States as long as these necessities existed; and in hardy confession of the politics of British admiralty law, he added in conclu- sion, that if dissatisfied with his decree, the parties could apply to a superior tribunal where the instructions and object of his majesty's government are known d priori. The license trade, thus condemned by American and upheld by British courts as a mere political contrivance managed by the ministry, while Dr. Croke waspronounc- ing his time-serving decree at Halifax, on the 2d August 1813, was exposed to general odium by a tumultuous and characteristic fermentation at Boston. The brig Despatch, owned by Cornelius Coolidge and Francis J. Oliver of that place, arriving under a British license from Cadiz, was captured within the lighthouse by a couple of petty privateers, the Castigator of Salem, mount- ing one six pound cannon, with a crew of nineteen men, and the Fame, mounting two four-pounders, and manned by eight- een men, as the law was then setfled that licenses were illegal. Still the own- ers of the Despatch forthwith armed two boats with twenty-two men each, and sent them to recapture their vessel. As the. Chap. II.] boats approached for that purpose, the pri- vateers supplied {he prize-master on board the Despatch with amis, several times hailed the boats, ordered them to keep off, and fired at them. Without returning the fire, the boats ran along side the Despatch, boarded, and carried her in spite of her fire. Fortunately, no blood was spilt in the ridiculous encounter, of which the tidings at Boston produced great and opposite sen- sation. The officer commanding Fort Inde- pendence took possession of a,ll the vessels, delivered the Despatch to the Collector, and enlarged her captors. The owners of the Despatch, with some of the armed men equipped by them in the two boats, were arrested for breach of law; the Despatch was condemned to the captors, and the riot- ous conflict was not without influence in converting public sentiment to the aid of law and order, the former long, the latter on that occasion egregiously set at naught by those who supplied the enemy with food under his illegal licenses. At length, after more than twelve months' endurance of the vicious system, soon after the indecent conflict near Boston harbor, the chief Anglo-American author of trade by licenses, a rallying point of British in- fluence in Boston, the ex-British consul ther§, Mr. Andrew Allen, was arrested and expj^lled under prosecution for that mis- deineanor as imperfectly prohibited by the - Act of July 1812. A license countersigned by him as issued by Admiral Sawyer, was put in evidence before the judge, and as Mr. Allen would not acknowledge his hand- writing, his signature was proved by Mr. Thomas H. Perkins. ■ The District Judge, Davis, -after hearing the District Attorney George Blake, for the prosecution, and Mr. Otis and Mr. Wm. SuUivan, for the siccused, ordered him to enter into recognizance in $1000 for his appearance and trial at the next Circuit Court. When called to appear in court the 25th October 1813, for trial, Mr. AUen made default, leaving his recog- nizance au6 Massachusetts behind, while he went to Canada in a single horse wagon, and embarking at Quebec in the Douro fri- gate, sailed to England. In February, 1815, 3ie gentleman who proved his handwriting, Mr. Thomas H. Perkins, and the consul's legal advisers, Harrison Gray Otis and Wil- liam Sullivan, were appointed by Governor Strong, envoys to Washington, pursuant to resolution of the Legislature of Massachu- setts, bearers of the behests of the Hart- ford Convention. Between the peace of 1783 and war of 1812, England, without proper delicacy, sta- tioned as consuls in the iJnited States, seve- ral tories of the revolution or their sons, loyalists extreme in English reverence and American aversion, of whom the consul af: Boston, Mr. Andrew AUen, was a superior tjpe of what many, if not most, Americans BRITISH CONSUL AT BOSTON. 41 admired as the model of English gentle- men. To English invidious detestation of whatever is" foreign, some of the insular greatness of England may be ascribed. American either dislike or reverence, of what is English perverts, or benumbs na- tionality; though complete American iu- dejieudenee is rare in seaports, where En- ghshmen like Mr. Allen enjoyed great social influence, and constantly sought foi; politi- cal, in the long-cherished English hope of re-colonization, for which disunion of the States was inculcated. Of all the agents for such purposes, none was better qualified than the consul at Boston. Stationed there in 1805, when English vexations of Ameri- can commerce began, domesticated there in 1809, when Governors of Nova Scotia and Canada, with the. sanction of the British ministry, sent John Henry and other clan- destine emissaries, to attempt disunion by operations at Boston, and remaining there, by direction of the British government after war was declared, and his consular func- tions legally ceased, Mr. AUen, by the license trade and other means, was the minister of a commercial alliance between persons, if not portions, of the United States and England, in spite of war and in defiance of the American government. Of superior education and attainments, in the prime of life, of handsome appearance and prepossessing manners, with inbred Anglo-American contempt for republican institutions, and transcendental love of English government, much admired as an English gentleman of American birth, he could not but delight in the duty to restore such parts of the United States as could be convinced of their revolutionary error, to the inestimable advantages of British aUegiance, and of being saved by it from the infidel and fatal effects of French influence, which, through the instrumental- ity of Jefferson and Madison, were consum- mated by a war commanded by Bonapsirte. Well salaried, maintained, and esta- blished to propagate these sentiments, a universal favorite among the malcontent mercantile aristocracy of Boston, five hun- dred miles removed from the counteracting influences of the seat of national govern- ment, Mr. Alien effectually represented Great Britain among those soured by Jeffer- son's superseding Adams in the presidency, alarmed by the incalculable increase of Southwestern power, by the annexation of Louisiana, impoverished' by the decUne of business and of property, which followed the restrictive system, arid excited to de- lirious disaffection by a declaration of war, resolved at all events on some change of rulerSj poUoy, and government. In poUti- cal council and social intimacy with that restless disaffection, Mr. AUen's vice-royalty was established at Boston. Born in Pennsylvania, of one of the lead- 42 ADMIRAL COCKBURN AND THE LICENSE TRADE. [1813. ing families of that leading colony, when Philadelphia, where they resided, was the North American metropolis, overweeningly attached to a great mother country, the Boston consul's grandfather, William Allen, from humble labor, became a prosperous merchant, and maker of his own fortune. By royal authority created chief justice during the primitive colonial paucity of law- yers, he administered the inartificial justice with short pleadings, enjoined by Penn the founder, as the reformed code of hia radical commonwealth. The merchant chief jus- tice's son, Andrew, provincial attorney- general, was father of the consul, Andrew Allen the younger ; connected by inter- marriages with the Penns and Hamiltons, who gave provincial governors to Pennsyl- vania, and others of the provincial aristo- cracy as thoroughly English as they were racily recent ; and after the Revolution con- nected also by marriage with Hammond, the first English minister commissioned from the Court of St. James to dazzle Philadelphia by European luxuries, and annoy our first administrations by impress- ment and sea-search. Born from the bloody bowels of a revolu- tion he had every reason to deplore and decry, taken to England for thB first stages of his education, and after the peace re- turned to America to finish it, the future consul as a schoolboy made himself re- markable for combative English disdain of whatever was American. From his father, once much attached to his birth-place, the son inherited morbid intensity of English loyalty. Persecuted, banished, fugitive, attainted, his ample estates around Phila- delphia confiscated, his name published in a catalogue of traitors, compelled to live pensioned and die repining in a foreign country which paid without respecting aliens to their own ; the father ruminated that deadliest of melancholy hatred which victims, exasperated by proscription and for- feiture, contract for their nativity. Such was the inheritance of Andrew Allen, the Eng- lish consul at Boston, naturally and immu- tably an English propagandist in America. For many years of that function establish- ed among the descendants of some of the sternest authors, and worst antagonists of the American Revolution, soured with their own national government, inured to eluding, opposing and condemning its laws of peace and of war, and remitted by that antagon- ism like reconciled lovers to English attach- ments. After his departure frorri America, Mr. 'Andrew Allen took orders for the church, and lived to witness the vast pro- gress of the United States when two wars with Great Britain, redeemed transient distress by permanent prosperity. The British ministry in London, by their order in council of September, 1812, li- censed trade between enemies, contrary to the first principle of war, not to mitigate, but plague it by avarice. Outrun in the race of covetousness by their consul A116n at Boston in July of that year, in concert with Admiral Sawyer at Halifax, two of the most rapacious depredators next year in the American waters. Admiral Cockburn and Captain Barrie, by anticipation protest- ed against loss of their share of plunder. Then stationed in Cadiz Bay, to watch the war movements in Spain, those freebooters, by an ofBcial correspondence, which came into possession of our government from an interloper in the confidence of Consul Al- len, protested to the British Government against licenses allowed to prevent the harvest they anticipated of American prizes. On the 6th November, 1812, in that struggle, ministerial, consular and naval, for unlawful gain by fraud of war, Robert Barrie, captain of the ship Gram- pus, then in Cadiz Bay, wrote to Rear Ad- miral Cockburn, "When I detained the American brig Lydia on the first of that month, her master and supercargo both assured me that Mr. Allen, the vice con- sul at Boston, receives from the American owners one dollar per barrel of the entire cargo of each vessel which is famished with his license. The terms of agree- ment are one-half the purchase-moiiey paid Mr. Allen down when he delivers the license, the other half to be paid if the vessel arrives safe at her destined port. I should conceive myself wanting in duty if I concealed such information. I conceive our government should be acquainted with the fact. May I request that, before I pro- ceed on my next cruise, you will furnish me with some instructions on the subject of Mr. Allen's papers, as they do not ap- pear to me to be connected with the one hundred and eighty licenses left by Mr. Poster." On the same November 6th, 1812, Rear Admiral Cockburn, from on board his ship, the Marlborough, in Cadiz Bay, enclosed that letter of Captain Bar- rie to Vice Admiral Martin, in a letter from Cockburn, complaining that " a Mr. Allen, his majesty's vice consul at Bos- ton, has entered into a nefarious agree- ment with owners of American vessels, for lending his official authority towards cover- ing their property across the sea. As those licenses issued by Mr. Allen have certainly no relation to the one hundred and eighty referred to in Admiral Sawyer's letter to the admiralty of the 18th July last, I pro- pose, till I_ receive your further directions on the subieot, authorizing Captain Barrie and the other officers under my command to persist in not respecting them, and to continue to send to a British port, to be there treated as other Americans, the ves- sels they may fall in with holding these papers, which, by the accompanying state- ment, appear to have been granted by Mr. Chap; II.] LORD CASTLEREAGH'S LETTER TO ALLEN. 45 Allen more with a view to his private in- terest than his public duty." On the same 6th N-ovember, 1812, Cockburn by letter to J. W. Croker, Esq., Admiralty, " thought it right to, transmit, -without loss of time, for their lordships' consideration, the copy of his lettei; enclosing Captain Barrie's, transmitted by him (Cockburny to Vice Admiral Martin." These complaints pro- duced a letter from Mr. Croker, dated Ad- miralty Office, 23d November, 1812, to W. Hamilton, Esq., asking, by command of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, Lord Castlereagh's opinion as soon as pos- sible, relative to licenses issued by Mr. Allen, his majesty's consul at Boston, to American vessels. Accordingly, on the 25th November, 1813, from the Foreign Office, Lord Castlereagh's letter was expe- dited to Andrew Allen, Esq., his majesty's consul, Boston, transmitting him copies of all the before mentioned letters " wjth re- spect to licenses said to be issued by you without authority, and in a manner dero- gatory to the character of a person holding his majesty's commission, for the protec- tion of American vessels loaded with corn for the Peninsula. I desire that you will lose no time in acquainting me with the circumstances relative to this transaction, and particularly whether the licenses al- luded to are those which you were in a Planner authorized to issue by Admiral -•Sawyer, and upon which you have already been instructed to desist from any further issue of the same, without immediate in- structions from his majesty's principal Secretary of State to that effect." Signed by Castlereagh's neat and characteristic handwriting, too well known at the Ameri- can Department of State, that rebuking missive, together with those producing it, aU furtively taken from Mr. Allen's repo- sitory of such precious documents, near Boston, were sent to Mr. Monroe, exposing the ministerial, consular and naval shabby strife concerning unlawful gain by trade in war. On the 14th October, 1813, a letter was confidentially presented to the Secretary of State, of which the following is copied from the original. To His Excellency the Hon- orable James Monroe, Secretary of State, &c. &c. &c. " Sir— On the 12th March, 1663-4, and on the 29th June, 1674, Charles II., by let- ters patent underthe great seal of England, Save and granted to his brother James, 'uke of York, his heirs and assigns, all Mattewaks, now called Long Island, all Hudson's River, and all the lands from the west side of Connecticut River to the east side of Delaware Bay. These gifts and grants were confirmed in the treaty of peace between England and France at Breda, July 21st, 1667, and in London, February the 9th, 1674;. and the Duke in consequence sold part of them to Lord Barclay and Sir George Carteret. At his ascension to the throne in 1685, James II. continued to dispose of the remainder aa his private property, totally unconnected with the domains of the crown. After his abdication in 1688, he and his heirs en- joyed in exile (with the exception of short interruption during 1746-7) the same power until the commencement of tho American Revolution. Upon application then to the French monarch, the Duke of Albany in 1779 was assured that the American Republic had no intention to invade the rights of the house of Stuart ; and when under the 7th March, 1784, a Philadelphia banker, Mr. Robert Mortis, offered to purchase these rights of the Duke, Louis the Sixteenth by Cardinal de Bernis, his ambassador at Rome, desired him to decline this offer, giving him in lieu an annual pension of 200,000 livres, on condition that as long as this pension was regularly paid, his most Christian majesty and his heirs were to be considered as in- vested with all the right of the Duke and his heirs. This pension the Duke received until his death in January, 1789, and after him his brother, the late Cardinal York, until June, 1792. " In the will of the Duke of Albany, dated Florence, August 30th, 1788, Count Stuar- ton is acknowledged next to Cardinal York his lawful heir, an acknowledgment eon- firmed by this Cardinal in his will, dated Rome, February 15th, 1789. Both these wills were by Cardinal de Bernis commu- nicated to the King of France, who, on the 2d July, 1789, gave his royal assent' to Count Stuarton's rights and claims, with a promise to confer on him the vacant-ti tle, of Duke of Albany as soon as France had recovered her then lost tranquillity and order. All the original grants, assign- ments, letters, wills, contracts and other documents mentioned above, are in the possession of Count Stuarton, together with the papal bull of December 23d, 1792, de- claring the legitimacy of his grandfather as son of James III., commonly called the Pretender, the only legitimate son of James the Second, King of England, with Agathe Therese Adelaide, Marchioness d'Epernais de St. Luc ; and the decree of Parliament at Paris, dated February 26th, 1733, confirming and registering the papal bull. " The object of this letter is to solicit on the part of Count Stuarton his Excellency the President's permission for the tran- scription- of such official correspondence or of such private notes of verbal conferences between the respective agents of the Ame- rican and French governments which may have taken place concerning the claims of the royal Stuarts from 1776 to 1785. I have the honor to be respectfully, sir, your 44 COUNT STTJAKTON. [1813i Excellency's most obedient and humble servant." Dated Washington City, October 14th, 1813. The name of the extraordinary, myste- rious, and after extensive and expensive pursuit and search throughout Europe, Canada and the United States, the never- theless undiscovered author of that and other remarkable letters which soon fol- lowed it, perha.ps an assumed name, at all events immaterial to this account of him, is suppressed, because such seems from the papers to have been Mr. Monroe's under- standing with that informer, or was his frequent and urgent insistance and condi- tion of the information he betrayed. In one of those letters he called himself a Swiss, by the mother's side related to some of the first families of Europe, having bled by the side of Louis the Sixteenth on the 10th August, 1792 ; poor, but rather from choice than necessity, preferring an hum- ble independence to any affluence a bril- liant bondage can bestow ; living near Worcester, Massachusetts, in total retire- ment, as he actually lived, during the three years preceding his visit to Washington in October, 1813 ; an elderly gentleman, of pleasing address, fascinating manners and superior information ; a fugitive, he said, from the police and vengeance of Napo- leon ; his wife, a charming young English woman, born, she said, in Somersetshire near Bath ; both intimate with Mr. Andrew Allen, the British consul at Boston, at one time relegated to Worcester, and with his respectable associates, the Perkins, Trumbulls, Parson Gardiner, and others of the best social standing thereabouts, whose attentions, hospitaEties and presents to those attractive and secluded strangers-, "iBfparted consideration, and enabled them to master and betray, if so disposed, the plans, and correspondence of the consul, and others dealing with him in illicit com- merce by British licenses, or other con- trivances, contrary to the law and welfare of this country. To this day it remains, and probably must forever be unknown, whether those accomplished foreigners were English spies, as was believed by many, or mere adventurers. Letters from the Swiss himself and copies of letters to him from persons of consequence, as' he stated, in Loudon, Paris, Prague, Frankfort and Stockholm, which he sent to Mr. Monroe, justified the impression that if an impostor he was -no common one; and as such the medium, if of some ficti- tious, also of much useful information. Secluded, as the American Government was, by hostile naval hindrance from early and accurate European intelligence, such European correspondence was valuable, and its American disclosures still more 80. No pay was required. Information concerning the royal btuart's private Ame- rican property, to be obtained from the American diplomatic records, and a cartel for safe passage to Europe, with the allow- ance of a mere ordinary messenger, w^re all the requitals asked for intelligence, none of it unimportant, some of it appa- rently momentous. With large European as well as American experience in all the bye-ways of government, Monroe, con- vinced by John Henry's disclosures that successive English ministries long ma- chinated odious conspiracies against the American Union, before and during the war, wary as he was, yet inclined to credit the most alarming of these Swiss tales. Mr. Erskine and Mr. Foster, while English ministers in the United States, at different periods were both credibly reported to have said that New England would never fight against Great Britain. The Swiss soon sent a cypher, with the key to it, in which to veil his letters, stipulating that none of them should be seen but by the President and Mr. Monroe, and all burned when read ; with anxiety declaring that the slightest suspicion reaching Mr. Allen of his correspondence with our government, would be fatal to his means of information. A letter in cypher, dated November 4th, 1813, began "Chance and not confidence has placed the annexed parcel in Tsay hands, and zeal, not interest, transmits (it to the American Government," enclosing five sheets endorsed by Mr. Monroe. " Sir'^ George Provost's instructions to British agents in the United States, 1812," divided into thirty-six heads, viz : " To ascertain in each of the governments of the United States whether any foreign influence pre- vails therein, and the name of the state, nation or country on behalf of which such influence appears. If possible, also find out the persons and channels whereby such influence is carried on, and by what means, whether by Ijribery and personal advan- tages held out, or by commercial and other national benefits proposed." "Ascertain what proportion the two contending parties in America, namely the federalists .and democrats, bear to each other." "In what proportion the federalists incline towards the interests of Great Britain or France in the present war, and the proportion of democrats who espouse the cause of either party ; whether the present election of President and Vice President has caused any disunion in either of the parties ; what measures are most likely to be adopted by those unfriendly to Great Britain, and what by her friends, as most likely to pro- mote her interests ; in what proportion each State has suffered by the embargo ; whether it is probable it will be resisted openly by any and which of the States ; whether resistance to the embargo would lead to a separation of the United States ; whether any party wishes it, or State., and Chap; II.] PREVOST'S DETECTED INSTRUCTIONS. 45 ■whether a separation is considered inju- rious to the country at large.''^ — Together with many queries respecting the military, regular and militia, and the naval force of the United States, forts, arsenals, &c., are several concerning Spain and Portugal among them, "whether the change in the government of Spain has excited any and what apprehension in the American Go- vernment respecting the acquisition of -Louisiana, and whether any increase of the naval or military force of America has taken place in that quarter in consequence of recent events." " To mark particularly whether the opinions of the President of the United States have undergone any and what alterations since the last meeting of ■ Congress ; whether he appears to waver from the measures which he so strenuously pursued, and still appears determined to pursue the same line of conduct ; to ascer- tain what ideas are entertained as to the feasibility and mode of attacking Canada, -New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and whether by sea or land ; whether the in- habitants of those provinces have any partiality or attachment for the United States, to favor or assist them, or to sepa- rate from Great Britain and enter the con- federacy of the United States." lAlthough those pragmatical queries im- plicated no American state, or party, or person whatever, in collusion, with sinister jBritish designs against American welfare, yet odious -and dangerous governmental contrivances against it by clandestine - means, were the burden, tenor and aim of instructions, which could not have origin- ated in Canada, but must have gone there from England, and, however unjustly, implied American infidelity. There was ^Iso remarkable doubt of Canadian loy- alty to England and inclination to the •United States ; and stiU more remarkable fear of the exposure of the other British North-Eastern American Provinces to Ame- rican hostile occupation, not only by land, but by sea. Importing American unity throughout all the confederated States, for none but those of New England could be contemplated as inclined to disunion, that document, suggesting doubts of Canadian _ loyalty, and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia liability to invasion, revived the ap- prehension derived from Mr. Quincy Adams, -countenanced by Henry's mission, conti- nued by the violent language of Eastern individuals, and confirmed by the inimical acts of State authorities in the east, that there were party leaders, as Mr. Adams solemnly averred, ready to dismember the Eastern States from the rest, and put N'ew England under British protection. Other communications, from a real or fic- titious agent, of a real or fictitious royal Stuart, as it might be, but who, if real, had royal means of knowledge, placed the be- fore-mentioned original letters of a corre- spondence between Lord Castlereagh and Consul Allen, with those of Admiral Cock- burn, Captain Barrie and Secretary Croker, in the hands of the American Executive, induced by all these circumstances to lend some cautious credit to an extraordinary inference, and convinced of the unwarrant- able efibrts of the English government in- ducing ours to endeavor to discover whether Prevost had American instruments. It was information the Executive thought neither to be disregarded nor believed without as- certainment. Some time, therefore, after the first assurances from the ostensible agent of Count Stuarton, the chief clerk in the State Department, John Graham, a respect- able and trustworthy agent, was privately despatched to Massachusetts with the fol- lowing letter of instructions from the Se- cretary of State, which is incorporated entire with my text as the best narrative. To Mr. Graham. "Sir: — The President commits to yon a very important and delicate trust in full confidence that you will execute it with ability, uprightness and discretion. The following details will explain the nature of this trust and its duties. '•' A Swiss gentleman, by the name of , communicated to me the follow- ing facts: — That there existed in the East- ern States a conspiracy against the welfare and happiness of these States. That Na- tive American citizens and British agents were parties to it, and Boston its principal theatre or headquarters, where a society, was instituted called a ' committee of New England Royalists ;' that its object was to efifect a dissolution of the Union, and esta- blish a monarchical form of government, with the Duke of Kent at its head, com- prising, in the first instance, the New Eng- land States, under the name of the kingdom of New England, to be extended afterwards as circumstances favored, to all the States. That this conspiracy was formed at, or about the close of our revolution, had been approved by George the Third, who, to pro- mote its success, had promised to the sub- jects of his son, all the commercial advan- tages and privileges that were enjoyed by his own subjects : that some of these New England royalists had frequent conferences with the Duke of Kent when he was in this country, respecting the means of accom- plishing the objects of this conspiracy, and that they had kept up a regular correspond- ence with him since, by means of British agents in America, and American agents in England; that the committee make an- nual report of the state of this country to the British government : that the orders in council, and other measures adopted by the British government against the commerce of the United States, were suggested by 46 INSTRUCTIONS TO ME. GRAHAM. the committee in the hope that they would be imputed to the measures of the Repute lican party in power, and thereby destroy the government in the confidence of the people : that in 1807, a well digested plan of a monarchical constitution, under the sovereignty of the Duke of Kent, was sent by the committee to England, with advice founded on the state of affairs at that pe- riod, how to increase the public discontent, and promote the success of the conspiracy ; that the organization of an anti-iamany society was among the measures then sug- gested, but that by direction of the British government, philanthropy, and not politics, was made the ostensible object, to which source, it is believed, that the Washington benevolent societies are to be traced; that the committee had received £10,000 ster- ling, for the use of these societies, had asked £2,000 annually for the circulation of their orations and celebration of their festivals, and were to have their official Gazette, for which £5,000 inore were asked ; that £60,000 had been expended by it in pro- moting the election of D C —: that money had been advanced to the editor of the Washingtonian, a Vermont paper, for which his bond had been deposited with the committee at Boston : that he had seen three original letters, one from the Secre- tary of the Duke of Glocester, another from- the Secretary of the Duke of York, and the third from the Seor,etary of the Prince of Wales, approving the measures of that committee. " Mr. communicated the-above details on the authority of a foreigner of distinc- tion, a pensioner of the British government, who had been long, and was then, in this country. I understood from Mr. that he made the communication to me at the instance of that foreigner, who complained of being injured by the British government in regard to his pension, said to be £1800 per annum : and for the purpose of open- ing a negotiation with this government for the disclosure of the information he pos- sessed, and documents supporting it, par- ticularly the three original letters above mentioned, for an adequate recompense. By a letter from the Foreign Office to Mr. Al- len, which has been since intercepted, it ap- pears probable that this foreigner is a Count Stuarton, supposed to be the lineal descend- ant of the House of Stuart, formerly on the British throne, and that his pension was £200 sterling, annually, and not £1800. ",I replied in general terms to Mr. , that the conduct of the British, government towards the United States was so well known to be odiously criminal and detest- able, that documents fixing new facts on it, would be of less importance than such as established the guilt of our own citizens who had combined with it in so black and atrocious a conspiracy : that when Mr. [1813. Henry made his disclosure, the government had not urged the exposure of any of our own people, believing that they had been led into error by party feeling, and not by corruption; but that the facts stated by him, with other circumstances, if true, could not be accounted for in any other way ; that they provei the most shameful prostitution of principle for the vilest pur- poses. To fix the guilt of these conspira- tors would be an object of very high im- portance. In an interview wiPSh Mr. the next day, he informed me that the foreign nobleman, at whose instance he had communicated to me the above details, had left town, in consequence of his report to him of what he had understood to be the substance of my reply to the overture made me. This was the first intimation given me that such a person had been here. " Mr. communicated to me other in- teresting facts, from his own knowledge, relating principally to the conduct of Mr. Allen, late British agent at Boston in grant- ing licenses to favor a trade vrith the ene- my, and in intriguing with the disaffected there. He informed me also of Mr. Allen's having absconded to avoid a prosecution which had been instituted against him by order of the government for granting such licenses, and that a deputy from the royal- ist committee had accompanied "him -to Quebec, to advise the British government to prosecute the war, uhtU it should be' able to dictate a peace, and secure to itself £he next presidency, to be filled by one of the democratic party, for which purpose, measures ought to be taken to divide the Southern and New York democrats. Mr. thinks that many important documents relating to the general conspiracy, were left with in a trunk, which is either in the possession of , or the , of Boston. What Mr. knew of his own knowledge, he was vrilHug to communicate without any specific re- ward^ He soliiiited a passport for himself and family for England, he having married an English lady who was in bad health, and desirous of returning to her friends; he offered to render to the United States all the services in his power either here or in Europe, and to leave to the government to make him such recompense hereafter, if atiy, as he might be thought to have de- served. Mr. to write to me on his return to Worcester, in the neighborhood of Boston, the place of his residence, and to communicate what he might discover touching the above, which he should deem sufficiently interesting. He has- written to me since, two letters, which have tended to increase the idea of the importance of his whole disclosure." Since the moral emancipation of this country from English influence achieved by the war of 1812, and its subsequent .Chap. II.] progressive development, a conspiracy or plan to restore English government has become incredible, and most of the present generation will be apt to think contemptu- ously of Mr. Monroe s apprehension of the Boston royalists. But in 1787, Alexander Hamilton, by a letter to Colonel Wadsworth, referred to a report in the Daily Adver- tiser of New York, of August 18th, 1787, that a project was in embryo for the esta- blishment of a monarchy, at the head of which it was contemplated to place the Duke of York, then called Bishop of Osna- burg; and desired Colonel Wadsworth to trace its source. Colonel Wadsworth in- quired of Colonel Humphries, whose an- swer the first of September, 1787, to Ham- ilton was, that he first saw it in the hands of Jared Mansfield, formerly a reputed loy- alist: adding, "The ultimate practicabi- lity of introducing the Bishop of Osnaburg is not a novel idea among those who were formerly termed loyalists. Ever since the peace, it has been occasionally talked of and wished for. Yesterday, where I dined, half jest, half earnest, ho was given in the first toast. I leave you to reflect, how ripe we are for the most mad and ruinous project that can be suggested, when in ad- dition to this view we take into considera- tion how thoroughly the patriotic part of the community, the friends of an efficient government, are discouraged with the pre- sent system, and irritated at the popular demagogues, who are determined to keep themselves in office at the risk of every thing.^' Ten or twelve years after 1787, when Rufus King was American minister in England, a common toast at Philadel- phia, 8ie seat of the federal government, like that Colonel Humphries heard in Con- necticut, half jest, half earnest, was our King in England. The planting and ap- proved portion of the federal party came out of the Revolution, resolved on republi- can government. But from the peace of independence in 1783, to the extremely .difficult establishment of a Federal Repub- lican Constitution in 1788^ England and her many loyal adherents in America were strongly in hopes of American return to En- glish allegiance. And from 1788 till 1812, those hopes never ceased. We shall find, in this volume, how they grew in England to royal credulity, in 1814, that the once Bishop of Osnaburg, Duke of York, might be created King of New England or North America, as the Swiss informer told Mr. Monroe, was the long-continued scheme of a Boston Secret Society ; now, fortunately, scarce to be credited, but once too certain. It is common American error and fond assurance, that the American Revolution was a unanimous and concerted result of national resistance proclaimed by the De- claration of Independence. Lgt those who think so, read Mr. Lorenzo Sabine's " Lives ROYALIST SECRET ASSOCIATIONS. 4T of the American Loyalists," for unques- tionable proof of the contrary. One-half the educated Americans were Tories in heart, and one-third in sanguinary action. Whigs did not propose, nor Tories oppose, independence. All that all desired, was better English treatment; Whigs more earnest to complain of want of it than To- ries, but separation of the colonies from the mother country, was the wild notion of very few, which destiny brought about, as most human events are accomplished, mankind knowing not how, tiU they come to pass, and then claiming them as their own wise work. That such a royalist secret society existed in Boston, as the Swiss told Mr. Monroe, is not improbable. Thousands of the best men of Massachusetts were severely de- nounced by Washington for leaving Bos- ton with the British, when it surrendered to his arms. Halifax was peopled by those loyalists and imbued with their bitter Eng- lish hatreds and hopes. The intercourse between Halifax and Boston, always fre- qiient, in 1813 was incessant and traitor- ous. By a letter from the Foreign Office to Mr. Allen, which was intercepted, and in possession of our government, it appear- ed probable to Monroe, who was not easily duped, that a Count Stuarton was the sus- picious foreigner of the British consul's acquaintance. This volume will show, be- fore it closes, that in London as well as Washington, there were apprehensions of royal designs of an American kingdom, with the Duke of York on its throne. "As Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and other contemporaries of the revolution, not to mention Madison and Monroe, were familiar with the facts that America was full of English adherents then, so all capa- ble of knowledge, when the war of 1812 began, and before it, knew that large num- bers of the educated, especially the com- mercial, professional and clerical of the Atlantic towns, were unreserved in expres- sion of their conviction, that the experi- ment of American republicanism must fail, and that the restoration of British go- vernment was inevitable in the United States. - It is time to render justice to the Tories of the Revolution, crushed and cursed under its successful termination ; but num- bering among their non-combatant, merely passive, and often conscientious men retired from conflict, many excellent civilians, and among their fighting men some of the most intrepid soldiers of that struggle, several of the former of whom were employed by Washington and other eminent Americans, to administer the republic. The following is an early one of that extraordinary informer's remarkable let- ters. " As soon as Mr. Allen's return was known in Boston, several federalists came here to converse with him, and he went there. in five days after his arrival. From •48 SWISS INFORMER'S LETTERS. a conversation, I learned that an American deputy accompanied him to the British. His object was said to be to inform them of the state of parties in the States, and to advise the best means to continue the war so as to enable the British government to dictate a peace which will place the next presidency in the hands of a person in his interest, though of the Democratic party. To effect this great hope is held out from a division among the Southern as well as the New York delegates. On the other hand, I heard that the British government was offended_ with Boston federalists for acting so weakly after talking so loudly, and that the blockade would be extended to the Eastern ports next spring, if certain measures to embarrass the American go- vernment were not resorted to by the fede- ralists during the winter. It was also said that an uninterrupted correspondence is ■carried on between the disaffected tere and their principals in the British govern- ment. Letter-bags for Spain and the Bri- tish government are found in the exchange coffee-houses^ of all open ports, though Cadiz and Lisbon are as much British ports as London and Liverpool. Could not the American government cause a law to be passed prohibiting ship letters and all other letters to pass by any other channels than the regular post-office ? Such a law would at all times add to the revenue of the United States, and in time of war in- crease the means of the American govern- ment to discover the plots of its enemies. In all states of Europe such a law exists. In England the writer or carrier of every letter found on board a ship, or even in stages, without any post-ofBce mark, is fined £5." "A small part of the enormous salary of the marshal might be employed to gain some well-conducted and well-informed.fe- deralist, more_patriot than partisan, to dis- cover the machinations of his party, espe- cially at Boston, their head-quarters. It was by selecting royalists and Jacobites, of education and talent, that Bonaparte pucceeded to crush the most inimical fac- tions, those that principally conspired against his person and government. "A naturalized Englishman, Mr. , of Philadelphia, (naming one well known to me, very familiar in the most fashiona- ble circles there, whose name I suppress,) has lately become a bankrupt. In his statement and books he acknowledges to have gained upwards of $40,000 by the sale of eighty licenses received from Mr. Allen. (The latter told me he had given the former one hundred and fifty instead of eighty.) As this bankrupt is supposed not to be over delicate, could not the Ame- rican government, by his means, discover the violations of the laws and the traitors to the United States ? From an authority I cannot mention, I have also been told [1813. that he has been connected with certain contractors of the British in this country, who have furnished provisions to their colonies. His books are open to inspection of all his creditors, and may be seen by some trusty agent of the American govern- ment. The fifty licenses mentioned in my last were chiefly for Halifax and Bermuda. If no cartel sails soon, Mr. Allen writes that he will return to New Jersey and re- main there until May. His reception at Boston has not been such as he expected from the gratitude of the federaliste, and he will leave it soon." On the 30th December, 1813, the in- former wrote to Mr. Monroe, "What I heard from Mr. AUen and what I know from another source, made me (perhaps erroneously) alarined for a continuance of the union and tranquillity of the United States. By performing what I promised you, I betray no confidence, as any other of his mere visitors, or even his servants, if, like myself, anxious for the happiness of the United States, may have done the same. The visit with which Mr. Graham has honored me, occasions these prelimi- nary trespasses on your time. He said that the government might give me a flag for a cartel." Another letter, dated Feb- ruary llih, 1814, says, " a letter from the British government to Mr. Allen has been received by way of Halifax. It is dated October 30th, and orders him to remain in the United States, to continue .his usual services, and to draw for his usual salary. He arrived in England December 24th. We have had the expected visit from-Bos- ton, where they continue to prate boldly, to menace cowardly and to act foolishly." Another letter, dated March 11th, 1814, communicates to Mr. Monroe, that " biUs of the British government to the amount of a million of dollars have within two months been purchased for gold at a discount of twenty per cent, at Quebec and Halifax, and sold again at Boston and other towns with a profit of ten or twelve per cent. They are bought up with avidity, as they pass current in the English, Spanish and Swedish colonies, and pay for the colonial produce carried here in neutral or rather neutralized bottoms. Secret but regular commercial messengers carry by land both to Halifax and Canada the gold, and bring back the bills. Last Saturday five Ameri- can gentlemen left Boston for Halifax by way of Penobscot. They intend to go to England with the first Halifax packet. One of them has with him despatches for Mr. Allen from the united federal and democratic plotters for the next presideifoy. Twenty of British government licenses for ' American privateers have been obtained from Halifax, and partly disposed of. Two of these licensed privateers, rmort says, have already sailed with cartridge boxes Chap. II.] SWISS INFOKMER. 49 full of douBloona, and with gold or silver bullion melted in the form of bullets. This cash, is destined to pay for British dry foods, which wiU be landed in the United tates as British prize goods. Such is the report. In a letter dated March 29th, 1814, he wrote, " Not being favored with any re- ply to my several letters, I suppose it is not convenient for government to grant me the promised passage in some cartel for Sweden or England." A final letter of June 16th, 1814, states, "When you, sir, receive this letter, I am on my way to Europe." Whether that Swiss, as subsequent trans- actions indicated, was one of the extraordi- nary and exquisite impostors with whom society is infested, contriving means of live- lihood, or, as several circumstances cause to. be believed, an ambidexter agent of the British government, by partial, and as he supposed, important betrayals of their confidence, striving to seduce ours to the much greater which he was to worm out of it, he overreached himself. No letter, written communication or other assurance froqi Mr. Monroe, encouraged him beyond a promise to'have Count Stuarton's title pa- pers searched for, and perhaps to give his real or pretended agent passage in a cartel to Europe, which does not appear to have been done ; and no pecuniary return what- ever was made or promised for his advices. In the summer of 1814, he left the village of Worcester, with his wife, for Boston, where the most liberal and elegant enter- tainment welcomed their sojourn and en- riched his much regretted departure. A gentleman of Mr. Allen's intimacy allowed him one of his fine houses for temporary residence in Boston, loaded him with other substantial kindnesses, and insisted on send- ing by him a large sum in gold, which the Swiss expressed great reluctance to take, to a commercial correspondent in Lou-' don, to whom it never was delivered, and where, on inquiry by a special agent sent after the bearer, all that could be learned was vague stories that he was somewhere on the continent of Europe, in the con- fidential employment of the English govern- - ment. Perhaps the American government, like the Massachusetts associates of. the British consul, were deceived by a captivating ad- venturer, to whose impositions in America, the consul's intimacy with him and the British government's repeated clandestine attempts at American disunion, gave cha- racter and credibility. But for- them Mr. Monroe would hardly have been, if he was, imposed upon. Nor can the State authori- ties, 01 good people of Massachusetts, charge the federal government with' precipitate, unfounded or ungenerous suspicion when it oidered a secret inquisition, on the in- formation of such a witness, to test their loyalty. Unlawful connectioii between American citizens and British agents for illicit trade was frequent and notorious. Political connection between State au- thority, or individuals with British agents, disproved by all that ever came to light, was nevertheless - averred by men of the highest credibility, rendered probable by numberless individual indiscretions, impro- prieties of the public press, and State go- vernment violations of the Constitution more than enough to justify the federal Ex- ecutive in any effort to detect and counter- act such dangerous misconduct. The Swiss informer, besides private per- sonal and American disclosures, in a letter dated from his Massachusetts retrea,t, Feb- ruary 11th, 1814, sent copies of several let- ters to him from alleged correspondents of rank and superior means of knowledge in Paris, liondon, Frankfort, Stockholm and Prague, of which the following extracts concerning America (exclusive of Euro- pean details) conveyed intelligence then novel and important. "The annexed let- ters," said his to Mr. Monroe, "are. from persons of education and rank in Europe. If their perusal can for a moment divert the enlightened minds of the President and yourself, my wishes are accomplished. With some truth they contain many sup- positions. They show, however, that the English politics are far from being settled, that France is far from being crushed, and that England is far from being the dictator of Europe." One, said to be from Baron de EoUe, dated London, August 25th, 1813, together with important European intelligence, con- tained in a letter from Prince de L., dated Prague, 12th August, 1813, stated, that " England was to assent to the discussion of her maritime pretensions at a general Congress of Representatives from all the maritime States to meet at the Hague within twelve months" after a general paci- fication in Europe. In the mean time, a suspension of arms was to be agreed on between England and the United States, under the mediation of the Emperors of Russia and France. By the above, you will find that British pretensions are not much favored by her allies, who -dread the turbulent ambition of Great Britain, nearly as much as the encroaching spirit of France. Indeed, the British ministers have rejoiced as much at the rupture of the negotiations at Prague as at the news of Wellington's victories in Spain." A Paris letter of De- cember 4th, 1813, with much European detail not pertinent to my narrative, con- tained this sentence — " Austria, Prussia, and Sweden, do not much object to Napo- leon's plan, but England gives a counter project, having for object to place not only Europe and Asia, but America and Africa upon the footing they were at the peace of 1763." Another, dated London, December 50 FOSTER AND BAKER. 18th, 1813, mentioned, "An attack at some part of the United States; and on an exten- sive scale, is spoken of in the naval and military circles. But though I have heard the names of the commanders, and of the ships, &o., I have not been able to learn what troops can be spared for such an at- tempt, at a ■ period when Spain, Holland, and Germany, demand great, and almost daily reinforcements from England." A letter of March 29th, 1814, encloses a copy of another, dated Paris, Peliruary 4th, 1814, as follows : " I have just heard from a cre- ditable source, that the restoration of the four hundred and fifty thousand French prisoners, in the power of the allies, forms a principal obstacle to a general pacification, as with those troops under his command, Napoleon might soon again be the dictator of Europe. Several plans for disposing of these unfortunate men have been suggested, one of which is said to be a colonization, or an employment of a greater part of them, to restore order in St. Domingo, and in the Spanish colonies, and to force the people of the United States to change their re- publican constitution into a monarchical one, the existence of an American Repub- lic being judged incompatible with the safety of the European monarchies. You may easily suppose from what quarter this last proposal, also reported to have been devised by the same plenipotentiaries to prescribe, at a general peace in Europe, the terms for a peace between England and the United States, which, if not accepted by the latter, an excuse will be offered for the landing and settling in merica of the European royalist veterans, and with their aid to destroy the last free Republic on earth. Depend upon it, some discussion to this effect has taken place at Chatillon on the Seine, though nothing certain has yet been determined upon." Nefarious as Cockburn characterized Al- len's transactions, to increase British plun- der-by tempting American cupidity to share in unworthy gain, the thing became ridicu- lous by the mishap of Foster, the British minister at AVashington, and Baker, the consul-general there. Augustus Foster, who came to the United States as a secre- tary to Merry, the minister, afterwards secretary of legation, and, being in some way connected with the ducal family of Devonshire, rose to be minister plenipo- tentiary, was such when war was declared, to his confusion, having, by all his de- spatches, assured his government that ours would never venture it. Mortified by that egregious mistake, and disgraced by low libertinism, he returned to England, scat- tering, as Parthian arrows, one hundred and eighty licenses from Halifax on his way home ; repaying, like many other ill- bred English, flatteries, and excessive at- ' tentions from English idolaters i^ America, [1813. by publishing vulgar vilifications of the United States, preceded by calumny against them in Parliament. Another mortification in which he was associated with Baker, the consul-general, contributed to Foster's cha- grin, and precipitated Baker's departure, when detected and ludicrously punished for the clandestine distribution of licenses, even from Washington. The minister, Foster, complaining of the postage he had to pay, vv-as in the habit, through the con- sul-general Baker's personal intervention with the officers of the post-office, of reject- ing many of his letters, if, on opening &.em. at the office, they were found to contain no- thing deemed worth taking away. In that method of parsimony, the post-office clerks were, at length, allowed to open the letters themselves, without Mr. Baker's presence, and withhold such as weje obviously un- important. About the time of the declara- tion of war, by that permission, they open- ed several, containing licenses to trade, and secret information, such as the British minister and consul-general were author- ized to receive, but extremely averse to find published. The post-office immediately communicating these detected misdemean- ors to the Executive, they were gene- rously sent, without comment, to their address, which caused Mr. Baker's speedy departure, not to appear in Washington again till he returned bearer of the treaty of peace ; leaving Mr. Foster eager to pay the postage of those and all other letters to his address. The ministry in London, the envoy at Washington, the consul-general there, the consul at Bos- ton, the admiral at Halifax, the navy, co- lonial courts of admiralty, merchants and other agents, English and American, as soon as war rendered them illegal and unworthy, were involved in those mean- nesses of ill-got gain, which it took more than a year of American resistance, by judicature and acts of Congress, to extii^ pate. The confidential intimate of some of them in Massachusetts, on the 4th of November, 1813, wrote to Mr. Monroe: " A person just told me that fifty new li- censes have arrived from Halifax in the same vessel that brought Allen's letters. The — — are preparing a vessel for Canton, and offers of |20,000 have been made by others for licenses to protect a voyage to Calcutta. From what I lesrn the war is much more popular in Boston. The late successes of the American arms, and the hope of profit from speculations in the manufacturing line, have altered th& pub- lic opinion for the better." Actuated by such transactions, and urged by the war party of New England, a mi- nority always vigorous and ardent in its support, insisting that as long as any trade or shipping at all was permitted in their waters, war would be defeated, the ad- CHiP. II.] EMBARGO. 51 ministratian resolved to fetter navigation with restrictions, against wllich a clamor was raised there and reverberated in Con- gress much louder than the appeal for the imposition. British ministers, admirals, consuls, and their American instruments, annulled and emasculated war for more than a year after its declaration, by traffic as effectual and pernicious as if duly stipu- lated with the enemy ; and the President, with his original preference for passive rather than active hostilities, renewed exe- cutive invocation for an act of Congress to aid the war by embargo, of questionable constitutionality, if indefinite, unquestiona- bly severe in operation, and further fuel for the already heated furnaces of disaffec- tion. Soon after his general message, therefore, the President, on the 9th of De- cember, 1813, by special communication confidentially repeated his rejected call for an embargo ; to prevent, it said, abuses of our commercial and navigation laws, by which supplies found their way not only to British ports and British armies at a dis- tance, but in our own neighborhood, and to British troops infesting our coasts and waters, encouraged in their predatory and incursive warfare, also fraudulent importa- tions in British vessels disguised as neu- trals, and" collusive ransoms of pretended prizes. Several secret conclaves,, therefore, began the winter session, first in the House of Representatives, and when we passed the bill, then in Senate with closed doors, lasting till the 21st of December, 1813, when the injunction of secrecy was re- moved, and a very stringent act pub- lished : not, however, tiU one of the be- trayals of secrecy, so common from, the Senate, made known the provisions of it at Boston, where its effect was intended to be most felt. Mr. Calhoun, chairman of the Committee on Poreign Affairs, though he voted for, did not approve nor advocate the measure, for which 1 eUx Grundy officiated as leader in the House. Commercial, East- ern, and party opposition, assailed it in all its stages, in principle and details, by nu- merous motions made by Mr. Gaston, Mr. Pitkin, Mr. Stockton, Mr. Hanson, Mr. Grosvenor, and Mr. Oakley, much of the force and talent, therefore, of the Federal minority, with whom the weight of argu- ment preponderated. But that of party carried it through the House by eighty-five ayes to fifty-seven nays, Mr. liowndes and a few more of our party voting against it. " The duty of the friends of the Embargo," said the National Intelligencer, " was to act, not speak:" wherefore the debate was principally confined to opposition. But it should not be supposed that in the secret session, faction overawed patriotism. It was apprehended that the votes of Mr. Giles, Mr. Stone, and Mr. Anderson would defeat the embargo in Senate ; Mr. King and Mr. Gore, who did not reach Washing- ton till that body was in conclave on it, hurried to the Capitol without going to their lodgings at Georgetown. It passed without difficulty, and was much rejoiced at by the administration, as the most vigor- ous act of the Senate, hoping that it would put an end to fraudulent trade under Swed- ish and Spanish flags, and British licenses ; reduce the enemy's supplies and plunder, straiten their armies in Canada and navies on our coast, and also their forces in Spain ; deprive England of our raw materials, such as cotton for their manufactures ; and her shipping of timber and tar, increase our supply of unemployed seamen for privateers as well as public vessels ; and our internal trade, as the external was diminished, en- courage American manufactures, and bring war to a speedier conclusion. Capitalists complaining that it deprived them of the means of using their funds profitably, were told then to invest them in manufactures ; or, if they preferred it, in privateers. The name of embargo, however, had lost its original charm generally ; and in the East,, where its operation was most felt, become- extremely odious. Speculators, partisans,, and the disloyal did not suffer alone, though the most clamorous. It was privation, in many respects as painful as war, without any of its excitements or attractions, and, as it proved, little of its however dear bought but_ undeniable advantages. It was resisted too,, by not only numbers of poor and not well informed persons, accustomed to earn their livelihood by small traffic, but in Congress, besides the vehement opposition of some of" the representatives of su<;h distressed con- stituents, Richard Stockton, in his speech,. in secret session, denying that those were- general practices, furthermore questionedi their illegality. On a small scale contri- buting to the comfort of the naval com- manders of the enemy on the coast, perhaps,, he said, they might exist, when poor people would be enticed to furnish them with' poultry, vegetables, and such small articles- But yielding to such temptation was hardly unnatural or highly criminal in the unpro- tected state in which those poor people are^ left.. If such things are not furnished volun- tarily, they win be ta'ken by force ;. and shall we destroy the commerce of the country for such a cause 2 Mr. Stockton's arguments; savored more of courtesy and charity than, law- In many instances there was proba- bly no criminal intent to aid and comfort the enemy ; but all the courts of justice- declared the law perfectly settled, and so- inserted on the face of the Constitution,, that none of such intercourse is innocent,, but aU of it iUegaL By repeated, earnest, and denunciatihg: efforts, in various motions, resolutions,, and' speeches, Cyrus King resumed his attack on the emjjaigo, wbicb, as enacted, was the t 52 EMBARGO REPEALEP. most comprelienslve and annoying restric- tion ever fastened on commerce ; in its suppression of the coasting trade — the first and extremest fetters ever put on that ele- ment of livelihood to many poor, industri- ous, and ■well-disposed people. On one of these occasions, George Bradbury stated, that there was great distress where he came from for food. They depended on importa- tions for flour, whicii was eighteen dollars a barrel. Several other Massachusetts members stated the great hardship sufiered in that State, by catching coasting vessels from home, and preventing their leaving ports whore they did not belong. But all endeavors to mitigate the severities of the law were overruled. All that was done was by an act of the 25th January, 1814, au- thorizing the President, when, in his opin- ion, the public interest should not forbid it, on application, to grant permission to any inhabitant of Nantucket to employ a vessel "to convey from the main land to that island, ifuel, provisions, and other necessaries of .subsistence, and to carry from the island to the main land, oil, spermaceti candles, and ■fish, under regulations prescribed by the Embargo Act. That indulgence passed the House of Representatives almost unani- mously, as it went from the Senate. It was said that a vessel, belonging to a mer- chant of Boston, named Goddard, which was caught by the embargo at Eastport, was burned by his orders ; and tha,t persons were threatened with violence who refused to subscribe to remunerate him for his loss; so angry was the local feeling. A bill to enable embargoed masters to return home, reported by a committee to alleviate the distresses of commercial re- striction, was voted against by many of those most vehement in denunciation of the whole system, on the plea that they would take nothing less than repeal of the act ; and till repealed, they avowed their desire to render it as oppressive and odious as possible. During the winter and spring of 1814, when the license trade began to be sup- pressed, British capital and American cu- pidity imposed another heavy impediment in our way. British government bills to a large amount were circulated, particularly in Boston, and exchanged for gold, causing some of the Boston banks to overflow with coin, while those of the Middle and South- ern States were drained of it, preliminary to their suspension, as they called their in- solvency, in the following September. A Spanish schooner, called Rosa, boarded Ijy the American privateer Viper, being searched, there was found in the Spanish captain's boot an official letter, dated at Bermuda, the 17th February, 1814, from Admiral Warren to Captain Talbot, or the senior officer of his majesty's ships off New London, informing him that "Mr. Stewart, [1813. late British consul there, but then at Ber- muda, having offered to procure money from the United States, requests that, agreeably to his arrangement, you will receive on board your sliip whatever money may be carried along side by persons Mr. Stewart will engage, and forward it to this island ; if a large sum, send a sloop of war pur- posely with it ; and sufier the vessel bear- ing this letter, the Rosa, to remain under your protection, if not permitted to go into New London." Passive belligerency proved of little avail, owing to great European changes, ending with the conquering allies of England en- tering Paris as captors the 31st March, 1814, on which day the President, by special mes- sage, desired Congress to repeal one of his favorite measures, in consideration, was argued by his message, of the extensive changes, favorable to liberal commercial intercourse, which had previously taken place in Europe : Russia, Sweden, Den- mark, nearly all Germany, Holland, Spain, Portugal, and the borders of the Mediter- ranean, permitted by victories over the Erench, to open commercial intercourse with the United States. The Swedish minister, Kautzow, and Danish, Pedersen, were at "Washington, desirous of it; not long after a Dutch minister, Changuion, arrived at Boston, with similar views, in which the Spanish minister here, Onis, participated. The executive message re- commended to interdict the exportation of specie, (deemed impracticable by some, im- politic by others, and not attempted by Congress,) as a more effectual safeguard and protection for our growing manufactures. Madison, always a judicious advocate of such reasonable protection to guard their infant struggles against the gigantic mono- poly of Great Britain, by that message laid a corner stone of subsequent much eon- tested industrial development, by recom- mending that the additional duties then in force, but to expire at the end of a year after the war, should be prolonged for two years after that event. Without adopting the President's recommendation, tie House of Representatives passed a resolution, moved by Mr. Samuel D. Ingham, directing the Secretary of the Treasury to report a tariff of duties at the next Congress ; which produced Secretary Dallas's project, falling no further within the scope of my sketch, than to state that the war which forced the first important manufactures into being, also superinduced the first controverted tariff on their importation. As war spread, its exigencies and contri- vances multiplied. On the 2d December, 1813, from on board the ship Valiant, Ro- bert Dudley Oliver, senior officer of the squadron, blockading Decatur's at New London, by letter to Don Thomas Stough- ton, Spanish consul at New York, gave OHAP.n.] 3LUE LIGHTS. 53 formal notice that the blockade, theretofore confined to the ports and harbors of the Chesapeake, Delaware, New York, Charles- ton, Port Royal, Savannah, and the river Mississippi, was extended, by Admiral Warren's proclamation at Halifax, the 16th November, 1813, -to all that part of Long Island Sound, being the sea-coast lying within Montaugh Point, or the eastern point of Long Island, and the point of land oppo- site thereto, called Black Point, together with all the ports, harbors, creeks and en- trances of the Bast and North Rivers of New York, as well as all others along the coast of Long Island and State of New York: which extension of blockade was proclaimed to be in consequence of the American withdrawal of their naval force from the port of New York, and establish- ing a station at New London, to cover the trade to, and from New York; without much hindrance from which American fri- gates and privateers sailed from, and re- turned to Newport, Boston, and other east- em ports, with such iiiipunity as to be mentioned with surprise and complaint in Parliament and throughout England. The blue lights treason — ^which called forth much public animadversion, and has ever since been matter of reproach to the whole community of its putative authors — was denounced by Commodore Decatur's official letter of the 20th, published the 28th of December, 1813, and made subject of discussion in Congress the 24th of January, 1814. In tempestuous weather, with the cover "*of a severe storm, Decatur resolved to venture to sea during the night of the 15th December, 1813, hoping that the ene- my's blockading squadron would be blown off, or otherwise unaware of his attempt. This movement, unavoidably knovm ashore, when about to be made, was frustrated by two blue lights, displayed on the opposite sides of the river, as signals, believed to be preconcerted with the enemy, and answer- ed by him, intelligibly to those familiar with the practice of signals. Thus betray- ed and prevented, it was not till a year afterwards, the 15th of December, 1814, of another tempestuous nirfit, favored by an- other severe storm, that Decatur put to sea from New York, again betrayed by sign-als from shore, which informed and embodied the British squadron that captured him. A month after the New London affair, Ly- man Law, a native of that place, and repre- senting in Congress that .part of Connecti- cut, on the 24th of January, 1815, moved for a committee of the House of Represent- atives, to inquire whether treasonable cor- respondence had been held, or information given by blue lights from the shores to the blockading squadron, whereby the enemy might, learn the movenients of Decatur's sbipSj to t^ke evidence by deposition or otherwise, and report to the. House. He believed, he said, that the whole was mere delusion. Connecticut, by her troops, had protected Decatur's squadron till lately, when the United States stationed troops there, whose means and duty were plain to prevent any such treason. Jonathan Mose- ly, another of the Connecticut members, seconded his colleague's motion ; and ridi- culed the imputation ; blue lights might be useful to illuminate charges so frequent in the House of British Tory attachments, but there were no such lights or attachments in Connecticut. Felix Grundy moved that the resolution be referred to the naval com- mittee. Jonathan Pisk objected to the pro- ceeding altogether, to pervert the House into a Court to try traitors. Mr. Jonathan Roberts, John W. Eppes, John G. Jackson, and Mr. Calhoun all opposed it. Mr. Law replied, that its frequent mention in the House, and apparent importance, induced him to introduce the resolution ; which, on Jonathan Roberts' motion, was laid on the table, by a vote of more than two to one ; and never taken up again, but left for par- tisan, if not patriotic, fuel. Decatur's letter of the 20th December, 1813, was official and positive, that when the weather promised an opportunity for his squadron to get to sea, and it was said, on shore, that he intended to make the at- tempt, two blue lights were burnt on both the points of the harbor's mouth as signals to the enemy, " and there is not a doubt that they have, by signals, or otherwise, instan- taneous information of our movements. Notwithstanding these signals have been j-epeated and seen by twenty persons at least in this squadron, there are men in New London who have the hardihood to affect to disbelieve it, and the effrontery to avow their disbelief." It was said, that the blue lights were seen by persons of both the other ships, the Macedonian, Captain Jones, and Hornet, Captain" Biddle. Cap- tains Decatur, Jones, and Biddle, had, nei- ther of them, any doubt of the atrocious fact. Officers and men of the Hornet, sta- tioned as lookouts, distinctly saw and no- ticed the blue lights, and soon after that signals were made from one of the enemy's ships, in consequence, they presumed, of those Trom shore. The officer of the Mace- donian, who was rowing guard, together with all the men composing his boat's crew, saw blue lights made on both sides of the river, and immediately returned to the ship to report it to his commanding officer. They were persons familiar with the mak- ing of signals, and could not mistake the common -lights on shore for blue lights. The New London Federal newspaper con- stantly insisted on the treason. Controversy arose among the newspapers of Connecticut on this subject. The Norwich Courier de- nied the facts as stated by the New London Gazette. Eutj on fuU inquiry, the former 54 HIEAM THAYEK. retracted its assertions, admitting its mis- take, and declared, that blue-light signals had been repeatedly made, after their first exhibition of the 15th December, 1813, or New London lights, " by some unprincipled scoundrels, destitute of every principle of honor and patriotism." Sunday night, the 0th of January, 1814, about ten o'clock, blue lights were again exhibited on both sides of the river, and were answered by all the British ships. The lights were dis- tinctly seen by a number of our naval and military officers. Again, in March, 1814, during a, storm of wind and rain, and weather favorable for Decatur's squadron to put to sea, he issued an order requiring all his officers, on shore, to repair, without delay, on board their vessels. Shortly after, blue lights were thrown up like rockets from Long Point, and distinctly seen by the officers at Fort Trumbull, and by the officers and men in our lookout boats. The lights were answered by three heavy guns from the enemy, at intervals of about ten minutes, and the blue lights continued all night. The authenticated case of a young man- of Massachusetts, named Hiram Thayer, was officially made known in March, 1814, by Commodore Decatur, one of many similar outrageous British inflictions on Americans, to redress any single instance of which, Great Britain would, without hesitation, to her honor be it said, have waged war with all her might, although she exerted it, to punish this country for attempting to get .lustice for six thousand such instances, ac- knowledged by her statesmen to be at least sixteen hundred. Hiram Thayer, born in Greenwich, Hampshire County, Massachu- setts, was the son of a respectable farmer, John Thayer, resident there. In 1803, he was seized by a press gang and forced into British service on board the frigate Statira, Captain Bramley, when that vessel brought Mr. Rose on a special mission to America. Thayer, always with characteristic forti- tude, protested against his imprisonment, refused the bounty and all pay, except so much as was indispensable, taking a small part of it in slops only. He had been immured in the Statira frigate six years, when that vessel became one of the squadron, blockading Decatur's at New London ; and once or more in American ports. While at Norfolk, Virginia, his protection and certificates from the select- men of Greenwich, were forwarded to the British consul there, with an application for his release, that was, of course, treated with contempt, as all such humiliating and humiliated applications then were. Simi- lar documents were afterwards laid before the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty by the American consul in London, but the appeal was there, too, rejected, on the frivolous pretext that the papers were not [1813. properly authenticated. A third attempt was made after war was declared, by laying the proofs before the naval authori- ties at Halifax, through the intervention of the American agent there, who presented certificates from the selectmen, the clergy- man, and the town clerk. Meantime, Thayer, for his sobriety, seamanship, and exemplary conduct, promoted to be boat- swain's mate, more earnestly than ever repeated his protest to his taskmasters, de- claring that he never would fight against his country. "Then," said Stackpole, Captain of the Statira, "if we fall in with an American man-of-war, and you refuse duty, I will have you tied to a mast, and shot at like a dog." The anxious, honest, and persevering father applied, on the 14th March, 1814, to Decatur for his interposi- tion, who forthwith dispatched a boat, un- der a flag of trace, vdth the father on board, fortified by all requisite proof of his son's American nativity. The son, as boatswain's mate, piped the hands for the boat in which Lieutenant Hamilton, ex-Secretary of the Navy's son, visited the British squadron. As the boat approached the Statira, the son, from her deck, perceiving his father, exclaimed to the first lieutenant, " My God, sir, there comes my father !" and the meeting Of father and son, upon the fri- gate's deck, far beyond the power of any written evidence, attested to the heart of every bystander the truth of the latter's right to be released from his cruel bond- age. An accumulation of more than twelve hundred dollars arrearages of pay, which he had constantly refused to touch, (an in- dependent fortune for a frugal New Eng- lander,) he gladly ofi"ered to relinquish. The father wept; the son spent every moment of their short interviews in in- quiries about his family, of whom he had so long been kept in cruel ignorance : of his mother and sister, their humble homestead, and every minute domestic circumstance, all pleading in vain his right to enlarge- ment. The aged parent burst into tears, and wept bitterly. Decatur's letter, con- taitiing a .manly, high-toned narrative of the case, without omitting Captain Stack- pole's brutal threat, was handed to Captain Thomas P. Capel, on board the La Hogue, commanding the British squadron ; who instantly acknowledged the certificates of exchange and discharge from parole, for- warded to Decatur, at flte request of Colo- nel Barclay, the Commissary-General of British prisoners of war, for which, in cour- teous terms,the British commander returned the order; and regretting that " it was not in his power to order the son of Mr. John Thayer to be discharged, undertook to for- ward the application by the earliest oppor- tunity to the commander-in-chief, and I have no doubt he will order his immediate discharge." " Not a doubt," said Decatur, Chap. II.] JOHN LEWIS.— JOSEPH WARBUIlTOlSr. 55 " -was on the mind of any Britisli officer, of Hiram Thayer's being an American citizen ; and yet he is detained, not as a prisoner of ■war, but compelled, under the most cruel threats, to serve the enemies of his coun- try." Whether Thayer was ever released or remained till the peace, if not longer, a British galley-slave, I am not informed : whose simple story is food for novelists and dramatists, more touching than many of the tales and lyrics of the ocean. A seed of his cold-blooded sacrifice is the emanci- pation of seamen from impressment. A single such outrage would now rouse the whole American nation to a war for its punishment. Thirty thousand American watermen of the West, who never saw the sea, would rush there to rescue one such victim from captivity. Not only so : but impressment has probably been expelled from British ports as well as from Ameri- can vessels, whether naval or commercial. More violent, irrational and odious, more painful too and lasting, than conscription as a method of raising forces, its ends, like the means, are also more indefensible : sea warfare being much more licentious than hostilities by land. Overruling Providence rendered impressment its own destroyer. When many of the merchants, for whom the country was plunged in war, deserted it to make common commercial cause with the enemy, similar laxity of morality led them to seek gain by privateering. Besides the seven or eight thousand seamen in Ameri- can national vessels, bravely contending for sailors' rights and no impressment, not less than five thousand volunteer mariners, the best in the world, were at sea in fifty privateers, carrying five hundred cannon, thirsting for vengeance and for prey. Withdrawal of the orders in council, and leaving only the cause of the poor sailors in dispute, was fortunate for them. While the country was sympathizing with Thayer, one of Washington's great nephews, John Lewis, returned, having been discharged from the British ship Kose the 10th Feb- ruary, 1812, shortly before the war, but not getting home till March, 1813, after thirteen years' confinement in British ships of war, on board of which he was repeat- edly flogged, and once, as he said, obliged to run the gauntlet through a fleet, faint- ing under the lash. The President gave him a commission as a master's mate, and he was ordered to the lake service ; but never went : he was killed at the sack of the city of Washington. The New London blue-lights and the massacre at Fort Niagara occurred during the same tempestuous wintry nights, when a, brumal day at Spithead, the 17th Decem- ber, 1813, witnessed the execution of a sea- man captured with the frigate Chesapeake. Joseph Warburton, said to be a young En- glishman of twenty-six years, taken in her, with five more said to be English, was sen- tenced to be executed by hanging for mak- ing off with a prize to the iEolus : shocking spectacular manifestation, that British sea- men fought in American frigates, (although it could not show that they fought well, as Warburton was one of the ill-assorted, un- disciplined and mutinous crew of the unfor- tunate Chesapeake, who rendered her an easy victim to the Shannon,) Vv''arburton was hanged at the yard-arm of the Prince, attended by the Reverend Mr. Jones, her chaplain, confessing his guilt, as was said, "and warning five other British seamen taken in the Chesapeake, then confined on board the Prince, expecting the clemency of their king, never to be wanting in feel- ings of fidelity to their king and country." All the boats of all the ships at Spithead, attended the execution of Warburton, whose sentence was read on board of every ship in that largest roadstead of the Britisli Channel, where the military parade on such occasions usual was performed, the English seaman captured in an American frigate pinioned, blinded and suspended in sight of all his comrades, and his body then interred at Heslar Hospital. I am not aware of any other instance of a British seaman taken fighting in an American vessel. On the last day of the year 1813, the English brig Bramble, under a flag of truce, in forty-two days from Liverpool, anchored at Annapolis, bearing the English Secretary Castlereagh's letter of the 4tli November, 1813, to the American Secretary of State, declining to treat under Russian mediation, but consenting to direct nego- tiation as proposed by the American com- missioners at St. Petersburg : negotiation at London, the British capital, and unmixed with affairs of Europe. Fortunately, as it eventuated, the American cause had been pointedly severed from that of France, to which English approximation the American commissioners added their consent to nego- tiate peace, if not sue for it, in the enemy's capital. Tidings by the Bramble, also re- ported by the Analostan American cartel arrived from Halifax at Boston, about the same time, and by a vessel under Russian colors bound for Amelia Island, taken into Savannah, were, that in the battles of the 17th, 18th and 19th October, 1813, at Dres- den and Leipsic, the French were defeated with the loss of nearly a hundred thousand men, and in full retreat for France, pur- sued by their conquerors. On the 7th January, 1814, the President, without ad- vices from our commissioners, communi- cated Lord Castlereagh's letter with Mr. Monroe's answer, accepting the English overture, and naming Gottenburg, in Sweden, as the place for the peace con- gress, though Sweden was one of the most 56 ARRIVAL OF THE BRAMBLE. active and efficient allies of England. On the 13th January, 1814, the House of Re- presentatives resolved, on Mr. Calhoun's motion, to request the President to commu- nicate all the documents concerning the Russian mediation, which were accordingly communicated on the 18th of that month. On that day William Gaston moved a reso- lution, that, pending the negotiation with Great Britain, it is inexpedient to prosecute military operations against the Canadas, of invasion or conquest. But cessation of hostilities by land, while prosecuted by sea or at all while-the enemy persevered in them, was deemed unwise ; and the House, by the rather unusual stand of a refusal to consider the resolution, put it down by a vote of ninety-two nays to sixty-seven affirmatives ; mostly party votes, though Mr. Cheves, Mr. Eppes, Mr. Macon and Mr.. Alexander, of the administration party, voted to consider. On the 4th January, 1814, Henry Clay and Jonathan Russell were nominated commissioners to join Mr. Adams and Mr. Bayard in the Gottenburg mission ; and Mr. Russell, re-nominated, was confirmed by Senate as minister pleni- potentiary to Sweden. On the 19th Ja- nuary, 1814, Mr. Clay resigned the speak- ership in a short valedictory, and on old William Findlay's motion received the thanks of the House by a large, though not quite unanimous vote, one hundred and forty-four to nine, counted by division merely, without names called. On the same day, ovei-ruling an effort of Jonathan Roberts to postpone it, Langdon Cheves was chosen Speaker by a few of the ad- ministration united with most of the oppo- sition -votes, defeating Felix Grundy, our candidate, who received fifty-nine votes. The seemingly conciliatory intelligence by the Bramble affected the community with unreasonable hopes of approaching peace, and American produce with sudden decline from war prices. But neither government nor intelligent men flattered themselves with pacification. Determination of the minis- try not to stop hostilities till the United States yielded the question of impressment, was no secret in England. The chairman of the East India Court of Directors, Ellis, wrote to a correspondent in Bermuda, "I have had an explanation with ministers ; there is nothing compromised to hismajes- ty's government in the despatches by the schooner Bramble to affect the commercial interest. The American commissioners must have full powets to affect even their temporary interests. Before we can enter into any kind of negotiation whatever, they must relinquish their supposed right of claiming British-born subjects by right of adoption, but more particularly of seamen." Thus permission for our minister to solicit peace at London, leave to negotiate at all, aad tbeie at the foot of the tluone, wa,s to [1813. be preceded by relinquishment of the only postulate of war. The Bramble returning with the American answer to England, Lieutenant Pogson, of that vessel, delivered it in London the 2d February, 1814, where the correspondence was published with lit- tle effect, except on the prices of American produce, which rose as if Americans being willing to treat for peace, as the London version of Monroe's letter was, was not much reason for its taking place. Very early next spring, the disengaged British conquerors of France' began their confi- dent, vindictive and menacing transit from Europe to America. Although our admin- istration was not without faint hope that it might make something out' of any negotia- tion that England would allow anywhere, yet in submitting the Bramble's letters to Congress, the President could hardly say less than that a relaxation of preparations for vigorously carrying on war would neces- sarily have the most injurious consequences. Intelligence of the astounding triumphs to Great Britain excited great sensation in the United States. The boarding-houses of the federal members of the Maryland Legis- lature, at Annapolis, were illuminated, on the Bramble's arrival there with the glad tidings. ANew York Journal, the Recorder, stated that " poor, murderous, proscribing, villainous democracy was going down. The illustrious and most glorious nation. Great Britain, will exhibit to the world the folly and illusory hopes of Mr. Madison and his party." The Boston Gazette rejoiced that " the destruction of Bonaparte, sacking and burning of the frontiers, probable conquest of Louisiana, want of money, of men and of confidence, would lay the present domi- nators of the people flat on their backs, and urge them to devise and bequeath the car- rying on of the war and its difficulties to whoever will step into their shoes." These American sentiments, when they reached English ground, became of course more completely English. A Halifax paper of the 8th January, 1814 — a day which twelve months after was consecrated to falsifica- tion of the prediction — stated, " The in- habitants of this' and our sister provinces cannot fail to be gratified at the predica- ment in which Napoleon's overthrow places his pander Madison ; that monster, with all the vices which blacken the character of the French ruler, without a scruple of the shadow of virtue, now at the mercy, thanks to Almighty justice, of the nation he vainly and impiously endeavored to destroy, and with it the world's freedom. It is not the wish, perhaps not the interest of Great Britain to repossess her rebellious colo- nies : but a portion given to her allies would at oDioe secure those she wishes to retain, and do good to the Americans, in spite of themselves, by giving thera a, goverwaent," Chap, II.] CAPTtHmt* I'LAGS. 57 On the lOth December, 1813, Mr. Pick- ering proposed a Taluable improvement, which ne followed up with commendable zeal, till, on the 27th of that month, it became a law, that two hundred extra co- pies of the journals and documents of both Houses of Congress shall be deposited in the Library of Congress for the use of members, and that together with the acts of Congress, copies shall be transmitted to each executive, each branch of the legisla- ture of every State and territorial legisla- ture, and a copy to every university, col- lege and historical society incorporated in each State. Few things have contributed more to familiarize the. wide-spread people of the United States with their national government, and attach them to it, than the profuse distribution by members of Congress of what are called documents, that is, the proceedings and reports of the National Legislature, which include all executive communications to both Houses of Congress. Mr. Pickering's improve- inent, the beginning of that dissemination, entitles him to general and grateful re- inembrance. On the" 23d December, 1813, 1 submitted, with a detailed report from a select com- mittee, for which materials had been col- lected between the two Sessions, the bill authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury to subscribe on the part of the United States for seven hundred and fifty shares of the stock of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company, which did not become a law till ten years afterwards; but was, nevertheless, one of the creations of that war,and several times cj)nsidered that session in committee of the whole. On the 30th December, 1813, Mr. Calhoun, for the committee on foreign af- fairs, pursuant to the President's recom- mendation, reported two bills for more effectually enforcing the non-importation, laws.; one forbidding courts to deliver to claimants, pending trial, merchandize or other articles seized under those acts ; the other prohibiting the ransoming of Ameri- can -vessels captured by enemies. Both of "those forbidden, proceedings were mis- chievously extensive; but neither of the bills became a law. That against delivery of goods passed the House the 25th January, 1814, that against ransoms the next day ; but neither got through the Senate, to the annoyance of the Executive, and of the few Eastern members, whose fellow- citizens imported British goods under feign- ed ransoms from capture at sea, and got delivery on frail security in court of prize goods, which once relieved from judicial grasp, disappeared, leaving worthless re- sponsibility. . As early in the session as the 20th De- cember, 1813, on Adam Seybert's motion, a select committee was appointed to inquire into the condition £|Jid wtribiition of the flags, standards, and colors taken by the forces of the United States from their ene- mies: who reported on the 4th February the bill which became a law the 18th April, 1814, directing the Secretaries of "War and the Navy to collect at Washington all such as had been or shall be taken, to be de- livered to the President for presentation and display in such public place as he deemed proper. It appeared, by the elo- quent report of Dr. Seybert, that the colors taken from the British seventh regiment by Montgomery at Chambly, the 18th October, 1775, had been delivered to Congress on the 23d June, 1778 ; who directed the standards' and colors, taken from the enemy to be col- lected; which, owing to peculiar negligence, was not done. Only six of those trophies of the Revolution remained in 1814 in the War Ofice ; not one in that of the Navy ; although' twenty-four were taken at the capture of Cornwallis, and there was reason to believe as many at that of Burgoyne. On the other hand, the standard of the fourth regiment of United States infantry, ignominiously surrendered at Detroit by Hull, was instantly sent to London, and ithere paraded in the Council Chamber at Whitehall. Since the declaration of war, in June, 1812, thirteen naval flags had been received at the Navy Department, and seve- ral others were known to have been cap- tured. Dr. Seybert's report well explained the European usages regarding such demon- strations of warlike success and incitements to national distinction, cherished by all na- tions as wise monuments of thgir renown. The act of Congress he reported passed without objection; but the negligence, which in the Kevolution was perhaps excusable in preventing its execution, remains to this hour unpardonably operative . Nothing was then, or has been since done to perform the pleasing and patriotic duty devolved by Congress on the Executive. The act of the 18th April, 1814, remains to this hour unexecuted. Trophies of war kept, but scarcely preserved in mouldy boxes and dark cocklofts, have nowhere been dis- played. Contrary to the obvious design of the act of Congress, the Mexican flags have lately been deposited at West Point, and the Secretary of the Navy proposes to collect the.naval flags at Annapolis. Whereas no school or place but the Capitol at the seat of government is proper for such objects. Authorizing the dispersion of these stand- ards at different and distant localities, vio- lates the act of Congress, and yields to that encroaching spirit of locality so often detri- mental. On the 3d January, 1814, Mr. Webster resumed his charge of undue Jrench influ-. ence in the administration: of which an account is given in my former volume. He had only taken his seat a day or two before the reyivaj pf his imput^itiQUj which was, 58 PRANCE. [1813. by resolution to Tefer Secretarr Monroe and the Committee of Foreign Affairs' (pre- sented by Mr. Calhoun) report on the sub- ject, to that committee. The House not having acted on the subject, he said his motion was to bring it forward ; unwilling that an argument in answer to resolutions of the House, should pass quietly into pre- cedent. When this House, the nation's grand inquest, called for information on specific points, he deprecated that a mere elaborated argument should be held con- clusive on its judgment. The House had shown its nearly unanimous desire to learn why our ariiis had failed. Was it not as important to know if there was not some- thing wrong in the origin and cause of the war? A better cause may have been as necessary as better generals. Let its advo- cates show that it was American, impartial as to both the European belligerents. Make it a war of the people, and not of a party, and it would become as energetic as it had been feeble. With such a war government would have only to direct spontaneous po- pular efforts, instead of being at the end of two driveling campaigns farther than ever from their object--the conquest of Canada. Canada, to the walls of Quebec, would have been ours in thirty days if the people had been satisfied that it should be. At this part of his speech, Mr. Webster was checked by Speaker Clay intimating that the House's determination to consider must precede dis- cussion, to which Mr. Webster replied that he thought debate was in order on a ques- tion of reference. That little check enabled him to modify his motion for reference to the committee of the wholp, and to render it a special order for the next Monday, in- stead of to the Committee of Foreign Affairs, where it would certainly have slept or been refuted as before. Governor Wright de- nounced the whole movement as tending to no good but to paralyze the arm of govern- ment, which ougit to be busy in strength- ening the army and navy, instead of such petite guerre of partisans. Qua animo, and cui bono such opposition? He moved to postpone it tUl 4tn March, on which motion the ayes were 69 to 82 nays. Felix Grundy then moved the first Monday in February, to which Mr. Webster and Mr. Gaston ob- jected as too far off. (Jeneral Desha moved to postpone the matter indefinitely, which the Speaker ruled out of order. Mr, Cal- houn spoke decidedly for the earliest day, denying that the war party wef6 bound to prove anything, the burden of proof rest- ing on the mover atid his supporters. The flubject was not called up for conBid«ration till the 2d April, 1814, when Mr. Webster's motion to go into committee of the whole for the purpose was negatived by 75 nays to 37 ayes, mostly party votes, though Gyrus Eing was one of the nays. On the 29th Becember, 1813, Alexander Hanson moved analogous resolutiohs, which he urged fiercely, but on the 10th January, 1814, withdrew for others substituted by him and several times debated, but without either disclosure or result worth mention- ing. On the 13th April, 1814, Mr. Gaston's resolution was adopted, requesting the President to communicate any proper in- formation, which he answered the 16th of the month, communicating Mr. Cravrford's letter from Paris, of the 16th January, 1814, containing nothing of importance ; a brief account of French ofBcial assurances of good will and promises of indemnity, pro- crastinated by the supreme crisis of French affairs, when the successive Russian and Saxon campaigns dethroned the Bona- partes, restored the Bourbons, and the hos- tile occupation of France, enforcing larger contributions than were ever paid by a con- quered country, authorized tiie American minister, making a merit of necessity, to signify that the American Republic, not relinquishing, would defer their claims till the much indebted restored kingdom of France should be better able to pay them. French influence in America has always been chimerical; while, from the French revolution of 1789 to that of 1848, American influence in France has proved prodigioua and portentous reality. The first bill reported, which became a law, after the Embargo Act, was, for cer- tain partial appropriations, reported by Mr. Bppes, from the committee of ways and means, to which, when it came to the votfe for engrossment the 5th of January, 1814/ containing a million and a half towards military expenses, Timothy Pitkin ob- jected, because the estimates for the year had not come in from the Treasury. Mr. Grosvenor exhorted the House, as guardians' of the public funds, to withhold all supplies in order to coerce production of the neces- sary estimates. Mr. Cheves said, that he should vote reluctantly for any appropria- tions, without estimates. Mr. Eppes and Mr. Troup replied, that partial approprisr tions preceding the general estimates, were usual, lessened no Executive accountability, and authorized no application of the fund but as directed bylaw. Mr. Pitkin's ob- jection was overruled by a large majority. The Senate put another million in the biU^ toward defraying the expenses of the navy, which renewed and increased opposition when that amendment came before the House, for Mr. Macon also demurred to voting money without estimates, though Mr. Bppes quoted precedents. When tne ayes and nays were ordered, he wished- to see, he said, who would vote against our gallant navy : which taunt elicited a shar^ retort from Mr. Sheffey, Mr. Webster, and Mr. Pitkin, disavowing all hostility to the navy, but protesting greater regard for the Constitution, Willis Alston, Robert Wright, Chap. II.] NAVY. 59 and Jonathan Roberts rejoined, that the federal side of the House had voted against loans and taxes indispensable to the navy, and openly declared, that to arrest the war they would withhold the supplies. The amendment was agreed to, 89 to 52 ; pure party votes, except Macon with the opposi- tion ; whose characteristic speciality and established popularity it required to vote against his party, when party could hardly be distinguished from country. But to re- fuse the Executive money without estimates is a cardinal and conservative principle of popular government, justifying the federal objection. Precedents are plenty for im- proprieties. 'But military appropriations are supplies which may be constitutionally withheld till duly estimated. Withholding supplies in Congress differs from that re- sort in Parliament, where it only compels a change of ministry, leaving the king as before ; whereas, when Congress withhold war supplies, it may be arrested, but does not change the administration. Even if government had suffered, on that occasion, however, the navy triumphed. Alston, Eppes, and Roberts, all of the parsimonious planting democracy, theretofore not well disposed to the navy, won or vanquished to its support, vied with its former advocates, and twitted them with opposition to a na- tional safeguard, which thenceforward be- gan advancement never yet, however, com- mensurate with the means and wants of a nation, of which it is the cheapest defence. The naval establishment of the United States, in actual service in January 1814, was seven frigates, two corvettes, seven sloops of war, two blockships, four brigs, and three schooners, for sea, besides the several lake squadrons, gunboats, and har- bor barges: three ships of the line and three frigates on the stocks. The whole number of men and officers employed was thirteen thousand, three hundred and thir- ty-nine, of which 3729 were able seamen, and 6721 ordinary; the marine corps, as enlarged in 1814, was 2700 men and officers. The commissioned naval officers combatant were 22 captains, 18 commanders, 107 lieu- tenants, and 450 midshipmen. One of the naval committee of the House, Adam Sey- bert, in the absence of the chairman of that committee, "William Lowndes, stated it as Mr. Lowndes' opinion from investigation, that the American navy cost less, per month, than the British. The tonnage of the United States, reported that year, was six hundred and sixty-eight thousand, and the foreign, forty-seven thousand tons. Secretary Jones' report to the Senate, 22d February, 1814, stated, three 74 gun and three 44 gun ships building, six new sloops of war built, twenty barges and one hundred and twenty-five gunboats employ- ed in the Atlantic waters ; 33 vessels of all sizes for sea, afloat or building, and 31 on the lakes ; so rapid was promotion that it was necessary to assign young lieutenants to command lake squadrons, and expe- rienced Captains found that the withdrawal of such lieutenants from sea ships would be a serious disadvantage. In 1806, the number of seamen, authorized by law, was 925, to which number, 3600 were added in 1809. In 1812, Congress authorized the President to employ as many as would be necessary to equip the vessels to be put in service, and to build as many vessels for the lakes as the public service required. The London press vehemently urged Canning's vow for the extermination of the infant American navy. On the 2d of July, it said, " In another part of this paper our readers will see a document calculated to call forth the most serious reflections. We allude to the official statement of the Ame- rican Marine force, which may now, alas, without irony, be termed a Navy. It con- sists (including three seventy-fours, likely soon to be launched) of 33 vessels of war for the ocean, carrying 917 guns, and 32 vessels for the Lakes, carrying 265 guns, beside 203 gunboats, barges, &c. Thia force, we have no hesitation in saying, must be annihilated. To dream of making peace until we have performed this essen- tial duty to ourselves and our posterity, would be a folly too deplorable for common reprehension. It would betray a wilful and voluntary disregard to the national safety. The fatal surrender of the Guerriere opened new prospects to them. Intoxicated with delight at beholding the British flag struck to the American, the Democratic Govern- ment seriously set about the task which they had before considered hopeless of form- ing a Navy. It is painful to reflect how far they have proceeded in the undertaTcing. It is infinitely more painful to consider that even the gallant affair of the Chesapeake has hardly served to check the full tide of their presumptuous hopes. They are now persuaded that the sea is their element, and not ours. There is but one way to turn the current of their thoughts and efforts from their present direction, and that is to crush their growing navy to atoms. Kow, America stands alone — hereafter, she may have allies; let us. strike while the iron is hot." In a few days, it added, on the 12th of July, "It seems fated that the ignorance, incapacity, and cowardice of the Americans, by land, should be continually relieved, in point of effect, on the public mind by their successes at sea. To the list of their captures which we never can peruse, without the most painful emotions, is to be added that of H. M. S. Reindeer, taken after a short, but most desperate action by the United States Sloop of War, Wasp." James Kilbourn, an active member from Ohio, submitted, the 25th of January, 1814, a resolution for inquiring into the expe- 60 diency of increasing the pay of the navy on the northern lakes, and offering other i.nduoementa to procure the proper number of proper persons for that indispensable service. He was informed, he said, by the best authority, that it had been very diffi- cult to obtain seamen for that service ; ovr- ing to more sickness, higher prices of cloth- ing, and inferiority of food. The chairman of the naval committee, Mr. LoTvndes, ob- jected, on the authority, he said, of a naval officer, who assured him there was no diffi- culty in getting seamen for the Lakes, and that if higher pay were offered, it would father alarm than induce them, as intimat- ing that greater hardships were to be ex- pected. William Reed stating that the wages of seamen not being fixed, might be made whatever was necessary, Mr. Kil- boum's resolution was rejected by a large majority. . The army which, during thirty years of not undisturbed peace had mouldered away, was also reviving. No military establish- ment is so difficult to maintain, so costly, or in peace so apparently useless, as that of the United States. The Russian, which is the largest standing army under the most absolute government in the world, is the least expensive ; that of England, the freest country of Europe, with relatively the smallest army, is the most expensive ; the army of this stiU freer country, much smaller, still more costly. English appre- hensions of standing armies are American exaggerations. Republican parsimony and "mistaken popularity continually prevented any but an insignificant regular force, with idle boast of a nominal militia, which never has been, and till organized never can be, reliable. The national defence and econo- my, for want of regular troops, have suf- fered by hostilities thereby invited and prolonged, with profusion of expenses, re- verses, calamities and disgrace. During Washington's administration, the stinted military establishment of twelve hundred men was unable to make head against the frontier Indians, who defeated the Ameri- cans campaign after campaign. President Adams' administration, with Washing- ton's approbation, raised an extrav^igant force of regular troops, with questionable cause, rendered one of the means of the overthrow of the federal pa'rty. In the first bloom of Jefferson's experimental presiden- cy, the army was as unwisely reduced as it had been raised, from twelve thousand men to one regiment of artillerists and two of in- fantry — under short-lived delusion of trans- atlantic repjiblican exemption from the lot of Ijumanity. ror war, like death, inscrutable, is inevitaible, Troubles soon ensued ; and, after several years of them, the defenceless republic was bloodily insulted by the outrage on its floating emblem, the frigate Ohesa- pealj?, in h^r Qwn wJite^s, Jiye yea.rs softer ARMY'.- - - [1813. the army (and navy too) had been almost disbanded, their presidential executor was constrained to c^ on Congress to restore the army ten thousand strong. On the 12th April, 1808, an act recalled those discharged by an act of the 16th March, 1802. Five regiments of infantry, one of riflemen, one of light artillery, and one of light dragoons, were ordered to be raised. Jefferson's es- say of unarmed economy and repugnance to war, like all excesses, were punished by his expiring administration being com- pelled, at much increased expense, to re- create what it would have been wiser and cheaper not to destroy. Political experi- ments, to be beneficial, should be conserva-, tive. Recurrence to first principles, the saving virtue of free institutions, to rectify continual decline, differs from sudden inno- vations, seldom permanently progressive. Jefferson, with ten thousand recruits, ex- pensively and with difficulty added to the army, imposed his much more expensive and questionable commercial restrictions, only to defer and aggravate inevitable war, which he left to Madison, his still more pacific successor. The presidential essayist of impracticable, tranquillity was, however, a lover of science ; and on the imtoward act of Congress of the 16th March, 1803, dis- banding the army, engrafted a scion of military power by the section authorizing him to organize and establish a corps of engineers, to be stationed at West Point, and constitute a military academy, subject at all times to do duty in such places and at such times as the President directs. Slow and feeble of growth, an act of Con- gress of the 29th April, 1812, just preceding the declaration of war, enlarged and im- proved that excellent institution; often since assailed in Congress and by State legislation through democratic jealousy and ignorance, as aristocratic, but self-sustained, like the navy, by its inestimable contribu-, tions to the defence, economy, safety, and glory of the United States. Its distinctive, merits are, that military education is tho- - roughly taught, and its advantages, like other repubhcan benefits, notconfined to engineers or other scientific corps, but extended to all arms, including infantry. That school, more advanced, would have saved the war with England much of its disaster "and ex- pense, as it covered that of Mexico with most of the astonishing glory, which by less than two years of victories assures the United States, if the same military spirit is kept alive, a long career of cheap peace and foreign resnect. On the 2d "December, 1811, Congress ordered the ten thousand men, foresha- dowed by the act of 1808, to be recruited and officered, doubling the bounty from, eight to sixteen dollars, allowing three, months' pay and one hundred and sixty acre? of land to e«ich soldier when honor- Chap. II.J MILITARY ACTS OF CONGRESS. 61 ably discharged, and in case of his death in service, tnat pay and land to his heirs and legal representatives. Corps of ran- gers for the frontiers and of sea fencibles for the sea coasts, together -with authority to accept volunteers, followed, with other provisions extending the military force till, in the course of the session which began in December, 1813, and closed in April, 1814, the regular army, by lair, amounted to 64,759 men, with eight major generals and sixteen brigadiers ; one regiment of light artillery, and one of dragoons, an artillery' corps of near six thousand, forty-six regi- ments of infantry, four of riflemen, seven- teen companies of rangers and ten of sea fencibles. The whole militia of the United States then reported, amounted to 719,449 men and officers. Preceding and with a view to war, the President was authorized to accept the services of not exceeding fifty thousand volunteers, to serve one year ; to be clothed by themselves, the cavalry to furnish their own horses, but armed and equipped by the United States when caUed into service ; the officers appointed accord- ing to State laws ; but under the same rules and articles as the regulars, with the same pay, rations, emoluments and forage, except bounty and clothing ; non-commissioned ofEcers and soldiers allowed the cost of the clothing of regulars of the same rank ; com- pensation for damage to horses in actual service ; wounded men pensioned ; heirs of those killed to have one hundred and sixty acres of land ; on honorable discharge, after a month's service, to be presented with a musket, or other personal equipments of infantry or artillery, and with his sabre and pistols if cavalry. On the 10th January, 1814, the chairman of the military com- mittee, Mr. Troup, reported the bill which became a law the 27th of that month, giving to each recruit, enlisted for five years, a bounty of |124, and $24 if killed in action or dying in service, to his wife, children or parents, and eight dollars more to any per- son procuring an enlisted recruit. Such large inducements to overcome the difficulties hindering an army by enlistment were followed during that session by several other belligerent acts of Congress ; tine authorizing the enlistment for five years, or during the war, of the fourteen regi- ments by prioT act enlisted for ~one year ; another authorizing the creation of three regiments of riflemen in addition to the one before ; a third prolonging for a year the services of the ten companies of rangers; a fourth empowering the President to take into regular service as many, not exceeding fifty thousand, as- he chose, who volunteered to serve five years or during the war: an act better organized the army; consolidating some of the regiments, and authorizing vo- lunteers to be promoted in the line of the regular army. ■ The marine corps was en- larged ; four captains and twelve lieutenants authorized for the flotilla service ; the navy pay was fixed ; the act of 1795, for calling forth the militia, improved, particularly as respected courts martial; twenty-five mil- lions Were appropriated for the army, near eight millions for the navy ; pensions given to the widows and young children of pri- vateersmen, as well as naval seamen, and revenue cutters co-operating with navy; $100 bounty to privateersmen for each pri- soner ; half a million to build floating bat- teries ; 1625,000 to pay for vessels built on Lakes Ontario and Champlain ; 1255,000 (with S5000 more to Perry) for the captors of the fleet on Lake Erie ; all captured flags' were ordered to be preserved and displayed. "With these military and naval provisions, medals, thanks and three months' extra pay were voted to Perry and Elliot, their petty officers, seamen, marines and the in- fantry serving as such on Lake Erie ; and swords to the relatives of Brooks, Laub, Clark and Claxton, killed there ; to Bur- rows and M'Call, and the men of the En- terprise, Lawrence, and the non-commis- sioned officers of the Hornet. The war charges were provided for by a loan en- acted for twenty-five millions, and five millions of treasury notes, with an addi- tional issue of five millions to be taken as part of the loan^ Enormous bounties, near three millions of dollars a year for recruits, frequent, numerous and irrepressible desertions, hun- dreds per annum, notwithstanding cruel and capital punishments to prevent them, still failing to fill the ranks of the army to anything Bke the number fixed by law, and reliance continually and terribly disappoint- ed on volunteers, militia and yearling regu- lars, combined to impress reflecting and experienced statesmen, as well as muitary men, with the truth of Washington's judg- ment, that the most if not only republican, effectual, economical and certain method of raising armies and providing for the general defence of the United States, is by drafts from the militia, classed and arranged for that purp'ose, as was proposed by the executive and rejected by Congress in the last- stage of the war. One hundred and twenty-four dollar bounty as inducement to enlist was adopted on William Lowndes' motion, modified at my suggestion, leaving the pay as it was, and putting the whole bribe into bounty. By that method five years service, should war last so long, was paid for by no more charge in bounty than for one. Cyrus King vehemently condemned such enormous seduction to farmers' sons and other persons to enlist in a war they disapproved : to which James Fisk replied that in New England much greater induce- ments were given to prevent than to en- courage enlistments ; and that if secret ar-: chives could be made public, he had no 62 ARMY MEASURES. doubt the influence of British gold would appear among the means resorted to, to prevent farmers' sons from serving their country in arms. Enlistments for one year proved a serious hindrance to those for five or during the war ; few acts of Congress were more neces- sary than that, suggested by a motion of Mr. Lowndes, for re-enlisting the yearlings for five years. The paucity of riflemen soon appeared : that American invention of the revolution, which Europe has adopted, and in this country where nearly all are gun men, is an excellent arm. Excluding minors from enlistments was another error. Youth from eighteen years upwards is the best basis of armies. In vain the recruit- ing officers complained, did they call for recruits to serve five years when others could enlist for one, and when a large portion of their most tractable recruits were not al- - lowed as minors to enlist. The nations of Europe were twenty years training their armies to be able to resist the French vete- rans ; yet an American soldier, without any youthful service, was to be made at once from an adult. During January, 1814, the army bills elicited the whole fire of con- trovei-sial discussion in the Capitol. Pro- tracted debates, all the tactics of opposition, previous question, and frequent committees of conference to reconcile disagreements between the two Houses, were resorted to. The war and administration were daily topics, and the ingenuity of both conflict- ing parties exercised to assault or defend them. The federalists who spoke nearly all declared a determination to put an end to the war. Colonel Tallmadge, of Connecticut, a cavalry officer of the Revolution, and Charles Goldsborough, of Maryland, were the only federalists who said they would support war constitutionally declared, though they might deem its causes insufficient and justice disputable. On the 6th January, 1814, after the Pre- sident's announcement of the failure of Russian mediation, a North Carolina ad- ministration, and respectable member, Wil- liam H. Murfree, introduced, by a sensible speech, a resolution to inquire into the ex- pediency of empowering the President to appoint a lieutenant-general to command the armies of the United States. " The last campaign, by the failure of our arms, had disappomted xill," he said ; "another was at hand, and nothing done to ensure more success, for which a controlling hand was indispensable." Governor Wright con- tended that our arms had not failed ; and Jonathan Fisk, that if they had, it was more for want of soldiers enough than of good commanders. Monroe then began to be thought of as Madison's successor in the presidency, to which and the lieu- tenant-generalship he aspired. When the first reverses took place by the shocking [1813. failure of Hull's invasion of Canada, which fell with terrible force on the administration, many extraordinary mea- sures were contemplated by it to recover public confidence and invigorate hostili- ties. Among these it was proposed that Monroe should be created commander-in- chief, and Dearborn restored to the War De- partment, while Jeffi3rson should undertake the Department of State ; or that Eustis should be transferred from the War to the State Department. The intimacy between Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe was such, and such the devotion of each to the success of the other's administration, that almost any sacrifice might be expected of either to the others. I am not aware whether Jefferson was apprized of the idea of recalling him for a great emergency to undertake the Department of State under Madison, who had served Jefferson, when President, as his secretary. But I know that such arrangements were considered in October, 1812, by Monroe, in whose calm, steadyjudgment, and great experience, both Jefferson and Madison had the utmost con- fidence, and whose intimacy with them in- duces the belief that they were made ac- (juainted with so important a suggestion in which they were so much concerned. Mr. Murfree was little of a mere partisan, and it is not probable that his motion for a lieutenant-general regarded Monroe's presidency. Armstrong, the Secretary of War, disliked by Monroe, and the adher- ents of Madison, at that moment, involved in much of the discredit of the failure of our arms in the north, was also mentioned as the presidential successor of Madison: and probably the North Carolina member preferred the Virginia to the New York candidate. But there was no reason for as- cribing to any such motive the resolution he moved for a lieutenant-general, which, however, was laid on the table, and never called up for consideration. Next day, a resolution of Mr. Orosvenor, proposed inquiry why so many officers were absent from the northern army, " where," he said, " there were scarce enough to perform the common camp duties, as the National Intelligencer also intimated." Not only administration, but opposition presses were censorious of Wil- kinson ancf Armstrong ; whose task was extremely hard, to render commanding officers unselfish, subordinates obedient, transform recruits into veterans, and out of chaos bring order. The best military au- thorities teach, that not only are old soldiers indispensable to reliable armies, but that, like seamen, the older the better, till age begins to impair strength. Eighty years 'of discomfitures have not convinced this country that militia are nearly useless, and volunteers useful only for certain purposes, who have votes enough to outweiga the 3hap?II.] TEBASUEY REPORT. 63 'kcoie than thrice told expense and blood- .shed, disease and wretchedness, of their employment; and it is probable that in ■ AmRTina. they will always be preferred to disciplined soldiery. The bill to fill the ranks by exorbitant bounties, proved some relief from the train of delays and reverses, mortification and slaughters, which trod on each other's heels during the first nearly two years of military abortion, for which the government was not more to blame than the institutions of the United States. War inculcated that Canada could not be con- quered by enlisted troops. Stronger influ- ence was indispensable than mere pecuniary temptation. Sixty-three thousand regular troops voted, and six thousand officers, largely paid, nearly all with the additional extravagance of paper money, many of them absent, others unfit for duty, consti- tuted our army. At no time did enlistment bring thirty, if twenty, thousand men into the .field. Drafts, as in .the Revolution, what was stigmatized and defeated as French conscription, began to be regarded by military and statesmen as the cheapest, most republican, and only effective force. The House biU^ for converting three in- fantry into rifle regiments, was amended in Senate by three additional rifle regiments, leaving the infantry as before, in which shape we passed it by party-votes, 85 t9-67, but not without a long sitting of severe contest, the 8th February, 1814. "When at- tacked by Mr. Sheffey, Mr. Webster, Mr. Grosvenor, and Mr. Tallmadge, it was de- fended by Mr. Troup, Mr. Robertson, Mr. Gholson, Mr. Calhoun, and James Fisk. In .that discussion, Robertson sounded the alarm of Louisiana invaded. " Why shall not English- troops be now transported to the United States? The ocean is free to ner ships, and she has no use in Europe for the immense force and expenditure hereto- fore employed there." With which antici- bations, realized so soon, came the severest irials, greatest triumphs, and honorable peace. The Treasury Report, presented the 10th January, 1814, stated the receipts for the fiscal year ending 30th September, 1813, at thirtjTseven mimous and a half, which, with the balance in hand at the beginning of that year, made near forty millions ; the year's payments had been not quite thirty- three millions; the expenditures for 1814 were estimated at more than forty millions, of which near thirty were proposed to be raised by loan. At the beginning of the war the financial plan was, to make the re- venue equal to the peace establishment, about seven millions ; interest of the old debt, a.bout two millions, and of the new (m.e, estimated about three, together about fee, millions more; making a total ofabout sum defrayed in 1813, by loans, was about twenty-four millions. The army estimate was about twenty-five millions for rather more than sixty-three thousand men ; and the navy estimate not quite seven millions for nearly sixteen thousand seamen and officers, and about nineteen hundred ma- rines. About twenty-three millions were added to the public debt in 1813. The whole ■ receipts for 1814, from imposts, taxes, and lands, were estimated at about ten millions. To that timid exhibit of the money, which is the main sinew of war, the acting Secretary added a faint intima- tion, whether it might not be expedient and prudent to provide new revenues to the very small and totally insufncient amount which he indicated. The last loan in 1813, seven millions and a half, cost thirteen dollars and nearly thirty-two cents premium for every hundred dollars. The taxes were not to be operative tiU 1814, when their avails were not estimated to exceed three millions and a half, and their actual re- ceipts proved much less. On the 9th February, 1814, the chairman of the ways and means, John W. Eppes, presented his loan budget to the house, with a bill to be filled by a loan for twenty-five millions, and treasury notes for five millions more ; so that of the forty-five millions es- timated as the year's charges, thirty were to be raised by loans at ruinous discount, and well nigh unsupported by taxation on any substantial basis : a paper money ex- periment almost as certain of failure as the. continental money of the Revolution. That deplorable catastrophe, Mr. Eppes, who was not equal to the exigencies of the crisis, but shrunk from most of its trying demands, a firm and worthy man, unfitted by political theories and scruples for the great require- ments of war, attempted to paUiate by the calculation, that in peace the country would be,, as it had been, able to pay off any debt contracted during war; which he argued from the fact of Madison's administration having paid twenty-three millions and a half of debt in five years, while borrowing about forty-four millions and a half, so that the balance of debt unpaid was less than twenty-one millions, incurred by the war. With delusive panegyric on the credit of the government, always faithful to its engagements, and visionary statistics of the wealth of the country, Mr. Eppes launched a loan bill larger than any before proposed, which, before Congress met again in September that year, proved an abortion as disgraceful and detrimental as the. dis- comfiture of our armies. Both the financial and the military abortions were salutary, if not providential, though severe and bitter, lessons- of republican improvidence and de- lusion. On the 28th March, 1814, the newly twelve - millions, and then to borrow the appointed Secretary of the Treasury, Geo, asBount of all the extra war expenses. The. |w. Campbell's answer, that officer's first 64 DEBATE ON THE LOAN BILL. [1813. official appearance, to an inquiry of the committee of ways and means, rendered matters 'worse than they were before, by his opinion, that the internal resources would be more productive than the acting Secretary Jones supposed, by his report of January ; so that, as Mr. Campbell stated, for covering the deficit of eight hundred thousand dollars, then acknow- ledged, it was not necessary to provide ad- ditional revenues. Thus the new secretary, and only secretary since Mr. Gallatin, aban- doned the Treasury, completed its dis- credit by subscribing to the pernicious de- lusion, that the war would not last, and that if it should, still baseless loans, with- out taxes, or with such slight basis as to be nearly so, might be relied on for its funds. Eppes' apology for neglecting the indis- pensable but dreaded duty of calling forth the resources of the country by taxation, from which it never shrunk, opened three weeks Saturnalian discussion on the Loan Bill, when nearly every member disposed to speak, embracing in this country a much greater number than in any other of fluent orators, by the method of conversation with constituents about themselves, explain and vindicate public affairs, and strive to recom- mend the people's servants to their arbitrary masters. Timothy Pitkin, a substantial and sensible New Englander, painstaking and exact in his positions, decorously main- tained, succeeded Mr. Eppes, exposed his errors and denied his calculations, averring that the war was waged for unattainable objects, not worth their cost if attained, and sure to entail enormous debt with one- rous taxes on the people. Daniel Sheffey followed him with still greater refinements of arithmetic. The loan he pronounced un- precedented in national extravagance, be- yond the possibility of accomplishment, yet insufficient to pay all that was wanting, as the prior year's expenses far exceeded, he insisted, what government confessed, and the army for 1814 would cost fifty in- stead of twenty-five millions. Both of those gentlemen contended against a country, whose people and resources have always disappointed the alarming predictions of opposition, and accomplished the ends of timid government beyond its deserts. Pit- kin and Sheffey's enigmas of finance were more falsified than Eppes' theories : and the country came forth safe in spite of both parties. Historical record or sketch of the short- lived speculations of that twenty days' de- bate, would not inform the reader, since events have deprived those ephemeral con- troversies of nearly all their interest. Of orders in council never to be repeated, and impressment for which that war would now instantaneously light up another for a single instance of the six thousand then in vain complained of, till resisted, very brief digest of debate wiU suffice. The federal- ists declared the nation ruined by commer- cial restrictions and war, the expenses of which would exceed a hundred millions of dollars, in the coming year. The army was not to be employed to defend the country, but for foreign conquest, not a foot of which had been effected, after two campaigns by an administration that had proved itself incompetent to carry on any war. The navy, which alone had saved the country, had always been opposed by the democrats. The army, such as it was, instead of con- centrated, was scattered, and dissolved by idle invasions. The democrats answered that not the mode, but the motive of the war, cha- racterized it as defensive ; that French in- fluence had been the federal cry, till our failures made Canadian conquest the com- plaint. "Would it not fee offensive war, to withdraw the troops from Canada, and go forth on the ocean to conquer and ravage ? The invasion of Canada is the best security for the whole country from hostile attacks. The coast cities and places would all be. assaulted, if we did not. compel the enemy to concentrate his disposable troops in Ca- nada, where the first blow of the revolu-' tionary war was struck, and which it cost England many campaigns to wrest from France ; and we, like other people, cannot learn the science of war, but by experience;. Many vessels of war had been added to the. navy, and all was doing that could be to encounter the British at sea. Reduced to essential qualities, that insignificant sub- stance may be said to have been the whole argument on which Congress dwelt, divid- ed, enlarged, and angrily disputed for three weeks. "With provincial antiquated pronuncia- tion, scholastic diction, sarcastic logic, ■ yet free from personality, a cold manner, profound reverence for the most English principles of American institutions, and saturnine apprehension of French influence- to which he ascribed Jefferson and Madi- son's politics, and the war, by powerful speeches, Mr. Webster then commenced his eminent career, more eminently forensic than parliamentary, and much more ora- torical than . statesmanlike. He opposef the war because declared rashly, and con- ducted not only feebly, but offensively, when, if ventured at all, it should be de- fensive. It was not enough that govern- ment could make out cause of war on paper, and get the better of England in argument. War is a question not only of right, but of prudence and expediency. Utterly aston- ished at the declaration of war he was sur- prised at nothing since .; he saw how it would be prosecuted when he saw how it was be- gun. In the nature of things there is an Unchangeable relation between rash coun- sels and feeble execution. Its failures were ascribed by its advocates to their opponenfe esAp. II.] WEBSTER. 65 ■distracting the country; but th.at was an •old English ministerial false position at- tempted by North when he lost America, decrying the impertinent boldness of Chat- ham, the idle declamation of Fox, and the unanswerable sarcasm of Barr6. Disclaiming rebellious or unconstitution- al opposition, Mr. Webster demanded evi- dence that the purpose of government was defensive, before he voted for offensive war : opposition to which was not only constitu- tional and legal, but conscientious. The entertainment we were promised by those who declared it, has not been realized ; no harvest of glory and greatness, as predicted. Men acting from conscientious opposition to war, causelessly undertaken, which has reduced the country from, abortive offensive to futile defensive hostilities, are not to be awed by any danger. They know the limit of constitutional opposition. Up to that limit, at their own discretion, they will walk fearlessly. If they find in the history of their country a precedent for going over, he hoped they would not follow it. They were not of a school in which insurrection is taught as a virtue. They will not seek promotion through the paths of sedition, nor qualify themselves to serve their coun- try in any of the high departments of go- vernment by making rebellion the first el^ ment of their political science. Freedom - of inquiry is a home-bred right, a fireside privilege, which hath ever been enjoyed in every house, cottage, and cabin of the na- tion, and not to be drawn into controversy : in private, a right ; in public life, a duty. • Aimingatall times to be temperate and cour- teous in its exercise, except when' the right shall be denied, he should then carry it to its extent, place himself on the extreme boundary of his right, and bid defiance to any arm that would remove him from his ground. That high constitutional privilege he would exercise within this House and without, in all places and times, in war and in peace, and living or dying, assert it. It was the war itself, its unwise declara- tion, contrary to public sentiment, and con- duct, since also contrary to it, that rendered it weak. The people do not desire to ac- quire more territory, or wage war with the savages of the interior for maritime rights, for sailors' rights with the tribes of the Prophet. The nominal majority for war he attributed to party cohesion ; the force of opposition to it to the prevalence of pub- lic sentiment against it. And party sup- port is insufficient for war in this country, where the people must be embodied for it. They do not feel adequate motive for the conquest of Canada. The bordering people are kindred, loath W shed each others' blood. In some of the affairs we call bat- tles; because- we have nothing else to give the name to, brother has been armed against brother, and father against son. 5 " I honor," said Mr. Webster, " the peo- ple that shrink from such warfare, wnich none but cannibals could enjoy. The peo- ple of Canada are all against your war on their government, and so are the yeomanry of the Northern States, whom neither per- suasion nor threat will-enlist. Last year a bounty of sixteen dollars, increased this year to one hundred and twenty-four dol- lars, teUa the enemy and the world, tells every body but the . government, that war for conquest of Canada is impracticable. ,The Northern states alone armed or un- armed, would overrun Canada in thirty days, if so inclined. As early as 1745 they raised 5000 men and took Louisburg from the French. With adequate motive Massa- chusetts could now furnish forty thousand men. Two Canadian campaigns have fail-, ed, and no where had you as many as 5000 men together. Whenever attacked, the American people have defended themselves; but whenever. defence ceases and invasion begins, they stop. They do not choose to pass the line, which, without serious obsta- cle, rises like a Chinese wall against their sentiments. What, then, should be done? Withdraw your invading armies, abandon commercial restrictions ; and embargo anni- hilating trade by color of power to regulate it. The constitution sprung from com- merce, for which war is wagad by those who never heard the surges of the sea, nor have any idea of a ship until they come from be- yond their western hills to protect the ma- ritime rights of those who remonstrated against it, with eight-tenths of the seamen of the country: war for maritime rights thus forced on those alone interested in them. In the commerce of the country the constitution had its birth. In its ex- tinction it will find its grave. The faith of the nation is pledged to its commerce. I conjure and entreat you," said Mr. Web- ster, " to redeem it ; and without menace forewarn you of consequences, unless you alter your course. Badly as I think of the original grounds and conduct of the war, T will aid in measures of defence and protec- tion to procure just and honorable peace. Give up futile projects of invasion. Un- clasp the iron grasp of embargo. Let it not be said that not one ship of force, built since the war, floats on the ocean. Turn the current of your efforts into that channel worn deep and broad to receive it. A naval force competent to defend your coast, con- voy your trade, and perhaps raise the block- ade of your rivers is no chimera. If war must continue, go to the ocean ; if contend- ing for maritime rights, go to the theatre where they can be defended. There the united wishes and efforts of the nation wiU go with you. Our party divisions, acrimo- nious as they are, cease at the water's edge ; lost in attachment to national character on that element where that character is 66 -made respectable. In protecting naval in- terests by naval means, you will arm your- selves with the whole power of national sen- timent, and may command the whole abund- ance of national resources ; in time enable yourselves to redress injuries when offered, and if need be, accompany your own flag throughout the world with the protection of your own cannon." So favorable was the effect of Mr. Web- ster's speech on the war party, that it was supposed he had resolved to support it, ■provided its operations were bestowed at sea instead of on Canada. Among the last ■published editions of his speeches, that first, produced obviously with his' own ■revision, together with his other speeches of that period, does not appear ; though the sentiments, terms, and force of the first, certainly do no discredit to the greater celebrity acquired by those of later date. Without denial of the justice and adequate causes of war, his argument struck at its wisdom and expediency ; and eloquently promised to support it if directed from ■ conquest in Canada to defence at sea. Mr. Calhoun, and others, charged the fe- deralists with unpatriotic refusal of sup- plies. But, thougti they voted against the loans and army, the taxes and most other -means of carrying on hostilities, there was nothing in such a speech as Mr. Webster's, of which I give but a faint outline, ob- noxious to the charge of refusing supplies, - or opposing the war without reason. On the auspicious 22d of February, 1814, John Forsyth surprised the House of Ke- presentatives by his first elaborate speech, from the pedestal of which he rose to be- come, during many years service in both Houses of Congress, a conspicuous, attract- ive, and effective public speaker ; formidable by the power of oratory unpremeditated, ■ pungent, not aggressive, but retorting; which recommended him to President Mon- roe for Minister to Spain, not his fittest place, and to Presidents Jackson and Van Buren as their Secretary of State, in which department he was honourable and respect- able, though, as elsewhere, indolent. I was in the Supreme Court, which quorums of both Houses then often frequented to hear the oommanding disputations of Pinkney and Dexter on constitutional and prize law, when a member of the House, John G. Jackson, informed me that Forsyth was making an extraordinary speech at the other side of the capitol. The representa- tive hall was then arranged as now, after ■ undergoing, since, several experimental ■transpositions in fruitless endeavors to overcome its incurable acoustic miscontriv- ■ance. The Speaker's chair was then, as -now, south, and the two parties sat as at present, the Federalists on his left, like the Whigs no\y, the Republicans, or Democrats, on his right. But, as there were from thirty FOESYTH. [1814. — * — to forty more of the latter than the former, some few unavoidably took seats among the party they voted against, among whom was Mr. Forsyth. Not long before he united with the federalists, on Mr. Clay's retirement, to elect Mr. Cheves his succes- sor as Speaker, instead of the special war and administration candidate, FehxGrundy. During all the first, and nearly three months of the second session, Forsyth sat mute, or nearly so, taking no prominent part on the floor. When, therefore, after such lapse of , reserve as led to impressions of, at any rate, Oratorical insignificance, and doubts of party entirety, rising in the midst of his federal neighbors, he fulminated gracefully and defyingly, a war harangue, the surprise of all parties, delight of his own, and disap- pointment of their opponents, were mani- fested at his unsparing denunciations, bursting like a bomb on the House. With a handsome face, chan-ming voice, grace- ful action, and ready elocution, from his youth at college always distinguished as a speaker, without premeditation or labor, few members of Congress commanded more attention. Like many captivating public speakers, Mr. Forsyth was one of whom no perfect idea can be formed with- out listening to and feeling the influence of his voice, manner, and address, his many physical advantages, without any salient peculiarity. Mr. Grosvenor and Mr. Han- son, particularly, had spoken with fierce freedom. " The opposition," said the Na- tional Intelligencer, " had been allowed to emit their most poisonous venom, and it was proper the antidote should be applied, as it was, in a spirit and tone which the language of habitual defiance not only justified but required. Without disrespect to others, we may be allowed particularly to commend the able, patriotic, and spirited -speech of Mr. Forsyth, exhibiting the fire of genius, which, like the fire of the flint, severe col- ' lision can only awaken from its repose." Like the spark, it may be added, it dazzled and went out. The questions of that con- test were, indeed, many of them, so t«m- porary,_that a digest or repetition of them would be without much of their actual ex- citement. And few discourses have left less of their immediate impressions than John Forsyth's, who became what Thomas Grosvenor then was, the readiest impromptu debater of his time. " I wish it understood," said he, " that my object is not to defend the government, but to show that the op- position to it is indefensible. In Mr. Gas- ton's correct and polished language, what means his dark intimation that now the majority can speak freely of the Emperor of the French ?" Averring that no one de- nied there was just cause of war, Mr. For- syth extensively repelled the charge, that it was produced by French subornation against England, " miscalled the bulwark of our eHAP, It.] CALHOUN. 67 , religion, whose atrocities disprove that New England ascription." After' extensive re- view of the causes of the contest, and its .continuance, of which subsequent events make irksome the repetition, Mr. Forsyth, addressing Mr. Webster's assertion of the freedom of opposition, said " that threats of physical strength were not constitutional objections. The direct tendency of the conduct of a portion of the Legislature of Massachusetts leads to separation of the Union. Inflammatory rescjlutions, violent complaints of injustice, stimulate public prejudice, and prepare for more decided steps, which he mentioned, not from fear," .said Mr. Forsyth, " but to express.my pro- found contempt fortheir impotent madness. JFear and interest hinder the factious spirits from executing their wishes. If a leader should be found bad and bold enough to try, one consolation for virtue is le/t, that those who raise the tempest will be the first victims of its fury." When debate on the loan bill had consumed more than two weeks in daily speeches, Mr. Calhoun said, the objections were all reducible to two ; first, that the loan cannot be had ; secondly, that the war is inexpedient: both of which he denied extensively. Of men impressed, ,we esti- mate six thousand ; the British confess six- teen hundred. Under pretext of taking her own seamen, Great Britain converts the commerce and navigation of the world into a nursery of seamen for the British Navy. .After reviewing that question, he proceeded to the commercial causes of war. The ma- f'c charge of French influence, by which ngland spell-bound the world, including this country, had lost its charm by English triumphs. All Europe must unite with us .to prevent the ocean's becoming English property; since we have broken the trident of British naval invincibility. Without re- sistance even unto war, and supposing our opponents in power, American commerce must have been destroyed by English ille- galities. The momentary inconvenience to -Massachusetts will be repaired by the great- est • share of commercial prosperity with peace. Whether war is offensive or defen- sive, depends on its cause; and so con- sidered, ours is defensive war. Supplies in -whatever shape, are opposed by those who are bold in facing bankruptcy, refusing a .loan which would be to shock private as .well as public credit. All the analogies of .private life teach, that when war is lawfully begun, party should not oppose, though it may /disapprove it, which would be like a .son taking side against his father, if disap- . proving his conduct. The justice of the ; war was acknowledged by the vptes of Mr. .Quincy, Mr. Emott and other leading feder- ,«lists in the House, when the preliminary steps were taken. What are to be the limits of opposition now? If they' withhold sup- plies, because the war is unjust, will not that reason justifjfurther resistance ? If the pledged public faith is no obligation, is the Constitution any more? How far a minority in war may justly go in opposi- tion, is a question of the greatest delicacy. Among ourselves we may divide ; but in re- lation to other people, we ought to be one nation. Government canjkindeed, command the hand and arm, but they are powerless without the people's heart. Union and zeal, more than numbers, are the elements of power. Whenever attachment to party is stronger than to country, faction takes place. The war, Mr. Calhoun said, had done much in liberating this country from dread of British power, prevalent before it was declared. If we have done little against England, she has done less against us. Rebellion, civil war, conflagrated towns, prostrated credit predicted, have not been realized. English power, till we defied it, was too great for our complete independ- ence. With the independence of thought and action we have acquired military knowledge. Connected-with this I rejoice, said he, to behold the amazing growth of our manufacturing interests, which _will more than indemnify the country for all its losses. No country, however great . and variant its staples, can acquire a stato of great and permanent wealth, without the aid of manufactories. Reason and expe- rience both support the position. Our in- ternal strength and means of defence are greatly increased by them. War, when forced on us hereafter, will find us with ampler means ; and will not be productive of that distressing vicissitude which fol- lows it, where the industry of the country is foupded on commerce and agriculture dependent on a foreign market. Even our commerce in the end will partake of the benefits. Kich means of exchange with all the world will be furnished to it, and the country will be in a much better condition to extend to it efficient protection. It is impossible to condense without in- justice to them, and irksomeness to the readers of this sketch, more of the many voluminous speeches of those three weeks' debate, when the war underwent that merely temporary and mostly party discus- -sion, of which events soon superseded the interest. Brief outlines of those of the three young statesmen, then rising to dis- tinction, are offered as ■ profiles of their promise. William Gaston, Alfred Cuth- bert, John G. Jackson, John McLean, Wil- liam Lowndes, Timothy Pickering, Morris MiUer, Samuel Sherwood, John Alexander, Jolm Rhea, Thomas Grosvenor, Joseph Pearson, BoUing Robertson, Robt. Wright, Alexander Hanson, I and others entered the lists, during the three weeks that the con- troversy lasted. At length, on the 3d March, 1814, late in the day, when Mr. Grosvenor 68 EMBARGO REPEALED. [1814. was called to order hj the Speaker for what ho deemed an offensive expression, before he could get the floor again, evidently for a long speech, Jonathan f isk supplanted him by the previous question, and the bill was ordered to be engrossed for third read- ing. Next day, on the passage of that bill, Richard Stamford, James Fisk and Roger Nelson, resumed the debate, and the bill, unimportant as to any principle involved, except those engrafted on a mere loan, passed the House by ninety-seven aiyes, strict war-party votes, to fifty-five nays, the whole present opposition. " The question," said the Intelligencer of the next morning, "would probably not have been taken last night, as we know several gentlemen in- tended to speak, but for the great sensation created in the House by the temper of Mr. Grosvenor's speech. After which, by a ma- jority of forty, the House determined to close a scene, in which unlimited indulg- ence and liberality on the part of the ma- jority had extorted from their opponents nothing but invective and personality :" censure, heavier than the offence ; for most of the opposition speeches were not more violent or disorderly than English parlia- mentary license. On the 5th" April, 1814, a bill was re- ported by Mr. Bppes, from a select com- mittee, fixing the meeting of the next ses- sion of Congress the third Monday of October, inasmuch as the war might con- tinue, he said, and then the taxes must be put in operation, which passed afterwards, fixing the last Monday of October as the day ; and Mr. Ingham's resolution was adopted after some opposition, directing the Secretary of the Treasury to report at the next session a general tariff of duties ; Mr. Lowndes objecting to Alexander McKim's amendment, which was rejected, to extend the specific duties as far as practicable. One of the last movements of the last hour of the session, was a motion by Morris Miller, for a select committee to sit during the recess, with power to send for persons and papers, to inquire into the causes of the failure of our arms on the Northern and North-western frontiers ; for which twenty- nine members voted, mostly federalists ; with them, Macon, Bradley and Stanford, who (Stanford) professed to be of the de- mocratic party. The action of any com- mittee of the House of Representatives, when Congress is not in session, is an ir- regularity. On the 4th of April, Mr. Calhoun, from the committee of foreign affairs, reported a bill to repeal the embargo aid non-import- ation acts, and another bill to prohibit the exportation of gold and silver coins and bullion. After some conversation, in which Messrs. Calhoun, Ingham, Webster, Macon and Pitkin took part, and rejecting several motions on the subject, it was referred to the committee of the whole. A national bank had then begun to be much talked of; rather than which, as the finances were every day declining, General Pesha launch- ed one of those wild schemes of paper money, which are almost the universal resort and frequent perdition of governments in such crises. Ihat resolution was to inquire into the expediency of emitting not exceeding fifteen millions of treasury notes, in sums from ten dollars to a thousand, bearing six per cent, interest, payable quarterly, and redeemable in five years; with taxes on watches, gold seals, plate, boots and fine hats, to pay the interest. Felix Grundy declared his preference for a bank ; Alex- ander McKim said he found it necessary, when his business was small, to be exceed- ingly cautious in signing promissory notes, and that government should never issue notes without providing adequate taxes for their redemption ; Mr. Eppes objected to paper money, or more treasury notes than already authorized ; William Barnett warm- ly advocated any money or taxes that would carry on the war ; General Desha pronounced treasury notes no worse paper money than bank notes, which Willis Alston reaffirmed ; but Jonathan Fisk declared that the mere reference of such a proposition would spread alarm at the prospect of such a mass of pa- per money to be thrown into circulation ; and Desha's scheme was rejected by one hundred and eight votes to thirty-seven, but all the minority of the war party. The shadows began to cast themselves forward of a financial failure and national bank. As soon as we had done with Desha's affair, consideration of Grundy's motion to appoint, a select committee for a bank was resumed, and Newton's motion for its indefinite post- ponement came within nine votes of suc- ceeding, 71 to 80 ; mixed votes, but the war party mostly affirmative ; my impression being that it was quite too near the day fixed for closing the session to take up so momentous a topic. The shackles of that hard servitude to questionable law, indefinite commercial re- straint, were never borne with patience. While the war party in New England maintained, and throughout the rest of the Union applauded it, not only the Eastern people and their representatives in Con- gress, but others continually remonstrated against and combatted commercial restric- tion. On the 10th of January, 1814, Christopher Gore moved in the Senate to suspend the embargo as to coasting trade, which was refused by 23 votes to 10 ; on the 2d of March, 1814, Robert Wright, a vehement adherent of administration, proposed in the House of Representatives to suspend it during negotiations for peace, for which he got 05 votes to 68 ; on the 14th of March, 1814, William Gaston moved to repeal the embargo and non-intercourse Chap. II.] RESTRICTIVE SYSTEM. 69. acts, rejected by 86 votes to 58 ; on the 17th of March, 1814, Mr. Wood proposed to ex- ■ elude fishing, fire-wood and lime coasters, bound from State to State, negatived by 80 -to 63; on the 26th of March, 1814, Mr. Webster carried a select committee, who reported, on the 28th of March, pursuant to a petition from the inhabitants of Ports- moufii, to import lime from Thomastown .vand Camden. T^hese -restless movements, .- jf not all honest, were nevertheless indi- - cative of irrepressible local disquiets. ■~ On the 6th of April, 1814, on Mr. Cal- houn's motion, the House went into com- mittee of the whole, James Pleasants being ' called to the chair, on the bill to repeal the ■ embargo. The war, Mr. Calhoun said, was for free trade and sailors' rights, against the British' maritime policy to destroy our free trade and seamen's -rights. To coun- - teract her assaults on neutral commerce, it •was our policy to cultivate the good will of commercial nations. The restrictive was a pacific and temporary policy, an4-in his opinion, should have ended with our war. But now that nearly all Europe is open to our commerce, there should be no embargo. .; Opening our ports to the maritime na- tions, would lead them to make common ■ cause with us, who would be irritated by ■ English paper blockades stopping their trade with the United States. Fersistance now in the restrictive system would be in- consistent with the reason of its establish- ment. As to the manufacturing interest, the vote on Mr. Ingham's resolution was a strong pledge that the House would not sufier that to be unprotected ; at all times and under every policy he hoped it would be protected. Mr, Webster rejoiced to read ^the funeral obsequies of the restrictive sys- tem, about to be consigned to the tomb. Like 'faith, it had been adhered to without reason, and its character would never be known till abandoned. It was expiring with general execration. The country had never been told till now that it was depend- ent on European politics. It' had been called an American system. But as soon as French predominance has ceased, it fells with it. Its coincidences were ob- vious with the French continental system. It was now confessed to have been a system of co-operation with France. It was a great error to render the politics of this country dependent on those of Europe. Nothing- is more injurious to a commercial country than frequent changes of system. As to the restrictive system promoting infant manu- factures, the administration would sacrifice them if need be, with as little remorse as the merchants. He was an enemy to rear- ing manufactures in hot-beds. Those com- patible with the interest of the country should be fostered, but he never wished to see a Sheffield or Birmingham in this coun- try, the true spirit of whose constitution did not empower government to change the habits of whole sections of the country, but to protect all in the pursuit of their own avocations. Those two rising statesmen took their first stands both against what finally be- came the declared doctrine of their public lives, each more consistent in change than by adhering to oxnginal p'ositions. Alexander McKim, an intelligent Balti- more merchant, moved to retain the non-im- portation acts, which were repealed by one section, for which he was supported by only 31 votes. Mr. Bradley proposed to allow commerce in neutral vessels forbidden to our own, in which he was supported by Timothy Pickering and Timothy Pitkin, opposed by James Fisk, Elisha Potter, Robert Wright, and Thomas Newton, and the motion re- jected. Before the final question was taken, Mr. Calhoun replied to Mr. Webster's charge of French co-operation, which he denied, and French influence, which he said he despised. If Mr. Webster's policy had been pursued* Ameiaoan commerce would have been entirely under- English . control. Mr. Webster rejoined that the good old-fashioned policy was the best ; to rely on ourselves, and not on others. Wil- liam Reed opposed the repeal of the em- bargo while the Russian mediation was pending, because it would drain the country of specie. The bill required neutral vessels- to be manned with their own seamen, and prohibited any American citizen from going in their vessels without a passport : which part Mr. Forsyth moved to reject, but it was retained after some debate, though op- posed by several of the most respectable; members of both parties. Next day, the 6th of Aprils 1814, when that bill was resumed in the House, Mr. McKim made a strenous effort to keep the non-importation law as a security to infant manufactures, which he estimated as a national interest of two hundred millions, and our utmost exports at sixty millions, so that the manufactures added probably a hundred millions to the agricultural in- terest. He feared that the English manu- facturers would overwhelm ours. Mr. Cal- houn answered that with the double duties they had fifty per cent, protection, which' was enough, and Mr. McKim's effort got but 34 votes. Finally, after a great deal more contest that day7 the repeal passed by 115 ayes to 37 nays, the latter being the remnant of the large administration ma- jority once taught to rely on national self- denial and passive suffering as preferable to the inconveniences and chances of war. When the bill was reported in Senate, Joseph Anderson, Outerbridge Horsey, Rufus King, David Daggett and John Tay- lor urged a suspension of the rule prevent- ing three readings of a bill in one day, so that the embargo and non-importation 70 COMMERCIAL RESTRICTIONS. might be forthwith annulled; which "Wil- liam Giles, Samuel Dana, and Elijius Ero- mentin opposed, and prevented. On the 12th of April 1814, rejecting the sections concerning neutrals and seamen, the Senate passed the bill almost unanimously, only four of the least influential senators voting against the repeal ; on the same day the House without debate on Mr. Calhoun's motion, by a vote of 68 to 52, concurred in the Senate amendments, and finally passed the bill. It wag known, and published at that time, that Jefferson acquiesced in that abrogation of his favorite and abortive ex- periment to prevent war by unlimited em- bargo, non-intercourse, non-importation, and permanent commercial restrictions on a nation confederated for the furtherance of commerce, which he thought would have succeeded, had it not been prematurely re- linquished. But questionable as was its constitutionality, still more doubtful was the feasibility of such painful and irritating privations inflicted on fhe navigating parts of the Union, who during seven years sub- mitted to despotic regulations, gi-adually, as was to be expected, infringed by innu- merable devices, but still always legally up- held. When the Senate rejected the biU which the House sent to them, prohibiting the delivery by the courts on bonds of goods secured under the non-importation law, the last hope of the restrictive system failed, and it was a dead letter on the statute book. The armed neutrality, the continental sys- tem of Europe, and the restrictive system of the United States were all in vain aimed at that enormous monopoly of commerce which Great Britain created and continu- ally increased by irresistible naval ascend- ency till her own wonderful constancy and success in war opened nearly all Europe to her manufactures again, thus rendering the American restriction of commerce less inju- rious to her than to tlie United States and tlieir European customers. Repeal of the em- bargo, therefore, was more obviously neces- sary than its original enactment and persist- ing maintenance. War of itself interdicted all trade between enemies, both by law and in effect, and neutral vessels could be the only legal bearers of any commercial intercourse between the United States and Great Bri- tain. Impost on them and our own, was ex- pected to contribute revenue for war charges. The repeal, however, was not an act of sub- mission, to fear or to opposition, but a war measure, to give activity to cotton, tobacco, flour, and other staples, the export of which, it was reckoned, might yield an income of ten millions a year, on which government could borrow, at the same time enabling the )roduoer of our staples to pay direct taxes, or the first time during many years im- posed on them. Retrospect of that experiment of free Fc [1814. government, by which it outdid despotic in severity of universal pressure on the com- munity, causes admiration of the law-abid- ing patience of the Eastern people, ex- tremely distressed by interruption of their, livelihood, and though taught to evade, yet never provoked forcibly to resist laws, which legists and legislatures denounced as uncon- stitutional and void. A majority believed that Jefferson was an instrument of Bona- parte's conquests, terrifyingAmerica as well as Europe, and enabling England, by the resemblance of the American restrictive to his continental system, to spread alarm that the American was part of the French scheme of destruction of trade. Yet under aU these causes for forcible resistance there was none. By industry paralyzed and property de- preciated, the losses wei-e incalculable; during the seven years of embargo, non-in- tercourse, and non-importation, much great- er than the nearly three years war. Nor did commercial restriction prepare for, any more than prevent, war. Angry discontent was increased, not allayed by President Jefferson's relaxation of his experiment on the assurance of a Massachusetts senator, Mr. Adams, that it was indispensable to prevent resistance and perhaps disunion. By proclaiming Henry's attempt at dis- union. President Madison introduced war with embittered animosity of the accused of New England, whom it failed to convict, and whom it was impolitic to inflame by accusation without conviction. Notwith- standing injuries and indignities, the peo- ple of New England clung to the Union, when some of their ambitious and impover- ished politicians were excited to calculate and deny its value. Another year's war, if successful, as was probable,would have mar- shaled the fighting men, the yeomen of the Eastern States under the national banner, to which a much greater number of them than from any other part of the Union ral- lied in the War of the Revolution. War was infinitely less odious or painful to them than passive and supine restraint. In vain did the authors of an inglorious system of commercial self-denial plead precedents of the Revolution, when twice, American non- importation acts forced Great Britain to yield. Jefferson's honest experiment be- queathed to Madison to govern without army or navy, and resist foreign enemies without war, proved total failures, more costly than war, and much more odious to the people and dangerous to the Union. On the 14th of April 1814, Cyrus King made a last and urgent effort to repeal the act against licenses to trade. Many Ameri- can vessels detained in foreign ports could not come home without them, he said ; nor would there be any submission to the ene- my, for in the exterminating war raging between Prance and England such licenses were used. The House by a vote agreeing Chap. II.] CLOSE OF THE SESSION. 71 to consider his resolution, a long and sharp debate ensued, in -whicli the resolution was supported by Governor Wright, Mr. Gros- venor, Mr. Sheffey, and Mr. Gaston, who (the latter) proposed to modify the act, in- stead of repealing it, by authorizing licenses ■ under the President's supervision. Mr. Calhoun, James Fisk, Mr. Murfree, Mr. Sharp, Mr. Rhea, Mr. McKim, Mr. Potter, Mr. Duvall, and I, spoke against the mo- tion ; King and Fisk becoming at last very personal and recriminating. By 81 votes to 49, the House refused to repeal or modify the act. James Fisk then carried a motion for his favorite project of strengthening th^ revenue laws to prohibit smuggling by provision for the removal of suits from state to the Federal courts, which, on Saturday the 16th of April, the last business day of that session, the House refused to consider, and in which he never finally succeeded till so late in the next session, that the war closed before it could be available. On the first of April, 1814, a member of the House of Representatives, John Daw- son, died, not of wounds, but disease con- tracted by following as a volunteer the Northern army on its disastrous campaign the year before : a, tall, well-looking, fash- ionably dressed and rather taciturn bache- lor, commonly called Beau Dawson. For sixteen successive years he represented the same Virginia district; not an orator, or conspicuous personage, but regular attend- ant, reliable voter, and veteran politician: From the time he came of age, till near fifty years old, when he died, he was hardly ever out of public life, which was his only vocation, and nearly always by popular election. Pi-esident Jefierson, to whose school of politics he belonged, conferred on him the complimentary mission of carrying to France the ratified treaty of Louisiana, by which excursion Mr. Dawson's tastes for the gay and the elegant were gratified. His successor was Philip P. Barbour, afterwards Speaker of the House, and Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States. Soon after Mr. Dawson's demise, on the 5th April, 1814, a more athletic and suc- cessful member, follower of the war, Colo- nel Richard M. Johnson, resumed his seat in the House of Representatives, on crutches and much mutilated, but with spirit un- broken,- inexhaustible good nature, and more incapacity than ever to say "no" to any one about anything ; a talent extremely rare and difficult in our popular govern- ment. On the last sultry night of the first session of the thirtieth Congress, August 14th, 1848, Colonel Johnson, who' had been a member in both Houses for more than twenty years, and Vice President, was there again, anxiously soliciting an Indian appropriation. In 1814 he was an object of universal admiration, as if, notwithstand- ing, all modern humanities,, the flr^t of vir- tues is the military, so deemed by the Ro- mans. In 1848, Congress reluctantly and irregularly voted grants to the families of JeflTerson and Hamilton, and indirectly to the impoverished conqueror of Tecumseh. Monday, the 18th April, 1814, that ses- sion of Congress ended, by adjournment till the last Monday of October, after hav- ing disposed of all but what was loft as unfinished business. The final movement concerning the war was a resolution sub- mitted by Morris L. Miller for a committee to sit during the recess, with power- to send for persons and papers, to inquire into the causes of the failure ef our anns on the northern and northwestern frontier ; which unwarrantable demand was rejected by 68 to 29 votes. The House did not find it necessary to sit later than nine o'clock in the evening of Saturday, and Monday was a day of mere completion, without under- taking any more business. Though much was done by the legisla- tion of that session to create a navy and invigorate the army, yet was it the untimely and culpable semi-ofSoial boast of the ad- ministration, that " no law was passed during the session to lay additional taxes, on the people ; the only acts respecting revenue were those authorizing a loan and treasury notes, calculated, together with the revenue from impost and internal du- ties, to raise a sufficient sum to meet the large appropriations made for the service of the current year." The same authori- tative announcement confessed also that the necessity of raising a revenue was a motive for repealing the restrictive system, " over which a veil of concealment was thrown during the discussions in Congress. That veil raised, exhibited the fact that the alternative was repeal of that system, or imposition of additional taxes for 1815, amounting, in case the war continued, to more than five millions annually, more than doubling the then rates of internal taxation." Such further acknowledgment of the inefficiency of self-restraint glaringly, impugned it by its authors, whose invete- rately fallacious hope of peace, and dread of burdening a people willing to bear any burden for supporting the war, were still uncured. In none of its lessons was the war more instructive, than that free people shrink less than their government from the discomforts, perils and charges of war. After the Senate had disposed of all their business. Vice President G^rry stated, with reference to the question that had been raised as to a temporary president of that body, that it had been the practice ever since the act of 1792, for the Vice President to retire, in ord«r that the Senate might elect a president pro tempore, to adjourn them, and that he ^should do so. On the 22d April, 1814, died at "Washing- ton in his^74th jear^ Samuel A. Otis^ Sec- 72 SUPPLIES. retary of the Senate from its first organiza- tion at New York, in 1789 : during five- and-twenty years of iiis faithful incumbency, not one day absent from a place, the duties of which he perform ed with exemplary punc- tuality and intelligence. He was the father of Harrison Gray Otis. His successor was Charles Cutts, brother-in-law of President Madison, whose most considered competitor for the succession was William W. Seaton, one of the editors of the National Intelli- gencer. As a method of superseding Mr. Cutts, with whom the Senate became dissa- tisfied, after he had been eleven years their Secretary, that body introduced for the first time, in 1826, a system of biennial elections of their Secretary, by which Walter Lowrie was chosen, both Cutts and Lowrie having been Senators before they were chosen clerks. During the first thirty-six years of Senatorial existence, there were no perni- cious and disreputable changes of sucn offi- cers, by which mercenary thirst for place is induced, not less inconvenient to the Senate than injurious to individual aspir- ants, thus invited to multiply, compete and intrigue for a clerkship, to which no Senator should descend, and from which numbers of claimants should be discountenanced. When, after three weeks' debate in the House, the Loan Bill passed by only the - administration majority overruling the party minority, the National Intelligencer, uttering the sentiments of most of the for- mer, accused the federalists of want of pa- triotism. The principal point of all their objections was that the money was to be raised for the war. On a bill to maintain the credit of the nation, had they a right to inquire whether it was just to pay debts for which acts of Congress had pledged the public faith ? The Loan Bill did not pro- pose money to carry war into Canada, yet was opposed, because to defeat it, would arrest such hostilities, and overthrow the administration. Such ground the govern- ment journal complained, would justify a future Congress in acting on the execrable idea, more than hinted at by a number of the opposition, of distinguishing between former national debts as just, and those of this war to be disregarded, as unjust; though no one, however violent, denies the integrality of public debt, incapable of classification, or gradation. The public faith once pledged, must remain forever inviolable, amid all the storms of party, changes of administration^ and even the uprootings of revolution. The federal party, therefore, would bankrupt the trea- sury, causing confusion, anarchy, and igno- minious submission to the enemy, as must have resulted from the success of their op- position to the loan. Such was the angry argument of the moment ; but is it the ver- dict of history ? In Congress, as elsewhere, the war and administratioawere stigmatized [1814. as wicked, imbecile, and ruinous, by accus- ers, who, in turn, were branded as a despe- rate and nefarious faction, refusing their country supplies in time of need, giving aid and comfort to the common enemy of all parties. The federal minority voted against many of what must be deemed supplies, mostly alleging that they did so to put a stop to the war, few of them, however, ab- solutely denying its justice or necessity, which are convertible terms, or contending that it should be left entirely without sup- port, having been, as they contended, un- wisely declared, inopportunely and impro- vidently undertaken, wholly unprepared, unjustly selecting England as the enemy, instead of France, or both ; and declared against England under French influence, by an administration weak and wicked, incapa- ble of its vigorous and successful prosecution, whose object was conquest of Canada, not defence of maritime wrongs. Without im- practicable and forbidden imputation of mo- tives, and denial of assertions which cannot be positively disproved, may history con- demn votes as against the country, or even the war, which, predicating opposition to the Executive, averred nevertheless sincere attachment to the country, and seldom if ever denounced even the mere war, but its time, manner, or some other collateral cir- cumstance ? Violent and factious parties are parcel of the freedom of this country, and when government has all the constitu- tional power, its measures will and should be watched, criticised, and counteracted by a jealous minority. There were members and measures of Congress trespassing beyond party, and inflamed by faction. Individuals, the press, and even State authorities preach- ed unpatriotic, some of them practiced trait- orous, opposition. Mutinous party passions excited inevitable personal, local, and sec- tional prejudices and animosities ; language of extreme abuse was applied by both par- ties to each other. But tested by votes in Congress, which are the best evidence of in- tentions, there is no reason to sentence the opposition at that time, embracing many of the most respectable and approved citizens, to historical reproach for want of patriotic adherence to their country. The- Hartford Convention, and acts of Congress to compel the whole population by drafts to carry arms, against which tnany revolted as con- scription for foreign conquest, shall be fairly submitted to the reader's judgment when' we reach that stage of the narrative. But avowed refusal of supplies never was resort- ed to by the minority in Congress till then, if ever. On the 14th of January, 1814, when the first war measure of that session — the bill to fill the ranks of the regular army — was read the third time, and the question was on its final passage, Daniel Shefiey moved, by way of rider to it, that the troops enlisted should, be liioited as to service ta Chap. II.] LAWS PROPOSED. 73 the defence of the territories and frontiers of the United States, or such part thereof as the President might elect and determine ; on which proposition a strict party vote of air the members present, by 103 nays to 54 ayes, indicated as well as could be the de- clared sentiments of both parties as to the war; ours, that what our opponents con- demned as oifensive was the most effectual defensive war ; theirs, that they would sup- port defensive but not offensive war ; the in- sincerity of which, their avowed position, who could prove ? What right had we to accuse them of striving to compel dishonor- able submission^ On the 5th of March, 1814, the anjnual appropriation bill for the navy passed the House by 121 ayes to 9 nays^ all of the nine negatives being from the North and East, one from New Jersey, three from New York, and five from New Eng- land — all, but Elisha Potter, of Rhode Island, members of no note, but all federal- ists. The same navy bill passed the Senate unanimously, every Senator present put- ting his name on the journal for it. The army appropriation bill, on the 7th March, 1814, passed the House by 82 ayes to 38 nays, and the Senate by 22 ayes to 10 nays, all party votes. . The general appropriation bill passed both Houses without opposi- tion, except the item of fifty thousand dol- lars for the expenses of foreign missions, which uncommonly large grant of secret service money was carried by 69 ayes to 52 nays. The amended militia bill passed the 29th March, 1814, by party votes, 88 to 53. The loan bill the 3d March, 1814, by 97 ayes to 53 nays, a strict party vote ; but after three weeks of provoking controver- sies by debate in both wings of the capitol, fomented by the party presses and other contributions from without of fuel to the flames. Notwithstanding the sentence of partisans in 1814, the judgment of history, after thirty-five years of calm consideration, must be that patriotism predominated, not unalloyed, (when is it?) by party ; but on the whole that country triumphed over party in Congress. Of contemplated but unexecuted move- ments of that session, may be mentioned a proposal by Israel Pickens, a respectable North Carolina member, afterwards Go- vernor of Alabama, to amend the Con- stitution for the election of presidential electors and members of Congress in sin- gle districts, which he afterwards abandon- ed- as to the latter, and which was rejected as to the former by a mixed vote of 64 ayes to 83 nays. John G. Jackson, afterwards District Judge of Virginia, proposed an amendment of the Constitution, never urged to action on it, to empower Congress to tax exports, make roads and canals and establish a nationaUbank. Elijius Fromentin in Sen- ate, and Thomas Boiling Robertson in the House, moved to regulate the right of expatri- ation as well as naturalization, which, by act of the 30th July, 1813, at the prior session,, was extended to residents in the United States on the day of the declaration of war, who had before declared their intention to become citizens, or those entitled to become such, without having so declared, though alien enemies according to prior laws. Mr. Fromentin connected his motion on this subject with a plan for ascertaining many statistical details. Cyrus King made an unsuccessful attempt to have' the House committee of elections chosen by ballot, as it is in the House of Commons, in- stead of appointment by the Speaker. Mr. Murfree got a bill passed by the House, but too late for its passage by Senate, for a sur- vey of the coasts of the" United States ; and there were several movements by various members for territorial improvements by land and water. An act revived the con- sent of Congress to laws of the states of Maryland and Georgia for tonnage duties, to improve their ports, excepting steam vessels. It was opposed by two Con- necticut members, John Davenport and Benjamin Tallmadge, and by John Reed and Cyrus King, of Massachusetts, and advo- cated by Maryland and Georgia members ; passed without alteration in committee, Joseph Lewis in the chair, and finally by a vote by division without ayes and nays of 56 to 44, ordered to be read a third time next day ; certainly without anticipation of the argument since drawn by President Polk from these acts of Congress against the constitutional power to improve rivers, har- bor and lakes. I reported a bill for requir- ing certain post office appointments,till,then within the exclusive control of the postmas- ter-general, to be submitted to the Senate for confirmation, and a bill for a new organ- ization of the federal judiciary, neither of which became laws that session ; though the former has since, the latter in some way is generally conceded to be indispensable. I also reported from the judiciary committee a bill which passed the House, originally proposed by John M. Taylor, but lost in Senate, requiring the Attorney-General of the United States to reside in Washington, which was believed to have occasioned Wil- liam Pinkney's resignation of that place and Richard Rush's appointment to it. A Yazoo bill, much contested, became a law under the chairmanship of Mr. Oakley, who report- ed from a select committee of which I was a member ; and a bill was reported by James risk from another select committee, of which also I was a member, for giving the federal courts entire control of revenue suits, which, in parts of New England, became vexatious hindrances by litigation in state courts of the war operations, particularly those to prevent smuggling and intercourse with the enemy. A bill recommended by the Presi- dent to prevent the delivery of prize goods 74' MASON'S AND GORE'S RESOLUTIONS. [1814. on bonds by the courts, which passed the House, was rejected by the Senate; and an interdict of the exportation of specie, which the President also recommended, was nega- tived in the House of Representatives. Congress authorized the Secretary of State to cause the printing and distribution of a work comprising a thousand volumes, called Duane and Bicren's edition of the Laws of the United States. To the eighteen -stand- ing committees of the House of Representa- tives then ten or more have since been added, of which those on public subjects are, on In- dian affairs, territories, pensions, patents, mileage, roads and canals, and agriculture. The States of Indiana represented by Jona- than Jennings as delegate, Missouri by Ed- ward Hempstead, Illinois by Shadrach Bond, and Mississippi by WiUiam Latti- more, were then under territorial govern- ment, the embryo of that vast West which now binds the Union together. When Mr. Gallatin left the treasury in May, 1813, the expectation was that he should resume it in six months. Nine months having elapsed without his return to its crying wants, on the 24th January, 1814, Jeremiah Mason moved in Senate a series of resolutions that, by the President's message of the 7th June, 1813, he had in- formed the Senate that he had commission- ed Albert Gallatin to proceed to Russia, and negotiate treaties of peace with England and commerce with Russia : that by his de- parture, the treasury became and remains vacant, and that such vacancy affects public credit, retards current service, endangers general welfare, and ought not to exist. The question was made the order of the day for the 7th February following. On the 8th February, 1814, George W. Campbell was nominated Secretary of the Treasury and Albert Gallatin Minister to Gottenburg. Not satisfied with that partial triumph over the President, Mr. Mason, on the 14th Febru- ary, 1814, moved to repeal or amend the acts of 1792 and 1795, making alterations in the treasury and war departments, and to inquire when the President may, without consent of the Senate, appoint persons to perform the duties of secretary of any of the four executive .departments ; but never called up the resolutions for consideration. Not content with that movement, on the 28th February, 1814, Christopher Gore moved that the President may fill vacancies happening during the recess of Senate by commissions, to expire at the end of their next session, but that no such vacancy can happen in an office not before full ; that the office of minister to negotiate peace with England, during the late recess, as stated in his message of the 29th May, was not constitutional, as the vacancy did not happen in the recess and the Senate had not con- sented to the nomination ; wherefore they protested against the commissions of Mr. Gallatin, 'Mr. Adams and Mr. Bayard. Mr. Gore proposed that a committee should pre- sent his resolution to the President. 'That resolution, moved with closed doors, involv- ing a cardinal denial by certain Senators of the President's constitutional .power of ap- pointment to office, on James Turner's mo- tion was ordered to be considered in public. On the 25th March, 1814, Mr. Gore moved for copies of several commissions granted by President Washington, which prior to the debate the President sent, showing that they were not in terms limited to the end of the next session of Congress ensuing the appointment. On the 31st March, 1814, the debate began, was continued the 2d April, when Wm. Bibb by resolution called on the President for more sijnilar commis- sions, and the debate was renewed on the fifth of that month : but on the twelfth, on General Smith's motion, postponed till the following December, which was equi- valent to indefinitely. Outerbridge Hor- sey, of Delaware, a federalist, answered Mr. Gore's argument with complete demon- stration that the President is authorized, when the Senate is not in session, to appoint without their confirmation to places not be- fore occupied by incumbents, there being many occasions, especially in war, when such appointments are indispensable, and such have accordingly been made by every President. The Senate, much the least responsible, is the most encroaching of our'public bodies. In the latter end of February, 1814, Re- turn Jonathan Meigs, Governor of Ohioi^ being nominated by the President to su- persede Gideon Granger removed from the place of Post-master General, it was some time before Governor Meigs' nomination was confirmed, as was rumored, because certain Senators denied the President's power of removal moje than appointment, without the consent of the Senate, which position, if assumed, was not, however, per- sisted in. Chap. III.] EXPEDITION TO MICHILIMACINAC. IS CHAPTEK Iir. EXPEDITION TO MICHILIMACINAC. Bv Perry's and Harrison's victories in the autumn of 1813, the British lost Lake Erie, and most of the peninsula of Michigan. Lakes St. Clair, Huron, and Superior, to- gether with the whole north-west, the nu- merous Indian tribes inhabiting their bor- ders, and -the valuable fur trade, still de- pended on Michilimaciuac, the key of that vast region of pellucid waters and immense prairies' or meadows, the American steppes. Those magnificent demesnes of savage ve- nery and recreation, abounded with grouse innumerable, herds of deer, and other game, much finer than any noble or royal park in the world, which they surpassed as much in picturesque scenery as m game. That- fortress. Surprised and taken fi'om us as soon as war began, was the main British reliance for supplies to their Indian allies, trading and warlike intercourse with them, and combination between Eastern and Western Canada, on which depended the preservation and contrpl of the vast wilds extending from the St. Lawrence beyond the Rocky Mountains to the almost unknown and fabulous shore of the Pacific ocean. To replenish Michilimaoinac, strengthen St. Josephs, supply all the British posts, and confirm British authority, throughout the borders of the northern lakes, from Lake Simcoe to the Lake of the "Woods, an enter- prising officer. Colonel McDouall, as soon as navigation opened in the spring of 1814, conducted detachments of troops to Michil- imaoinac, and beyond it. Some of them were marched by land all the way from Halifax, so enterprising and provident was British preparation against American at- tack of Canada. McDouall proceeded through Lake Simcoe into Lake Huron, by the River Natewasaga and Gloucester Bay, in open birch canoes, laden with stores, ammunition and supplies, braving the tem- pestuous weather of those northern regions, and safely deposited his freight at Michili- maciuac the 18th of May, 1814; replenish- ing that important station with fresh troops, munitions, provisions, and whatever else was necessary for the garrison which he remained there to command. Colonel Mc- Douall dispatched Colonel McKay, of the Indian department, with six hundred Ca-. nadian and Indian troops, who, on the 17th July, 1814, surrounded Prairie du Chien, on the Mississippi, and planted their bat- tery of one solitary, cannon against that American station. After short parley, and no resistance, the American garrison of seventy men and three officers, surrendered a post of the utmost importance to British trade and arms, efiectually securing their influence over the Indian tribes, traffic, and supplies in that region. Our government, likewise, in the spring of 1814, planned an expedition to the north- west, the objects of which were to recapture Michilimaoinac, destroy St. Josephs, and a fort which it was- erroneously believed the enemy were building at Machedash, on Gloucester Bay, in the north-east corner of Lake Huron; capture a large quantity of furs and peltries, which it was also, erro- neously, believed at Washington, were on their way from north-western to north-east^ ern Canada, and break down English power as effectually in the far west as Harrison had done in the north-west, and Jackson in the south-west. On the 15th of April, 1814, therefore. Captain Sinclair was appointed to the command of the Upper Lakes, sepa- rated from McDonough's command of Lake Champlain, and Chaunoey's of Lake On- tario. Sinclair was to convey Major Holmes with a land force to destroy the British boats supposed to. be building on Lake Huron, their establishment at St. Josephs,' the new fort said to be building at Mache- dash, and capture the peltries. Some diffi- culties and correspondence ensued as to~thel command of the expedition, which the senior officer at Detroit, Lieutenant-Colonel Croghan, in the absence of Colonel Butler, insisted the Secretary of War had no right to confer by a letter direct to Major Holmes without passing through the hands of his superior officer. A similar difficulty, about the same time, on the 11th of May, 1814, caused General Harrison's retirement from the army. Throughout the war it suffered much more from insubordination of com- manding officers than disobedience or in- discipline of the rank and file. Procrasti- nated by these causes, the expedition was not embarked at Detroit till the 3d of July, 1814, under the command of Lieutenant- Colonel Croghan, with Major Holmes td serve under him : Croghan, to the last, pro- testing that his force was too small, and that Michilimaoinac, if taken, was not an object worthy of the expedition. Five hun- dred regular troops, and two hundred and fifty militia, embarked in Sinclair's squad- ron ; and on the 12th of July, at Fort Gratiot, were reinforced by Colonel Cotgrove's regi- ts CROGHAN REPULSED. ment of Ohio militia. The naval ofiScers, accustomed to sea room', and unused to the novel, if not difficult, navigation of the lakes, moved so slovfly thi'ough St. Clair and Lake Huron, that Indians, in their birch canoes, or by land, had plenty of time to go forvrard and advise McI)ouall of the approach of an American foite to attack him. Another reason for the extremely slow navigation was, that the commanders expected to discover, or hear of large quan- tities of peltries which they might capture. Except the annual single schooner, or gloop, with supplies, which, pursuant to treaty arrangement between the United States and Great Britain, traversed those waters, their navigation, theretofore, had been confined to birch bark canoes. The large brigs of war Lavrrence and Niagara, with the smaller vessels composing the American squadron, were the first of such a size ever seen there. More than one thou- sand miles from the high seas, and upon deep waters several thousand feet above the level of the ocean, a fleet of vessels of war, with all the power and parade of arma- ment, traversed those vast inland waters. Comniodore Sinclair deemed Lake St. Clair extremely difficult and dangerous, and Lake Huron still more perplexing. Iron-bound coasts were lined by perpendicular rocks. There were no harbors but in the mouths of the rivers entering into the lakes, and no pilotage but for one main channel from De- troit to Michilimacinac ; the water trans- parent enough to steer by, but the fogs as prevalent, thick and impenetrable as on the Banks of Newfoundland. The depth of water was so variable, that from no sound- ings all at once to two or three fathoms was a common occurrence and constant disquiet. The remains of thousands of large islands become mere peaks, just rising above the surface of the water, contributed to render the navigation, as the seamen considered it, extremely perilous. Dousman and Da,ven- port, two inhabitants of English Canada, who, before the war, had become Americans, accompanied the expedition to affiard their information and advice, not only as re- spected the lakes, but the whole course of operation. John Jacob Aster's agent, Mr. Ramsay Crooks, was also of the expedition, to point out the property of his principal, who was the head of the South-west Fur Company, and distinguish it from that of the North-west Fur Company, which was an English Association, large quantities of whose furs it was hoped to make prize of. From their connection with the Indians, annual supplies to, and constant influence over whom, it was deemed an important ob- ject to cripple their resources, and, if pos- sible, break up their establishment. On the 20th of July, th6 squadron found St. Josephs evacuated and destroyed ; Major Holmes was detached with two vessels [1814. under Lieutenant Turner of the navy, to destroy an English factory on St. Mary's Straits, which unite Lake Huron and Superior: denounced by' Colonel McDouall as pillage and robbery, for which he threat- ened retaliation on the American villages of Ogdensburg and Hamilton on the St. Lawrence. Major Holmes, a well informed young gentleman, justified his proceedings as authorized by the laws of legitimate warfare, and Sinclair reminded McDouall of the excesses committed by the British on both our Indian and maritime frontiers. As is common in controversies between Americans and English, by public written correspondence, the loftier English insist- auce triumphed. Commodore Sinclair and Colonel Croghan consented to pay the- extortion of fifty cents a pound for some- sick cattle, the same day that Colonel Dick- son, at the head of his Indian warriors, as was said and generally credited, after Cro- ghan's repulse, tortured the American pri- soners, and mangled their dead. ■> When the squadron at length arrived at Michilimacinac, they, found the British passing boats full of men from that place to Round Island, a small island not far oflT,. which they thus prevented Croghan's taking possession of. Colonel Croghan instantly proposed to attack Michilimacinac, strip- ped of its defenders. But Sinclair would not venture to expose his vessels to the lofty batteries which towered a hundred feet above their decks, an elevation from which they could fire point blank on the vessels, without their being able, as was apprehended, to return a single shot. To that omission instantly to attack Michili- macinac, some of the land officers ascribed the failure of the enterprise. On the 4th of August, 1814, the troops were well landed on a fine open beach without molestr ation or difficulty, and forthwith marched to attack the British, fortified beyond a dense wood. Major Holmes was in the advance on the right, gallantly leading — a promising officer befriended by Jefferson. Captain Vanhorn led the left. Our artUlery was commanded by Mr. Picket, who has since represented the United States at one of the South American Republics. Colonel Croghan was at his post in the rear full of ardor, and soldierly bearing. But there was in fact no battle, though the Americans were repulsed after losing some dozen officers and men killed, and about forty wounded. A thick wood of dwarf trees, with long low projecting limbs, interrupted- the advance of our troops, crowded them- together and confused their march. The same thick woods were a perfect cover to the Indian skirmishers, couc.ealed among the trees, in the cowardly ambush- from, which they delight to kill and dread to leave for the exposure of an open field. A. little Indian boy, not more than ten years. t)HAP. III.] of age, from within ten feet of Major Holmes, pierced his breast with two balls, which struck him dead. Captain Yanhorn was liiilled at the same moment leading the left, and Captain Desha, standing near Major Holmes, so severely wounded in the groin as to disable him, though he refused to leave the ground. He was, I believe, the brother of General Desha, one of the Kentucky members of the House of Kepre- sentatives in 1814, and afterwards repre- sented a District in Congress from another State. Discouraged by the death of their leaders in the advance. Holmes and Van- horn, and the inability, from his wound, of Desha, and the men being all crowded toge- ther by the low branches of thick woods seemingly filled with sharp shooters, invisi- ble, whose destructive fire our men could not return, the regulars fell into confusion. Col. Croghan led on Cotgrove's militia regiment, who bravely moved up to the rescue of the regular troops. But the Colonel considered it too hazardous under such circumstances to persevere. The onset failed, the men weae discouraged and discontented ; it was risk- ing too much to march through woods, in themselves a serious obstacle, from behind every tree of which a rifle was supposed to be . leveled in the dark, and after getting "through the woods, then to attack the en- trenched British, about nine hundred strong, which was the total of the American force. Colonel Croghan, therefore, ordered a re- treat, which the enemy suffered without in- terruption, leaving the American dead and wounded on the ground. It was said, that they were subjected to the usual cannibal barbarities of the Indian triumph, the dead "mutilated, the wounded murdered, the hearts of some of them cut out and de- voured. But Captain Gratiot, who next day went with a flag of truce for the bodies, does not confirm this imputation. On the contrary, he was treated by Colonel Mc- Douall with great attention and kindness, and proffered whatever comforts the Eng- lish stores afforded. Holmes' body was found, as left the day before, covered with leaves by Colonel Croghan's black servant. With that unfortunate skirmish the ex- pedition ended, the troops re-embarked, and soon after the squadron set sail on the re- turn to Detroit. But misfortune marked every stage by water as well as by land of an unlucky entex'prise, to which even the ele- ments were adverse. A violent storm over- took the squadron sailing down the perilous waters of Lake Huron, which destroyed all their boats, save one that was picked up by their vigilant and indefatigable enemies, the plank of their rescue and of our almost miraculous and complete discomfiture. — Perry's consecrated ship, the Niagara, with four hundred regular troops on board, was saved from destruction on that iron- bound coast of perpendicular rocks by a STORES AT NATEWASAGA. 77 mere sudden change of wind. Such was the jeopardy, that total loss seemed inevita- ble of nearly all the adventurers of the ill- fated expedition, when a mere flaw of wind enabled them to save themselves. On the I3th September, a detachment under Captain Gratiot landed near the mouth of the Natewasaga river, and suc- ceeded in destroying six months' supplies of, provisions deposited there for trans- portation to Michilimacinac. Entirely de- pendent on those supplies, that place was thus believed to be at length reduced, at any rate rendered useless by this destruc- tion, provided the garrison were deprived of the means of repairing their destitution. For this purpose, Lieutenant Daniel Turner was left by Commodore Sinclair with two of the schooners of Perry's squadron, the Tigress and Scorpion, distinguished both, and one under Lieutenant Turner's cojn- mand, at the battle of Lake Brie. His per- emptory orders were, that, as it was all important to cut the enemy's line of con>- munication from Michilimacinac to York, through the Natewasaga river. Lake Sin- clair, &c., and on which his very existence depended, therefore Lieutenant Turner was to remain in the mouth of that river with his schooners, and keep up a rigid blockade until driven from the Lake by the incle- mency of the season, suffering not a boat or canoe to pass in or out of the river. Lest the enemyjs desperation should induce him to attempt boarding Turner's schoon- ers by surprise in the night, as the block- ade must starve Michilimacinac to sur- render in the spring. Commodore Sin- clair particularly warned Lieutenant Turn- er against such attempts. But disasters marked every stage of the expedition, and the blockade, like the battle, the weather,and the navigation, combined to doom Ameri- can disparagement and decree English tri- umph. Lieutenant Worsley, of the English navy, in- charge of the stodres destroyed by Captain Gratiot, escaped into the woods, and in spite of whatever blockade Lieute- nant Turner now maintained of the Nate- wasaga, on which all depended, the Eng- lish lieutenant, more adroit, enterprising, or fortunate, effected his passage in an open boat to Michilimacinac. That boat, sup- posedto be one of those belonging to the American ships lost in the storm a few days before, picked up by some wandering In- dians, was placed at Lieutenant Worsley'a service ; by which mere casualty, furnished with intelligence of his irreparable loss and the desperation of his condition,. Colonel McDouall went to work vrith commensur- ate ardor to repair the disaster. The boat was employed stealthily by day an,d night to dog the American aquadron as it slowly and dangerously made its way Aowa the lake. Meantime, four batteaux were fitted and equipped at Michilimacinac, 78 CAPTURE OF THE TIGRESS AND SCORPION. manned by seventy of the best Lake water- men and rangers, with a detachment of In- dians, commanded by the notorious Colonel Dickson, who acted as the marines of the squadron. On the first of September, Lieutenant Worsley embarked on one of the most adventurous and successful cruises of the British marine during that era of its iirst eclipse. The Lake was foggy, the nights dark, and even by day the naviga- tion difficult. If the schooners discovered the batteaux before they descried the schooners, the latter might overhaul, and with their artillery, sink their enemies without a contest. The blockade bein^ raised, the schooners had separated, and the Tigress cruised among the numerous islands which diversify those waters. On a cloudy and dismal night, the 3d of Sep- tember, Lieutenant Worsley, having warily reconnoitered and ascertained the situation .of the Tigress, with the utmost silence, dexterity, and celerity, approached by means of his oars, without being detected, as the Tigress lay at anchor off St. Josephs, and with a tiger's bound his watermen and Indians leaped on board. Sailing-master Champlain, the American commander, though completely surprised, made the best .resistance in his power under such circum- stances against greatly superior numbers, and did not surrender till several of his men were killed or wounded, himself se- verely. Having thus carried one of the .vessels. Lieutenant Worsley instantly re- solved with that one to engage and take the other. The Scorpion, Lieutenant Turner's vessel, had a long twelve-pounder more than the Tigress, which vessel mount- ed but one small gun, and nothing would have been easier, but for the tide of ill luck, than for the Scorpion to subdue the Tigress. On the evening of the 5th of September, flushed with success and deserving it. Lieutenant Worsley, with a light wind, anchored the Tigress not far from the Scor- pion. He had taken the signals, and no [1814. signal was passed. The men for the ves- sels were picked by Commodore Sinclair from his squadron, twenty-five men added to the original crews of the schooners, and Colonel Croghan furnished some of his best soldiers as marines. Still the British much outnumbered the Americans, though that by no means detracts from the gallantry of the English e.xploit. Although the Scor- pion was provided with boarding netting, and, in all respects, prepared by Commo- dore Sinclair for the apprehended endea- vors of the enemy to prevent so great a hindrance as the blockade, yet the Tigress, after passing the whole night not far from the Scorpion at anchor, next morning weighed anchor, set all sail, swept down on the Scorpion, fired into, boarded and captured her almost before it was reported to Lieutenant Turner, who was below, that an enemy was thus suddenly upon him. Not an American officer was on deck at the moment ; the capture of the Scorpion was as easy and quick as it was creditable to JInglish enterprise. Throughout the war no action of the British navy was more conformable with its well-earned glory than that little enterprise on Lake Huron, which was much extolled, and, indeed, exagge- rated by Canadian accounts, but not more extolled than it merited. Colonel McDou- all's whole campaign, by land and water, was a series of highly creditable success ; while that of the combined American forces was at least unlucky. Two of Perry's ves- sels were lost under mortifying circum- stances. The young hero of Sandusky, to whom we were beholden for the first west- ern victory, was unfortunate at Michili- macinac. The navy, till then, notwith- standing the ill-fat«d Chesapeake, every- where superior to that of Great Britain, did not maintain its shining reputation. Those distant operations, far beyond the outskirts of civilization, however, made less sensation, and were less noticed than our Atlantic occurrences, especially in Europe. CHAPTER TV. CANADIAN PARLIAMENT — WITH INDIANS— ENGLISH SMALL WARFARE — SHE PAUG— AMERICAN PLANS BOR— WILKINSON'S TO P BRITI.'^H ATTACK OTSEGO- —WILKINSON'S REPULSE CAPTURE OF FORT ERIE- EXECUTIONS— INDIAN COUNCIL — AMERICAN TREATY INDIAN PENSIONS— AMERICAN TROOPS— WAR SPIRIT— RWOOD'S INCURSION — HOLMES' EXPEDITION — PETTI- OK CAMPAIGN— BROWN-S MARCH TO SACKETT'S HAR- LATTSBURG— PRING'S ATTACK ON LAKE CHAMPLAIN— -BRITISH SURPRISED AND CAPTURED AT SANDY CREEK AT LA COLE MILL— BROWN'S CANADIAN CAMPAIGN— -BATTLES OF CHIPPEWA AND BRIDGEWATER. The Canadian Parliament assembled at Quebec, the 13th January, 1814, much less united or tractable than Congress, but more liberal in grants of men and money for the war. The colonial conflict of races, insti- tutions and languages, — French, English and Americans, in the population and go- vernment, striving between a House of Representatives, indigenous, elective and free, and a Senate, European, executive and Chap: IV.] INDIAN TREATIES. 79 irresponsible, with a viceroy over all, did not, amid the contests of the session, pre- vent vigorous and salutary legislation. Xhe Canadian military establishment was much more respectable than that of the United States. Six battalions of embodied militia, nearly four thousand strong, other militia and provincial corps,, frontier light infant- ry, voltigeurs, and lake sailors, at least as good as the common British seamen, constituted altogether, with their Indian ^allies, a considerable force, better disci- plined and more obedient than ours. With the large number of veteran troops trans- ferred that summer fi-om Europe to Ame- rica, after the conquest of France, England had militai-y means for the defence of Canada superior to ours for its conquest. English tenure of French Canadian colonies, always precarious, was never more so than when the American Republic was vainly endeavoring, by arms, to force its laws where its free principles and population abound. That large reinforcements of vete- ran troops from Europe were timely suc- cors, was shown by the trials, in May, of no less than fifteen of the inhabitants of Upper Canada for high treason, by a special court at Anoaster, under Lieutenanl/General Drummond's administration of the Upper Province, of whom eight were executed by hanging, at Burlington, the 12th July, 1814, just between Brown's two victories, the 5th and 25th of that month. In the midst -of these cruelties, and notwithstand- ing Brown's triumph, the Cananian popu- lation was not only kept in submission, but its representatives in the local parliament voted ample means, which their servants in arms applied with vigor and success to de- feat much desired liberation from colonial thraldom. On .the 13th March, 1814, an embassy of chiefs and warriors from the Ottawas, Ohippewas, Shawnees, . Delawares, Mo- hawks, Sacs, Foxes, Kickapoos and Winne- bagoes, northern Indians, visited Quebec, and held an imposing council with the Governor-General, Sir George Prevost, in the Castle of St. Louis. At that talk the savages urged their right by English co- operation to recovery of the lands taken from them by the Americans, and they re- quired their old boundaries. The Prince Regent's viceroy assured those vagrant andlords of the wilderness, that their fa- ther, the King of Great Britain, considered them all his children, and would not forget them whenever peace was made with the United States, against whom he expected the Indians to persevere in hostilities. His excellency condoled with them on the death of General Teoumseh, to whose blanketed brown sister Lady Prevost, representing the fair sex of Great Britain, presented mourn- ing dresses and ornaments. Colonel Dick- son was sent from Quebec to the north-west, loaded with presents for the Indians beyond Lakes Michigan and Huron, who were ca- ressed and courted by all the means of English conciliation. Next month Louis the Eighteenth, with his family, attended a chapter of Knights of the Garter, at Carlton House, the palace of the Prince Regent, in London, where, surrounded by peers, prelates, judges and ladies,- that order of knighthood was con- ferred on the King of France, who, in re- turn, conferred the order of the Holy Ghost on the regent's brother, the Duke of York. Swords, ribbons, personal ornaments and Ian ds were the rewards by which princes and savage warriors were alike encouraged to expose life in battle ; the Indian and royal ceremonials not very different on the two continents, at London and Quebec ; and the philosophy of the whole much the same. Indian hostilities always among the mo&t terrible of British warfare against America, after that congress of the allied powers, In- dian and English at Quebec, were provided against on our part by a commission, con- sisting of General Harrison, Governor Shel- by, and Color\el Johnson, appointed by the President, in June, 1814, to treat with the north-western Indians, at Greenville. Shel- by and Johnson declining to serve. Generals Cass and Adair were'substituted ; but Gen. Adair did not attend. From the 20th of June till July, 1814, Generals Harrison and Cass received the tribes to. the number of one thousand warriors, with three thousand followers, most of whom had been employed with the English in the war against the United States ; who engaged to take up the tomahawk against their old allies. But most of the Pottowatamies, Winnebagoes, and Chippewas persisted in their English alliance offensive and defensive. By the treaty of the same name, negotiated at the same place in 1795, these Indians had stipulated to remain at peace and neutral in the event of war with England. They desired neutrality in 1814, which was re- fused, because they.had, in violation of the treaty of 1795, taken up arms against us. From that time during the rest of the con- flict, the Indians ceased to be formidable ; their power, numbers, spirit and character reduced and degraded by American resist- ance to English subornation. At Ghent a .faint effort was made for their protection, but forthwith rejected on our part and aban- doned forever. Harrison in the north west, in 1813, and Jackson in the south, in 1813, '14, broke up the Indian confederates of England, and deprived her forever of that Canadian reli- ance, of whose atrocious coalition a Lon- don journal boasted that, " with patriotism that would do honor to men that pretend to be more enlightened, they joined the tomahawk and scalping knife to the bayo- net and sword, and swelled the British" 80 HOLMES' EXPEDITION. shout of victory with the yell of the Indian war whoop." There was reason to hope that the Canadian government, before Har- rison's and Jackson's exterminating reac- tion, had become sensible of the inhumanity of Indian warfare.. On the 20th of July, 1813, a board of ofScers, convened by the Governor-General of Canada at the head quarters, St. David's, presided by General Vincent, took into consideration the claims of the Indian warriors to head money for prisoners of war, and made provision for those disabled in service ; the rates of pen- sions were fixed for the wounded and wi- dows of the slain, together with prize money for the capture of Detroit ; in order to soften, said the order published by Ad- jutant-General Baynes, which was confirmed by the English Government, and restrain the Indian warriors in their conduct to- wards such Americans as should be made their prisoners of war. Our American militia were beginning to be^shamed of constitutional scruples, the volunteers to learn that subordination and patience arc military virtues as essential as courage and hardihood, while the spirit of the ofEcers of the regular army was bravely buoyant and enterprising ; undis- mayed by two years of discouragements, eager for further trials, and resolved to re- deem the national character. Instead of being disheartened by continual reverses indicating incurable national inferiority, as their proud enemies boasted, the American inheritance of English fortitude, added to the more alert and intelligent courage of the natives of this country, from repeated discomfiture, roused it to more strenuous and successful effort. The war too had be- come defensive, although we continued to g reclaim and prepare for the invasion of anada. Subduing the fleets and vanquish- ing the armies on its lakes and shores were defensive rather than offensive operations. Great Britain, by large fleets and fqrces, assailed the United States at all points, in New England, New York, Maryland, Vir- ginia, and all the southern states ; every- where European troops were the assailants. and instructors of ours, trampling upon useless disafi'eotion, corroborating patriotic union and exertion, rousing national enthu- siasm, discountenancing the party divisions which had been our fetters and her strength. The cycle of British success was completed, and ours began when her horizon was fair- est, but all the depths of sentiment, if not power, were ours. Several smaller expeditions and encoun- ters preceded the Canadian campaign, which began in July, 1814. On the night of the 6th of February, 1814, Captain Sherwood, of the British quartermaster-general's department, with Captain Kerr, and a few marines and mili- tia, crossed the river St. Lawrence, from [1814. Cornwall, in Upper Canada, to Madrid, about fourteen miles from Hamilton, both towns on that river, and captured a quan- tity of goods taken from Canada the preced- ing October. The British, also,, surprised at night and captured Lieutenant Lowell with thirty of our men, stationed on the Thames river, below the Moravian town. Captain Lea, of the Michigan Mounted Ean- gers, made prisoners of Colonel Baby, Ma- jor Towley, and Captain Springer, of the Canadian militia, with some others. Tow- ley and Springer were born in the United States, and becoming British Canadian sub- jects, were among the most efficient and vindictive of the partisans against us. Frontier incursions and barbarities, blended with treasonable intercourse and supplies, were disgusting incidents of neighborhood between bordering people of the same fami- ly, who fought and fed each other with similar, yet various fortune, avarice, and ferocity; the Canadians, whether of British, French, or American pedigree, less disloyal or covetous, but more sanguinary than their American enemies. Colonel A. Butler, of the Second Kifle Regiment, commanding at Detroit, on the 21st of February, 1814, resolved on a stroke at some of the enemies' posts in that quar- ter, despatched Captain A. H. Holmes, of the 24th Infantry, with small detachments from the 26th, 27th, and 28th regiments, to attack Fort Talbot, about one hundred miles down Lake Erie, below Maiden, or Delaware, as he might choose. Fallen tim- ber, bad roads, winter weather, and other impediments, compelled Captain Holmes to leave the two pieces of artillery he took with him and depend on his musketry alone. Captain Gee, with bis company of Rangers, and Captain Lee with a troop of Michigan cavalry, joined Holmes' detach- ment, which soon got within striking dis- tance of a superior British force, a light company of the Royal Scots, another of the 89th regiment, Caldwell's Indians, and McGregor's Canadian Rangers, not less than . three hundred good troops, fresh from their barracks, well found in all respe'cts, high.' spirited, and commanded by Captain Bars- den of the 89th regiment. Holmes' men had suffered so much from fatigue and exposure, that s'everal had been sent home, and of the rest, altogether about one hundred and sixty, 4 many strongly opposed fighting a force so. sunerior to their own. But Holmes and his adjutant, Heiird, a grandson of- the famous rifleman, General Morgan, could not brook retreat without combat, and resolved on vic- tory or death, which much oftener leads to victory than death. Aftorsome time spent in marches, countermarches and manoeuvres that would not have been discreditable to celebrated commanders, the mutually well resolved leaders of miniature armies met on the 4th March, 1814, at a place called Long- Chap. IV.] OSWEGO ATTACKED. 81 wood, where the British, after vainly trying to draw the Americana into disadyantageous action, ■were induced to attack them, en- trenched and prepared for tlieir superior assailants. After repeated onslaughts at close quarters, bravely made and repelled, the British were defeated, with the loss of between eighty and ninety men, nearly one- third of the whole, including Captain .John- stone and Lieutenant GrEeme, killed, while the American loss was but six or seven, and they captured one hundred cattle. For this harl linger of our victories that year. Captain Holmes was forthwith made a ma- jor. It was his further good fortune that his victory was confessed in British gene- ral orders, published at Quebec the 18th March, 18l4; acknowledgment so unfre- quent among all combatants, that even in- dividuals, much less armies, seldom concede their own discomfiture. The attempts to conquer Canada proved such total, disgraceful, and inexplicable failures, that while the army was more ex- cited than discouraged, the Executive was discontented and shrinking like a burnt child that dreads the fire. Generals Arm- strong and Wilkinson bitterly upbraided each other, the country blamed both, the President trusted neither, while schemes for a third Canadian campaign were suggested, questioned, pondered, and rejected. Wil- kinson's army was somewhat comfortably cantoned at French Mills, where he erected extensive and expensive quarters, fortified, and left them to visit Albany, and plan winter expeditions with Governor Tomp- kins. The General's scheme, in which he said the (JiiTernor concurred, was to surprise Prescott, where ho said the enemy had but a few hundred men, ill fortified or prepared for attack, and thus sever Upper and Lower Canada asunder. The Secretary's plan that year, as the year before, was to attack the enemy at Kingston, the head-quarters of his naval, and an important station of his mili- tary, strength and operations, and overpower his principal post before reinforcements could be received. The President's plan was to attack nowhere, but pause and think. The terrible catastrophe of the prior autumn, extending from St. Regis to Niaga- ra, concluding Wilkinson's and Hampton's ignominious miscarriages, brought him to a determination to stand on the defensive merely, and attempt nothing further. Ame- rican disasters, vrith formidable threats from England, and tidings from Europe, reduced our plans and posture to the merely defensive. On the 2d January, 1814, there- fore, Wilkinson was directed to detach Brown, with two thousand men, to Saoketf s Harbor, for the protection of that place, and with the rest of his army, abandoning his position on Salmon river, to fall back to Plattsburg, and rest on his arms there. The 6 Secretary deemed AVilkinson's position on Salmon river, though fortified, insecure : and the overwhelming triumphs of England in Europe, conquering peace there, threatened invasion of New York by Plattsburp;, with augmented hostile forces in Canada, transfer- red from France, as took place in September. On the 13th of February, Brown mar'.-hid accordingly for Sackott's Harljor, ami Wil- kinson afterwards, with the rest of the army, to the borders of Lake Champlain. In thn latter end of that month, Armstrong, on the inducement of confidential and credible in- formation of the exposure of Kingston, with the fleet and public stores there, to e;i?y capture, there being only twelve hundred men in garrison, without the possibility of reinforcement or supplies tiU June, again, suggested an expedition th-ere ; and on the^ 28th of February, i«14, directed Brown to undertake it ; but to mask the enterprise by appearances- of" its being intended to re- take 1 ort Niagara, towards which he was to march, in order to promote that decep- tion. But in theopinions of General Brown and Commodore Chauncejv four thousand men, the dispiosable. force, was ineiEcient, the doubtful condition of the ice unfavor- able, and the President, extremely appre- hensive of all hazardous undertakings, so unlucky in that quarter, readily rejected the scheme on these doubts, of his best of- ficer on the- spot. As our troops did not attack Kingstrm, the enemy, always more enterprising and assailant, executed an assault under Gene- ral Drummond and Commodore Yeo, from that place, on Oswego, a station where large ciuaatities of stores and provisions, ordi- nance and naval equipments were collected for additional supplies to Sackett's Harbor. Lake Ontario cleared of ice, became navi- gable about the 25th of xipril, 1814. On the 4th of May an expedition sailed from Kings- ton, consisting of infantry, artillery, rock- eteers, sappers, miners, and marines, which aiTived next day off Oswego, near the east- ern end of Lake Ontario. From the indi- cations at Kingston, General Brown acci- dentally at Sackett's Harbor anticipatin c- the attempt on Oswego, dispatched four companies of heavy and one of light artil- lery, under Lieutenant-Colonel G. S. Mit- chell, of the first artillery, who reached Os- wego the 30th of April. On the 5th of May the enemy, commanded Ijy Drummond and Yeo, attempted a landing, but were re- pulsed ; and not being favored by the wind, drew oif, for better anchorage. Next day they renewed the attempt, and succeeded, but without any important result, and with credit to the American arms. The British, not less than fifteen hundred soldiers, ma- rines, and seamen, were courageously and judiciously resisted by Mitchell, with less than four hundred soldiers and sailors, sup- ported by some of the neighboring militia, 82 BRITISH CAPTURED. [1814. who repaired on short notice to the en- counter, anxious to talie part. Jlitchell retired in good order from a dilapidated for- tiiioation, and fell back fijihting, towards the spot inland, thirteen miles up the Seneca river, at the falls, where the stores were deposited, none of which fell into the hands of the enemy, wlmsn loss in killed and wounded was ninety-four, and ours sixty. Ca])tain Holtawav, of the English marines, was killed, Cai^tains Ledgergrew, Mulcas- ter, and Popham, Lieutenants JMav and Grif- fith, of the nary, wounded, in a sharp con- flict, well contested, for which Lieutenant- Colonel Jlitohell was complimented, in general orders, hy General Brown, and bre- vetted colonel. The enemy, having dis- mantled the fort, destroyed the barracks, and buried the dead, returned on the 7th of May to Kingston, after an unprofitable ex- cursion. About the same time the English naval commander on Lake Champlain, Captain Pring, sailed from Isle aux Noix, on the 9th of May, 1814, with a detachment of marines, to capture or destroy the new American vessels just launched at A'ergennes, and to intercept the stores and supplies intended for their equipment. On the 14th of Jlay, Captain Pring appeared off the mouth of Otter Creek, a bold stream, where 3Iaodo- nough's squadron was fitted for its bril- liant exploit, soon after, near Plattsburg. The enemy had his new brig and several sloops at hand to support the eight galleys, with a bomb vessel which made the attack. Captain Thornton, of the artillery, and Lieu- tenant Cass, of the navy, commanded the American battery. Man}- shells were lodged in the parapet, but no material damage done. Colonel Davis was advantageously posted to receive the enemy if he landed. After an hour and a half's inefl^cctual bombardment the assailants drew off, and passing by Burlington, returned up the lake to the Isle aux Noix, leaving, in their pre- cipitate retreat, two fine row-boats, shot loose from their barges by the fire from our battery. On their retreat up the narrow lake the galleys were fired upon, harassed and cut up hy militia from shore. At Gil- leland'a Creek, where they landed to cap- ture the flour from some mills, many of the men of two of the galleys were killed or wounded. The enterprise more than fail- ed : it was completely defeated. The com- mander, Pring, was sent to Montreal and tried fur misconduct. The British squadron having, by out- building ours, the ascendant on Lake On- tario, threatened several American plaee.s on the lake, and kept close watch to inter- cept supplies going from C»swego for the equipment of the now American vessels launched at Sackett's Harbor ; which place it blockaded on the 28th May, 1814. Captain Wolsey, of the navy, long employed and I' experienced in lake navigation, set sail with a brigade of nineteen boats, loaded with forty-eight heavy ship cannons, cables and other articles for Sackett's Harbor. The utmost dispatch, secrecy and even de- ception (of the enemy by circulating false rumors), were necessary to the transporta- tion of this armament, indispensable to our squadron. Besides sailors. Captain Wolsey had one hundred and thirty riflemen under Major Apling, of the first rifle regiment, distributed as a guard in his batteaux, and a party of Oneida Indians, led by Lieutenant Hill, of the rifle regiment, part of the way, to accompany the boats on shore. After reconnoitering and ascertaining that the coast was clear, the boats set off at dark, and riflemen as well as sailors working hard at the oars, in a deluge of rain, they got to Big Salmon River at day-light, on the 2'.)th, — all except one boat, which, in spite of order and exertions to keep the brigade as compact as possible, fell into the hands of the watchful enemy. At that jilace the Indians joined ; and Captain "Wolsey took ^ his boats about two miles up Big Sandy ■■ Creek, there to repose briefly from laborious J and hazardous duty. The captured boat 'f, made known, however, to the British com- :'■'' modore that there were more at hand ; and ft he dispatched Captains Popham and Spils- bury of the royal navy with three gun- y.; boats, three cutters and a gig, to capture a §■■ prize," on which the naval supremacy on » Lake Ontario, that campaign, probably de- f^ pended. Captain "Wolsey prudently sent to ._., Sackett's Harbor, sixteen miles distant, for ^' reinforcements. Commodore Chauncey im- ?: mediately dispatched Captain Smith with fe one hundred and twenty marines ; and Ge- ^ neral Gaines added a squadron of cavalry under Captain Harris, and Captain Melviu with ii company of light artillery, Avho ar- 1, rived in time to protect the boats. The* British, having reconnoitered, resolved ous an immediate attack. Captains "Wolsey and ';, Harris deemed it best not to display theirS force, lest it should deter the enemy's at-j. tempt. The riflemen were therefore ju-ff diciijusly posted in ambush half-a-mile be-st low the boats. The artillery, cavalry and. seamen kept out of view. The enemy went up the river, with their gunboats, cutters and gig, landed on both sides to prevent any,,- escape, and were about possessing them-'. selves of their valuable prize, when thef; riflemen rose from concealment and poured.^,- in the deadly fire which is so mueli more;; f ital than that of musketry ; sailors on shore, mi)reover, never feeling as confi-, dent as on their accustomed element. In^ ton minutes they all surrendered at discre- tion, with midshipman lloare and fourteen seamen and marines killed. Captains Pop- ham and Spilsbury, Lieutenants Cox and Kagh of the marines, with twenty-six men wotmded, and the whole party, gun-boats,. Ohap. IV.] barges and all, witli nearly two hundred men, captured, without the loss of a man on our side, and only one wounded. For this well-conducted surprise and capture, Major Apling was brevetted lieutenant-colonel. Captain Popham, in his official report of this misfortune to Commodore leo, ac- knowledged with the warmest gratitude the humane exertions of the American offi- ce.rs of the rifle corps in saving the lives of many of the English ofBioers and men devoted to slaughter, said his report, by the American soldiers and Indians. The Oneida Indians were first to seize the English when they surrendered and disposed, as, either en- couraged or permitted by English officers, at Raisin, Buffalo, Lewistown, and other places fresh in universal recollection, to massacre captives ; but they were prevented by the American officers. It was an unge- nerous as well as unjust aspersion of the British commander ungratefully, with his acknowledgment of that interposition, to couple the calumny that the soldiers were as savage as the Indians. No instance of such barbarity is imputable to men too justly- shocked at English connivance in such enormities to practice them, and too humbly solicitous of English good opinion thus to forfeit it. Wilkinson's repulse at La' Cole MiUwas the last of our Canadian disasters, and of his military service. His Hitle army, four thousand strong, in March, 1814, was con- centrated at the village of Champlain, three miles from the lake shore, and one from the dividing line between the United States and Canada, to give the enemy battle, if he would venture from his fastnesses to meet our forces, superior in numbers, in the open field, which was improbable, or to fortify Rouse's point vrith a battery that would prevent, as was certified by the engineer, the British squadron, then nearly ready for action, from entering Lake Champlain. Early in that month, Brigadier-General Macomb, with two thousand men, crossed the lake on the ice, entered St. Amand's in Canada, staid there several days without further movement or any molestation, and returned to General Wilkinson, who had then the three brigades of Generals Smith, Bissell and Macomb, all full of courage, ardor and devotion ; excellent troops as far as could be without experience, which was confined to their commander-in-chief alone. Forty years before, he had visited the same country as Captain Wilkinson, aid-de-camp to Brigadier-General Benedict Arnold, one of the most enterprising American gene- rals, as Wilkinson, then like Hull and Dear- born, was a young officer of great promise. On the 29th March, 1814, a council of war, at which General Wilkinson was not present, but whose judgment was immedi- ately made known to and approved by him, resolved to attack La Cole Mill, the wall of WILKINSON REPULSED. 83 which, it was said, could be easily breached by light cannon. One of the officers present knew the mill, had been in it, and no doubt "was entertained of taking it. But to cover the artillerists, it was deemed prudent to take along several bundles of packed hay, of which there were many stored in the vil- lage, to serve as ball-proof protection from the enemy's musketry. Thatpart of the plan made no impression on the General's mind ; perhaps he considered it useless ; on his court-martial, he denied it altogether; but the engineer officer. Major Totten, is positive that it was to have been done next day, 30th March, 1814; when the army marched without the hay, led by Colonel Clarke, and Major Forsyth, in the advance, who had a sharp skirmish on the main road, which rendered it necessary to deploy two of the brigades, and occasioned much lost time. The main road to Canada was impassable, from obstruction by felled trees. At Odle- town, the General caused one of the many persons of that name there, to be placed be- tween two dragoons, and forced to show the way to the mill, to which that road for three miles traversed the forest, by a very crooked- path, only wide enough to allow the pass- age of the small sleighs of the country. The heaviest cannon, an eighteen pounder, broke down in the miry ground, between the main road and the wood. General Wil- kinson's military secretary. Captain Mac- pherson, who volunteered to take charge of a twelve pounder, got it forward with great difficulty and labor ; the wheels continually coming in contact with trees on both sides of the road. Lieutenant Laribbee con- ducted a howitzer in like manner. But another twelve pound gun, although the party in charge of it were directed by the chief of the artillery, did not reach the front at all. And there was a second sharp en- counter in the forest-path, before the guns were allowed to be carried forward. The best place in the clearing that could be found, was selected by Captain Macpherson for the battery ; but, unfortunately so near the mUl, as to be exposed to such fire vrith- out cover, as no troops can bear. Of the twenty men and three officers at the guns, two of the officers were severely wounded, and fourteen of the men either killed or wounded. The miU was defended by Major Handcock and some two hundred men, whose firing was incessant, accurate and destructive. From a gun-boat, and also from other places, the enemy kept up, more- over, a fatal fire ; besides, several times, with the utmost gallantry, rushing forward to seize the American guns ; in which attempts, however, they were as bravely - repulsed by our troops,, whose conduct throughout the whole engagement was ex- cellent. The twelve pounder and howit- zers continued their discharges, as their officers flattered themselves, with good ef- 84 PETTIPUNG. feet; which the desperate efforts of the ene- my to seize and spike our cannon, seemed to justify. As our troops arrived, they. ■were stationed promptly and in good order, so as to prevent the escape of the garrison or succor to it ; and, also, to be ready for the assault, vrhenever the time for it should be announced. The troops stood in snow about one foot deep, and in a forest so dense, that scarcely any of them could see the mill at all, from which a desperate sor- tie of a couple of companies, had nearly reached our guns, to capture them, before they were perceived, and driven back by our troops, who were so incommoded by the trees, as to be obliged often to stoop very low, in order to fire with any effect. Laribbee had hardly joined Macpherson with his how- itzer, when a musket-ball pierced his breast, which was immediately extracted by the surgeon, from between his shoulder blades ; in a few days he had quite recovered, and is living now a respectable farmer in Con- necticut. Macpherson was soon hit by a passing ball, under the chin, which he dis- regarded, and continued with great anima- tion, to serve his piece, till struck down by a dreadful shot in the hip, from which he never recovered. He survived, indeed, se- veral years, but always a miserable cripple, kindly sent by President Madison, as Con- sul to Madeira, in a vain attempt to recover his shattered health, which continually failed, [till that able officer and amiable gentleman suffered a premature death. Under so destructive a fire as the British maintained, the artillery officers were of opinion that heavier guns would have been of no avail. To make a breach in the wall, even if much thinner than it was, it would have been necessary to plant in it many balls near to each other, whereas scarcely any of them struck the wall at all, as it was impossible to point or aim the cannon with precision under the storm of bullets and accurate "firing of the British, which no troops could stand, exposed, as ours were, to certain destruction. Night was coming on ; it was too plain nothing had or could be done, and the general drew off his disap- pointed troops in perfect order and delibe- ration, encamping them for the night near the point in Odletown where the Mill road diverges from the main road. General Wilkinson must have , been aware of the cause of his mishap, the whole matter turn- ing on a small point of detail which should have been, but unluckily was not, provided for in the first instance, and no doubt in- tended to renew the attack next day with the bundles of hay or other protection for his artillery, and nothing contingent could be more certain than the success of a re- newed attack. But that night torrents of rain fell, the snow melted, the whole forest was flooded with u, substratum of basin like ice, and the officers sent to recou- [1814. noitre reported that it was utterly imprac- ticable to march forward or renew the at- tempt on the mill. This vernal deluge was soon followed by the opening of the lake of which the enemy had command, and it was but common prudence for General Wilkinson to withdraw his army within our own borders. On his court martial at Troy, something censorious was said of not setting fire to the roof of the mill by red hot shot, and also of not covering the artil- lerists with materials to be found on the ground, but snow was the only material there, and if there had been red hot shot, they could not be lodged on the roof, because it was impossible so to point the guns as to strike or aim at it. The repulse was one of those misfortunes which, perhaps, more foresight might have prevented, but which, unexpected and mortifying as it was, was no discredit to the American arms, while it left something in dispute between the en- gineers and the commanding General, he declaring that he performed the expedition to draw off the enemy's attention from whatever might be General Brown's de- signs on Lake Ontario, and pursuant, as Wilkinson supposed, to the wish and plan of the Secretary of War, which the Secre- tary positively denied by a publication in the public prints. That unlucky renewal of Wilkinson's attempt on Canada, superadded to his inglorious discomfiture the autumn be- fore, induced him to retire from the com- mand of the army, and demand a court martial by which he was tried and acquits ted, but he never regained the confidence of the government or the country, and w.aa unavoidably left out of the army when it was reduced to ten thousand men, and two ma,jor-generals at the peace. One of the best conducted enterprises of the English marine was, safely to them, with considerable American loss, accomplished on the 8th of April, 1814, when, after midnight, a detachment of two hundred- men, from the blockading squadron, off New London, in six boats, entered Con- necticut river, landed at Saybrook, disarmed the small battery there, and re-embarking, went eight miles up the river to Pettipung, where they landed again and burned twen- ty, some of them valuable vessels. They spent the morning there, the seamen enjoy- iugthemselves playing ball, pitching quoits, and other amusements, while the officers superintended the conflagration, which was done with kind expressions to the inhabit- ants, staving in several hogsheads of rum, lest, as the commanding officer said, it might intoxicate his men, and stopping the burning of two vessels on the stocks for fear of their setting fire to the neigh- boring buildings. The country round was soon alarmed; some volunteers with arms, by noon repaired from New London Chap. IV.] CANADIAN CAMPAIGN. 85 and Killingsworiii, followed ia the after- noon by detachments from the Macedo- nian, under Captain Jones and under Cap- tain Biddle from 'the Hornet. At night, ■when the enemy stiU remained, an Ameri- can victory seemed certain. But at nine o'clock, when it was extremely dark, tak- ing advantage of a freshet in the river, the lucky invaders, without the least noise, or pulling an oar, but swiftly borne away on the top of the flood, floated out of reach ; just as they cleared, the American forces s.alutLng them with three hearty valedic- tory cheers. A couple of hundred ven- turesome mariners penetrated eight miles into a thickly settled part of the United States, spent the day there merrily, and escaped without a man hurt. What was more remarkable, and as much to their credit, they behaved as courteously and in- offensively as was possible on such an occa- sion, injuring only the property which, by the law of war, they had a right to destroy. That incursibn, though it cost American citizens one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of their property destroyed, admo- nished the people of New England to be on their guard against an enemy, like death, always at hand, and no respecter of per- sons or places. The alarm embraced Bos- ton in its preparations against such unwel- come visits. The Secretary's plan of campaign was, that while parts of the Erie fleet and the garrison at Detroit should be sent into Lake Huron and the Western Lakes, to recapture Michilimacinac, and break down the In- dian power in the northwest, other parts of that fleet were to go to the east end of the lake, and there co-operate in landing a military expedition in Canada. That ex- pedition was to. march rapidly to Burling- ton Heights, and seizing that position for- ] tify it, and there wait the co-operation of the Ontario fleet. With that, which the Se- cretary of the Navy promised by the 10th of June, and the troops at Sackett's Har- bor, Kingston, might be attacked, and eventually Montreal. By these operations forts Niagara and George would be rendered useless to the enemy, who would be shut off from all direct communication with his western posts and settlements, and disabled from reinstating his control of the Indians. The heavy expenditures on Lake Ontario v.xald be no longer necessary, and a large part of Canada taken into American pos- session before that season, mid-summer, when England could reinforce from Europe. General Armstrong flattered himself that the heart of Upper Canada might be reached from Lake Erie, where American ascend- ency was undisputed, as well as from On- tario where it was disputed. AVith naval co-operation on that Lake, which was indis- pensable,, six thousand men on the Niaga- ra, marching to Burlington, could not be resisted without so weakening the British Eastern posts as to expose them to ours at Sackett's Harbor and Plattsburg. Such was his plan : which the President at least doubted, if he did not disapprove. The romantic peninsula between those inland seas, Lakes Ontario and Erie, and the river Niagara, whose waters unite the two lakes, was the theatre in the summer of 1814 of an isolated and sanguinary cam- paign, as striking as the rugged features, of that wild region. The river running about thirty-six miles from one lake to the other, constitutes the natural boundary between rival empires of the same lineage, language, hardy and adventurous spirit, exaggerated to greater boldness in America by the vaster territories inhabited, waters navigated, and liberty enjoyed. Fort George, in the corner between Ontario Lake and the river Niag- ara on the British side, stands opposite to Fort Niagara on the American, since De- cember 1813, and throughout the war for- cibly held by the English, much to the dis- grace of America, and in spite of all that public sentiment could do to goad public force to retake it. At the other end of the peninsula the British Fort Erie stands op- posite to Buffalo, where the river Niagara flows into Lake Brie. Black Rock, Williams- burg, Manchester, are villages on the New York side ; Newark and Chippewa on the Canadian, their Queenstown right opposite to our Lewistown. Midway between the two lakes the river Chippewa, coming from among the Six Nations and other tribes of the West, empties into the river Niagara near the falls, opposite to the American town of Manchester. There the Niagara, about three-quarters of a mile wide, after tumbling over rapids for near a mile, plunges down 170 feet of the most stu- pendous cataract in the world, one of the prodigious lineaments of the North Ameri- can continent. By the treaty of inde- pendence in 1783, and that of Ghent in 1815, the line which separates the United States from Great Britain passes where never human being could trace it, or beast, or hardly water fowl venture — through the middle of the Falls of Niagara. Near the magnificent mist and eternal commotion of that prodigious waterfall, the younger peo- ple challenged the older to combat. The rival nations there met to fight, first by the brilliant sunset of western skies, then un- der the dark midnight of such scenery, and finally at noon-day, when a sanguinary sor- tie surprised and overthrew the British arms. During a campaign of seventy days almost every kind of battle tried the mettle of the combatants : in an open plain at Chippewa, by night, in conflict hand to hand at Bridge- water, by British siege repulsed, at Fort Erie, and finally American sortie there in mid-day, demolishing the British army, and PLAN OF CAMPAIGN. if Brown had been seconded as lie should have been by either Chauneey or Izard, probably giving American troops the com- plete possession of 'a large part of Ca- nada. The hazardous and improbable design of Brown and Scott, who were the life of the enterprise, was to take Fort Erie at^hat end of the Niagara, Fort George at the other end, of course the intermediate places, Chippewa, Queenstown, and Newark, and proceeding north along the shore of Lake Ontario to Burlington Heights, seize and fortify that place, the western extremity of the lake, not many miles from' York, and 'the whole extent of it from Kingston, which stands where King's River enters the lake, in the midst of islands in the frith where the lake originates the mighty St. Lawrence, with great advantages of navigation. To subdue and hold that Canadian peninsula, from Burlington to Brie, with a fleet com- manding the lake, might sever Upper from Lower Canada, control the Indians, paralyze Western Canada, and begin the invasion of the Eastern pi'ovince, Montreal, Quebec, and all that was -necessary to drive back English foothold beyond the banks of the St. Lawrence. So impracticable a scheme, with so small a force, depended on two car- dinal contingencies, either of which failing must be fatal — and both failed — viz., timely and ooTdial co-operation from the navy, and conquering the way to Burlington before British reinforcements from above could overpower Brown. The navy neither did, perhaps could or would co-operate with the army ; and British reinforcements, not only from Kingston and Montreal, iDut, from Quebec, and even from Europe, arrived be- fore it was possible for Brown to conquer halfway to Lake Ontario, where the enemy held the ascendant on the water as much as by land. But Brown, the upstart of emerg- ency, ardent, brave, athletic and sagacious, was impatient for distinction, and Arm- strong, an old soldier, who cherished soldier- ly qualifications, was disposed to gratify the enterprising borderer, for whose promotion to command he was responsible. Scott had been to Washington, communicative, plausi- ble, and persuasive, a soldier of some stand- ing, though a young man not thirty years of age, who, as Colonel of the Second Regi- ment of Artillery, as Adjutant General, and on all occasions had displayed that alacrity of courage and vanity of exploit which, like earnestness in an orator, are among the instincts of success, and command public admiration. Importunate to be allowed to lead an expedition into Canada, they at last got leave, with many executive misgivings, after long hesitation and much reluctance, to cross the Niagara, capture Fort Erie, risk a combat, march on Chippewa, menace Fort George, seize and fortify Burlington Heights, [1814. but only if assured of Chauncey's ascend- enc;^ on the lake and co-operation with the movement, who had promised to be in arms on the lake by the 1st of July. The plan seems to have been, to collect several thousand regulars and militia at Detroit, as many more on the Niagara, a brigade or more at Sackett's Harbor, and a considerable force at Plattsburg, Burling- ton, and thereabouts, on Lake Champlain, while by threatening Montreal and the enemy in that part of Canada, he should be deterred by Izard from sending any consi- derable number of troops beyond Kingston or York, Brown, with six or seven thou- sand men, should invade the Canadian pe- ninsula from Brie to Burlington, and there fortify an establishment. But his force never exceeded thirty-five hundred men, volunteers and all ; little or no reinforce- ments came from Detroit, at least not tiU after his two battles at the Falls of Ni- agara; Chauncey's fleet never co-operated with him ; and Izard withheld his assist- ance when required : so that the fate of the campaign devolved on' the insignificant en- terprise of Brown, but was by him ren- dered, therefore, more glorious, auspicious, and memorable. Without either Chauneey or Izard, Brown alone conquered and held a position in Canada, just when aU the armies of Great Britain, having subjugated' France, could be landed "in Canada, where reinforcements, not less than thirty thou- sand of the best troops in the world, were actually landed. Then it was that a little forlorn expedition invaded that province, as the frigates went to sea in 1812, govern- ment shrinking, officers confident, men wUling, and, during the whole summer and autumn, by repeated defeats kept the enemy at bay in six bloody tournaments. Our troops had been so industriously drilled and severely disciplined, tiiat battle was almost recreation to the soldiery as to the seamen, from the irksome toil of in- cessant exercise. The officers were mostly anxious to fight, as a corps of officers must be, and the men were ready to foUow wher- ever officers led. Brovfn, with Scott, pro- moted to a brigade, were intimate and cordial in their arrangements. If they had been more experienced commanders, they might have been less sanguine or venture- some. But the army and the country had reached one of those conjunctures when temerity is a virtue. Brown and Scott, if they had failed, -would probably have fol- lowed Dearborn arid Wilkinson into retire- ment: But their success, besides its own justification, the greatest captain of the age would have pronounced legitimate warfare. Reviewing the campaigns of Frederick, Na- poleon testified that councils-of-war, and displays of discussion, end, on all occasions, by adopting the worst plan ; that, almost BROWN CROSSES THE NIAGARA. Chap. IV.] always prudence is pusillanimous, and true military wisdom consists in energetic de- termination. Upon the impulse of these principles, on the eve of the anniversary of that national independence which began in much more peril and doubt, the 3d July, 1814, in the darkness of night, with imperfect means of crossing the Niagara, no stores or supplies 'prepared where he was going. Brown led Scott's and Ripley's brigades of regulars and Porter's of volunteers, with Major Hindman's battalion of artillery with their guns, and Captain Harris' troop of horse, into Canada, and landed without opposi- tion; Scott in the night; Ripley, not till the next morning, less intimate with his leader, and less confident in the undertaking, embarking with reluctance. Three thousand five hundred men invad- ing a hostile country, armed at all points, by land and water, prepared with more than twice that number of superior troops hard by to confront the invaders, seemed to be worse than useless irruption. But, soon after, a British army of about the same size, without artillery or cavalry, baggage wagons, or supplies, penetrated Maryland, put to flight twice their num- bers at Bladensburg, captured Washington, and, after besieging Baltimore, retired safe- ly to their shipping. What we wanted was bold, if not rash leaders, to face over- powering ascendency, more injurious than superior force, American audacity to defy English arrogance, and, fearless of conse- quences, risk all for victory: — to burn the ships and trust to fortune. On the 24th January, 1814, George Izard and Jacob Brown were promoted from bri- gadiers to major-generals ; and on the 1st of May, 1814, Andrew Jackson ; the two former destined to command in the North, the latter in the South. On the 2d May, 1814, General Izard took General Wilkin- son's place, as commander of the northern army. What was called the second, or division of the left of the northern army, was com- posed of two squadrons of light dragoons, commanded by Captain Harris, a detach- ment of the corps of artillery under Major Hindman, a battalion of the first regiment of Riflemen, under Major Morgan ; and the 1st, 9th, 11th, 21st, 22d, 23d, and 25th, seven regiments of infantry, commanded by Major-General Brown, Brigadier-Gene- rals Gaines, Scott and Ripley, Adjutant- General Gardner, Inspector-General Snell- ing, Engineers McRee and Wood. The first. General Scott's brigade, consisted of the 9th, 11th, 22d and 25th regiments of infantry, commanded respectively by Colonel Camp- bell, Major Leavenworth, Major Jessup and Major McNeill. The second brigade, com- manded by General Ripley, consisted of the 21st regiment, Colonel James Miller ; the 87 22d, Colonel Brady, with detachments of the 17th and 19th regiments. The first re- giment, ColtJIiel Nicholas, joined them after- wards in Canada, but was attached to nei- ther brigade. Captain Harris, with a troop of Colonel Burns' regiment of cavalry, and Major Hindman, with a battalion of artil- lery, consisting of the companies of Cap- tains Towson, Thomas Biddle, Ritchie, Wil- liams and Fanning, made up with the before mentioned two brigades, General Brown's regular force. Early in April, 1814, Col. Fenton, with one hundred and eighty vo- lunteers from Pennsylvania, and more if needed, were ready to go, embarked at Erie in the schooners Scorpion, Tigress, Porcu- pine and Somers, under Captain Elliott, and being landed at Buffalo, joined General Porter's standard, under which they sef ved with great gallantry throughout the whole Canadian campaign. In the month of April, 1814, on the east bank of the river Niagara, among the de- vastated places of that almost' houseless vi- cinage, the oflcers of all ranks went to work to discipline their men by drill, manoeuvre and march from eight to ten hours a day, so that, to the army, as to the navy, battle was relief from the severity of constant exercise ; and it cannot be too forcibly im- pressed by history, as a great lesson to the licentious independence of the country, that to siiperior discipline, is asoribable the first victories by land, as well as sea, which from the depths of degradation, raised the na- tional character to the heights of renown, and to this hour, cover the nation with that shield of its protection. Will the advocates of perpetual peace, who for many centiiries have, in vain, striven to prevent war, whose frequency and barbarity are often inhumanly unjustifiable, excuse my adding that Buffalo, the great western seaport, and all that flourishing neighbor- hood, for many miles around, was then a desert from hostile devastation, as the most fertile portions of Europe, Flanders, North- ern Italy, and the finest parts of Germany, many times have been, proving that regions flourish and population multiplies from the manurance of bloodshed and ashes of desolation, by one of those inscrutable" overrulings of Providence which mysteri- ously favor development ; while the indolent, opulent, undisturbed and contented, often decrease in numbers as they decline in en- ergy, and seem to prove, that the uses of the hardest adversity, at times, affect na- tions, as they do individuals, more benefi- cially than the most wanton prosperity? On the morning of the 2d of July, 1814, Major General Brown authorized the gene- rals of brigade to inform the commandants of corps, that the army would cross the strait before them, so as to invest Fort Erie as day dawned, on the 3d. Limited means of trans- portation were divided between Generals CAPTUEE OF FOKT ERIE. [1814. Scott and Ripley, who were to embark during the night of the 2d, debark in Ca- nada, at dawn, on the 3d ; Scott "'below, Rip- ley above Fort Erie, which they were to surround and subdue, as soon as possible. General Ripley was so averse to the en- terprise that he tendered his resignation, which General Brown refused to accept, who was inflexibly resolved to proceed ac- cording to the arrangements made. General Scott immediately assembled the chiefs of corps of his command. Colonel Campbell, Major Leavenworth and Major Jessup, Colonel Brady not then having joined, and communicated to them General Brown's design, who said his army's attitude in Ca- nada would be a powerful diversion in favor of General Izard at Plattsburg, and if it did nothing more than restore the tarnished honor of our arms, that was an object worth the sacrifice of the whole force he commanded. He had met with opposition where he expected support, "but," he add- ed, with emphasis, " we go, nevertheless ; nothing but the elements shall stop us." The communication of his design by the commanders of corps to the respective of- ficers was received with the utmost enthu- siasm. General Riall was known to be in force not far off. ' Every one was eager for an opportunity of trial with him ; most of the officers agreed to wear their sashes and feathers, and everything else demonstra^ tive of military pride. The men had been under arms so many hours every day, that every corps manoeuvred in action, and un- der fire of the enemy's artillery, with the precision of parade. General Brown fol- lowed General Scott before General Ripley embarked, attended by Adjutan^General Gardner, Majors McRee and Wood, en- gineers, and Captains Austin and Spencer, the General's aids. A body of Pennsyl- vania militia volunteers, under Colonel Fenton, and several hundred Indians, con- stituted a third brigade, led by General Peter B. Porter, who, throughout the whole campaign, on all occasions, nobly repelled the taunts of -political opponents, and as far as it was possible for him to do, redeemed the pledge he gave in Congress; where he held a very conspicuous situation, of Ca- nadian conquest and annexation. The whole division under General Brown never exceeded three thousand five hundred men, and was reduced, in the course of the cam- paign, to less than two thousand; but if there be anything in national honor and military character, seldom, if ever, were a thousand lives or wounds lost or suffered with better result. Reconnoitering the woods in advance- of Scott's right. Brown's good luck began, by falling in with an inhabitant and a little boy, his son, on the way to the Strait for fish, who by threats and promises were in- duced to accompany Adjutant-General Gard- ner, ordered to go and meet the reserve of Ripley's brigade, as they landed from Black Rock, and march them up to Scott's right. Major Jessup was ordered forward with the 25th infantry, to invest the Fort in conjunc-' tion with Ripley's brigade, which had not arrived when Jessup reached the station assigned to him. With Majors McRee and Wood he approached and reconnoitered the fort, which delivered some discharges from, both cannon and musketry, wounding a few of Jessup's men. Investing Fort Erie with his two brigades, Brown's good fortune commenced, by its ca- pitulation almost without a blow, surren- dered by Major Buck, of the 8th infantry, the English commander, the afternoon of the first day. If he had held out only long enough for the report of his resistance to reach Major-General Riall, entrenched at Chippewa, Brown's sword might not have been flushed with instant and bloodless triumph. Whereas, one hundred and thir- ty men, well provided with means of some defence, gave up a place of refuge for the Americans, in ease of need, and the event- ual theatre of their final triumph. One hundred and sixty prisoners with trophies were marched from Buffalo to Flatbush, the harbingers of Brown's auspicious ven- ture. Before they could perform the first stage of their journey, while the people of the United States were celebrating the De- claration of Independence, Scott was pushed forward with his brigade to Chippewa ; and, on the 4th July, surprised General RiaU's advance at Black Creek, strongly posted be- hind that stream. Captain Towsou; with his company of artillery, compelled the British to retire, in doing which they re- moved the bridge over the creek, .and a small engagement ensued, which, like the whole series, attested the emulous intre- pidity of the American forces. Captain Crocker, with a company of infantry, pass- ing the creek above the bridge and pur- suing the retiring enemy, before the brigade could get over, was assailed and surrounded by part of the 19th British dragoons, whom, with, great self-possession and steadiness, he drove off and put to flight. This, on the 4th, wag the overture of more extensive success on the 5th July, the battle of Chip- pewa. The British under General Riall were entrenched beyond the bridge over the Chippewa, a stream too deep for fording and surrounded by marshes, which, difficult to pass, must have been turned, at some loss of time and exposure to casualties. Why Riall did not remove the bridge, it is not easy to understand, and thus impede, retard, if not frustrate Brown's advance, or cross the Niagara and capture his sup- plies there ; eitlier of which seemed to be obvious means of resistance. But there were many turns in the wheel of Brown's ' Chap. IV.] BATTLE OF CHIPPEWA. 89 fortune, wliich he pushed forward with impetuous diligence. Eeaching Scott's en- campment near midnight of the 4th of July, with Ripley's brigade. Brown made his disposition for a speedy attack, in which it was his good luck, in the place and man- ner to be favored by his enemy. From early da-v^n of the 5th, the British assaulted Brown's pickets. General Porter, with his regiment of Pennsylvania volunteers and some hundred Indians, did not arrive till the morning of that day. In the afternoon he was ordered to proceed with them through a wood, and drive in the enemy's pickets, while ours should withdraw, and Porter also to entice the British to follow and approach our main body. General Porter with great gallantry led his men as directed, driving the enemy's light troops before him, when suddenly their whole column, encouraged to leave their entrench- ments in order of battle, broke upon Porter, who, unable to make head against such odds, retreated; Brown said with his men in disorder. But there was reason, from the events of the battle which ensued, to believe that the general unjustly depreciated the volunteer force. RiaU followed Porter with great commotion of arms and clouds of dust, supposing himself the assailant by antici- pating an expected attack. The place of action to which Scott with the advanced brigade was thus invited, and forthwith hastened, was a plain on the east side of the river, in front of the British entrenchments, the time about five o'clock in the afternoon, within short distance of the Falls of Ni- agara, whose dull monotonous roar, as it were a tocsin or alarm bell to rouse the combatants to action, accompanied the con- stant explosions of cannon and rapid dis- charges of musketry for more than an hour at close quarters, thinning the Ameri- can, and more than decimating the British ranks. Major General RiaU had with him some seventeen hundred men, bravely led by Colonel Gordon commanding the Royal Soots, the 100th regiment of infantry led by the Marquis of Tweedale, Majors Evans and Risle with detachments of the eighth regiment of infantry and nineteenth of dra- goons. Captain Machonachie and the royal artillery, Lieutenant-Colonels Pearson and Dickson of the militia, and a body of In- dians. Scott was drilling his men when ordered into- action. Towsou's battery of three guns was first quickly advanced to the plain on the riverfrontof the American catnp before Scott could form. The battle began, by Towson's animated fire from the bank of the river, an officer on all occasions, prompt, judicious, cheerful and effective, who enjoyed the fire and uproar of great guns. The enemy considerably outnumber- ing outflanked Scott's line, and might have - turned it but for one' of those inspired movements which change a perilous crisis into greater safety and assurance, by nearer approach to danger. Major Jessup, at the head of the 25th regiment, whose horse was shot under him, and his men falling fast on the extreme left, where he contended with the British right, ordered his firing to be sus- pended and his regiment to advance with the bayonet in the teeth of deadly volleys, gain- ing thereby a more favorable position and compelling their adversaries to retire from a log fence, behind which they stood, but by Jessup's gallant charge driven back ex- posed to flank as well as front fire. Major McNeill on the right. Major Leavenworth parallel to the enemy's attack, meanwhile, poured in their rapid and destructive dis- charges. McNeill judiciously occupied an oblique position, and delivered his well- aimed shots with fatal effect ; and though Captain Towson's own gun was thrown out of action, he served with unabated ardor at the other pieces. Captain Harris of the dragoons, which corps was not made use of, volunteered to serve out of his place and had his horse shot under him. Major Wood of the engineers also served as a volunteer. Colonel Campbell, the only officer disabled, was wounded as he led the eleventh regi- ment into action. While it was raging General Brown arrived and cheered the first brigade with assurance that the second would soon come to its aid, which, in killed and wounded, had lost a fourth of its num- bers, yet unshrinkingly continued the action aJone. The 21st regiment from Ripley's brigade, notwithstanding every exertion ta get to the ground in time, did not arrive till the enemy were routed by Scott alone. The New York volunteers did not join the division till after the battle ; the volun- teer honors of which belong to three hun- dred Pennsylvanians who, though com- pelled by superior numbers to retreat at first, rallied to another part of the conflict with great spirit. In the onset which pre- ceded the main engagement. General Porter with these volunteers encountered about the same number of Canadian militia and In- dians, and drove them behind the line of the principal British column, destroying at least one hundred and fifty. Colonel Fen- ton, with the volunteers, formed in line with General Scott, and steadily sustained the destructive British fire of cannonadft and musketry, till their retreat began, when Colonel Bull, Major GaUoway and Captain White of the volunteers, too eager in pursuit and exhausted by exertion, were made prisoners. The British artillery wasi admirably served ; but thfe musketry of the people to whom the use of arms is forbidden by severe penal laws, till put in their hands - as enlisted soldiers, did not, as it cannot, equal that of those accustomed from iu' fancy to handle guns, and of course more dexterous in their management. The Ame.. . rican gunnery .altogether superior to the 90 JESSUP'S ACCOUNT OF THE BATTLE. English, the cannon, the musket, and the rifle, demonstrated its superiority that A&j by killing or wounding nearly two English to one American. After an hour's sangui- nary contest, the British were inclined to change their uncomfortable position and try the charge, for which the Americans were promptly prepared. But one of Tow- son's best directed shots blew up an am- munition wagon, silenced their battery and produced complete confusion in their ranks. Colonel Grordon, the Marquis of Tweedale, severely wounded ; Captain Holland, the aid of General Eiall, disabled by wounds, and yery large numbers amounting to a full third of their whole force killed, wounded or captured ; the American troops main- taining their dauntless attitude and unre- mitting fire — at last as the shadows of sun- set began to fall, the British broke, fled, and pursued by the victorious Americans, took shelter behind entrenchments. Just then. Captain Ritchie, with his company of artillery, and Lieutenant Hall, with part of Biddle's company, got up. Biddle and Williams, hastening up with more cannon, but arriving only to see the enemy's backs, broken and flying in disorder, leaving their dead and wounded in charge of the victors. By the British published general orders, fifty-three of the regiment of Royal Scots were acknowledged killed, one hundred and thirty-five wounded, and thirty captured; of the Marquis of Tweedale's regiment sixty-nine killed; one hundred and thirty- five wounded; and so of the rest, though not quite so many as of those two distin- guished regiments. To my account of the cardinal battle of Chippewa, digested from all authentic ac- cessible sources of information, as these interesting details will bear some repeti- tion, I think proper to add General Jessup's narrative, kindly fiirnished to me as fol- lows: " On the morning of the 4th of July, Gen. Riall's light troops were discovered in our neighborhood. — Gen. Scott was detached to- wards Chippewa — the enemy slowly retired before us — ^the march was a continued skir- mish, and on theplain between Street's Creek and Chippewa our light troops were warmly and vigorously , attacked, but maintained their ground most gallajitly. On that oc- casion Captain Crocker, of the 9th, with a detachment of light infantry, received and repulsed a charge of a detachment of the 19th dragoons. General Scott, finding the enemy strongly posted behind the Chip- pewa, called in the light troops, and took a position in rear of Street's Creek, where he encamped his brigade. General Brown eame up, about midnight, with the second brigade and the artillery. At dawn, on the morning of the 5th of July, the enemy began to annoy our pickets, and kept up a desultory fire for several hours, so near to [1814. our line, that a soldier of the 25th was wounded not more than thirty paces in front. Some time in the forenoon. General Peter B. Porter arrived with three or four hundred Indian warriors, and about three hundred Pennsylvania volunteers. After allowing his command time to refresh, General Brown ordered him to file from the rear of our camp, pass through the woods, and, Lf possible; place himself be- tween the enemy's advance and his main body. To facilitate this object, our ad- vanced pickets were directed to provoke a fire from the enemy's pickets, and then fall back to some log cabins in front of Street's house, to induce them to foUow, and to draw, if possible, their light troops in that direction. "A heavy firing soon commenced, and continued for more than half an hour, when, the enemy's light troops were observed to be retiring ; and, from a cloud of dust seen rising on the road leading to Chippewa Bridge, it was evident General RiaU was in motion with his principal force, and that he had attempted with his light troops a similar ruse upon us to that which General Brown had attempted upon him. At the time the firing had become so heavy. Major Jessup ordered the 25th to be in readiness to move at a moment's notice ; and, mount- ing his horse, he crossed the creek and joined General Brown. When the move- ment of RiaU was perceived, he returned immediately to his place and found the regiment forming under arms, by order of General Seott, for exercise. A few mo- ments after, the order was given by Gene- ral Brown to march and meet the enemy. "Captain Towson had been ordered to take a position with his artillery near the bridge over Street's Creek ; and, as Scott's brigade was compelled to cross that bridge under the fire of the enemy's artillery, he rendered important service by covering the movement and annoying the enemy's line. "General Riall had formed his line of battle, with his left resting on the Niagara, where he had a formidable battery of twen- ty-four pounders and howitzers ; his jight consisting of his grenadiers and light in- fantry, commanded by the Marquis of Tweedale, supported by a body of mUitia^ and Indians m the wood, was strongly posted behind a fence and a breastwork of large oak logs. Porter's command, though it had for some time gallantly sustained an unequal conflict, had fled on meeting Riall's column ; and by the time Scott's brigade had engaged the enemy, not a militia man or Indian was to be seen on the field. When the several corps had passed the bridge. Major Jessup was ordered to go to the extreme' left, and be governed by cir- cumstances. Major Leavenworth, witih the 9th and 22d, moved forward on the Chip- Chap. rV.J COMPAKATIVE MERITS. 91 pewa road and engaged the enemy's left. Colonel Campbell led the 11th to the left of the 9th, and was about to take his position in the line, when he received a severe wound in the knee, and was obliged to leave the field. Major M'Neill, who succeeded to the command of the regiment, immediately formed it and led it into action. Blajor Jesaup, perceiving that the enemy greatly outnumbered us on the field, moved his regiment in column until he attained a position within a hundred and twenty paces of the position ofthe Marquis of Tweedale, in order to deceive him in regard to the force of his regiment. There he formed under a most destructive fire from the grenadiers and light infantry in front, and the Indians and the militia, covered by a thick wood on his left flank. He soon found his position untenable, and that he must either retreat or advance. The se- cond brigade not being on the field, to have fallen back would have uncovered Scott's left flank, and have enabled the Marquis, by throwing forward his grenadiers and light infantry, to attack him on that flank, which, pressed as he then was by a supe- rior force in front, would have caused his instant defeat. Relying on the firmness and excellent discipline of his troops, the Major determined to advance and try the efiect of the bayonet, believing that, even should he be sacrificed, time enough would be gained to enable the second brigade to come to the relief of the first. He ordered his men to cease firing, and lest they should recommence the fire, he directed them to support their arms. Deadly as was the fire under which they were sufiering, the mo- ment they heard the words of command every musket was at a shoulder and a sup- port. The charge was made. The enemy, however, did not wait to receive the bayo- net, but strong as his position was, he fled in confusion. Captain Ketchum, with one of the light companies of the 25th, was de- tached to harass him and prevent him from rallying; the. remainder of the- regiment was formed across the flank of the line en- gaged with Scott, and by an oblique fire assailed it at the same time in front and rear ; part of the line gave way, but rallied immediately behind a fence. Whilst Major Jessup was making his dispositions to drive them from this position, General Brown came up and assured him of immediate support. About this time Major M'Neill, relieved by the position and operations of the 25th from a part of the force with which he had been engaged, with the ready presence of mind and decision which on all occasions distinguished him, promptly- threw forward the left of the 11th and at- tacked in flank that part of the enemy's line which still maintained its ground, when the whole gave way, and fled rapidly behind the Chippewa." British general orders pubKshed at King- ston, the 9th July, by Lieutenant Colonel Harvey, stated that Major-General Riall withdrew, having sustained a very heavy loss in killed and wounded, including a large proportion of officers. The Montreal Her- ald of the 12th July announced, with ex- treme mortification, that a severe Ijattle had been fought in which the British were Under the necessity of retreating with considerable loss. The Adjutant-General Baynes made a similar statement. The British Annual Register of the year re- corded the historical avowal of a British defeat by Americans in Canada, the 5th July, 1814, with the loss of one-third of the number of Englishmen engaged. Thus every British soldier was impressed with the fact, on British authority, put un- questionably before the world, that several regiments of British troops, in a fair trial of strength, in open ground, without any apo- logy to soothe wounded national pride, were defeated by an inferior number of Ameri- . cans : whose total loss killed, wounded, and missing was 328, not much more than half the British loss, and not one American commissioned officer killed. In a fair na^ tional trial ofthe military faculties, courage, activity, and fortitude, discipline, gunnery, ' and tactics, for the first time the palm was awarded by Englishmen to Americans over Englishmen. "Without fortuitous advau-, tage the Americans proved too much for the redoubtable English, though superior in number, theretofore universally arro- gating to themselves, even with inferior numbers, a mastery"but faintly questioned by most Americans ; no accident to depre- ciate the triumph of the younger over the older nation ; no more fortune than what favors the bravest. Piysical and even corporeal national characteristics did not escape comparison in this normal contest. The American rather more active and more demonstrative than his ancestors, many of the officers of imposing figure, Scott and McNeill particu- larly, towering with gigantic stature above the rest, stood opposed in striking contrast to the short, thick, brawny, burly Briton,, hard to overcome. A nobleman of the best blood of Scotland, whose daughter was af- terwards selected to continue the illustrious' race of the Duke of "Wellington, to whose eldest son she was married, the Marquis of Tweedale, with his sturdy short person, and stubborn courage, represented the British. Scott, with his much loftier form, more alert and more ostentatious- bravery, was the American type. Even the names be- tokened at once consanguinity and hostility. Scott, McNeill, and MoRee, in arms against Gordon, Hay, and Machonachie. And the harsh Scotch nomenclature, compared with the more euphonious savage Canada, Chip- pewa, Niagara, which latter modern Eng- 92 RIALL'S RETREAT. lish prosody lias corrupted from tlie measure of Goldsmith's Traveller : — Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around. And Niagara stuns with thundering sound. Two unfortunate young men, a captain and a lieutenant, sternly if not harshly stigmatized, (one of them the son of a re- spectable member of the war party in the House of Representatives with us,) in Brown's official dispatch, as wanting spirit, were the rare exceptions to the general rule, and there was reason to doubt the justice of that severity. With those excep- tions every officer and man, inspired by their admirable leaders,^ fought as if the fate of the day depended on each one. Brigadier-General Scott, Majors Leaven- worth, Jessup, and McNeill, Captains Crocker, Towson, Harrison, and Austin, (Brown's aid,) Lieutenants Worth and Watts, (the aids of Scott,) were immediately brevetted ; Captain Harrison, not only for active bravery, but more difficult passive endurance. Severely wounded by a cannon ball, he preserved his serenity and refused all help till the enemy was beat. Worth, the handsome and gallant lieutenant of that day, is the Major-General who has realized its martial promise by numerous feats of soldiership, and now with General Scott in Mexico, swells to a volume of fame the page unrolled at Chippewa. The battle known by that name has never been appreciated as it ought to be. Man- kind, impressed by numbers and bloodshed, regard the second more extensive battle near the Falls of Niagara, on the 25th of the same month, between the same parties with British reinforcements, known as the battle of Bridgewater, as more important than its precursor. So Jackson's sanguinary defeat of the English attacking him the 8th Janu- ary, has unjustly eclipsed his more masterly preliminary attack of them the 23d Decem- ber, on which the fate of New Orleans, and, perhaps, the sequel of the war, depended. The victory of Chippewa was the resurrec- tion or birth of American arms, after their prostration by so long disuse, and when at length taken up again by such continual and deplorable failures, that the martial and moral influence of the first decided victory opened and characterize an epoch in the annals and intercourse of the two kindred and rival nations, whose language is to be spoken as their institutions are rapidly spreading throughout most of mankind. Fought between only some three or four thousand men in both armies, at a place remote from either of their countries, the battle of Chippewa may not bear vulgar comparison with the great military engage- ments of modern Europe, But few better judges, less disposed to either flattery or partiality, have pronounced on its merits than Wilkinson, a man of education, mili- [1814. tary knowledge, and unavoidably invidious of the commanders who superseded him in those fields, and, as he thought, robbed him of their renown. He described it as an "obstinate contest, fought on a plain, and in direct order, whose simplicity presented few occasions for display of tactical skill : literally a trial of strength and courage, breast to breast, in which the American arms triumphed. Brigadier-General Scott led his corps to the attack with conspicuous gallantry, in which he was supported by three field officers, Majors Jessup, Leaven- worth, and McNeill, of whom it is no dis- paragement of the General to say, that they were his inferiors in naught but the acci- dental circumstance of rank. The contest for glory was. ardent and uniform, from the ranks to the brigadier. But it wa8_ Major Jessup's fortune to be most closely engaged ; pressed in front and flank, he found it ne^ cessary to appeal to the bayonet, and his antagonists recoiled." The charm of British military invincibility was as efiectually broken by a single brigade, as that of naval supremacy was by a single frigate, as much as if a large army or fleet had been the agent. After all done and written, from Cyrus to Napoleon, on warfare, there is no magic, nor much mystery, in a science of wmch vigilance, diligence, and execution, are. the arts, force concentrated on a point, by blows repeated; with success superadding its moral to the physical power employed in action. To organize victory the simple method is, to be in earnest and not afraid. On these lessons of mother wit, to a bold man, with a gtout person, thirsting for fame, Jacob Brown, the Quaker schoolmaster, pursued his triumphant march in Canada after the victory of Chippewa. Preparations were made immediately on the 6th July to overcome Riall in his entrenchments, en- feebled by deaths, sore with wounds, morti- fied and discouraged. Beat by part of Brown's force, could he resist it altogether, flushed with triumph ? After ground was marked for the American batteries, and other arrangements for attack, Riall, dis- concerted, destroyed his artillery, aban- doned his intrenchments, and decamped. Putting part of his troops in Fort George, where Colonel Tucker commanded, with the rest Riall retired twelve miles further up the lake to Twenty-mile Creek, there to prepare for revenge ; worsted, but not con- sternated. Brown directly followed, and during three precious weeks, with the ene- my cooped up in Port George, from the 5th to the 25th July, was undisputed master of that peninsula, which he might have held against any force the enemy could bring to oppose him, provided Chauncey took com- mand of Lake Ontario, as he did from and after the first day of August, and was ex- pected, if he had not even promised to do, Chap. IV.] BROWN'S RETURN TO CHIPPEWA. 93 by the 15th July. Should Fort George be invested, or Riall attacked by a sudden movement on him, more conformable to the onward course thus far? It was essential to keep near intelligence, reinforcements, and naval co-operation, anxiously expected, but never to come, from Sackett's Harbor. On the I2th July, the only wrong of the cam- paign was perpetrated and punished ; the hamlet of St. David's was burnt by Colonel Stone, of the New York militia, retaliating sorae feuds between them and the Cana- dians. Instantly disavowed by Brown, Stone was indignantly discharged. Recol- lections of the devastations in New York, caused by Maclure's conflagrations in Ca- nada, in December, were too flagrant for repetition of border barbarities, with Ame- rican Fort Niagara garrisoned by English in full view. On the 13th July, General John Swift, an aged and enterprising officer of New York, successfully reconnoitering Fort George, was murdered by a prisoner in the very act of begging and receiving quarter. On the 15tE July, General Por- ter, with his brigade of volunteers. Major Wood, of the engineers, and Captain Rit- chie, with two pieces of artillery, drove in the pickets at Fort George, and formed the brigade within a mile, in fuU view of the fort, with little interruption. Colonel Wil- cooks, with his American Canadians ; Cap- tains Hall, Harding, and Freeman, of the New York volunteers ; and Captain Flem- ming, with Indian warriors, advanced under cover of a tuft of woods within musket shot of the fort, and gave Major Wood an op- portunity, with hardly any loss, to examine the works : only a few of Captain Bough- ton's New York cavalry being surprised and captured. Unfortunately, Commodore Chauncey was ill ; but not more ill than Wolfe when, storm- ing the Heights of Abraham, he took Que- bec, and expelled French power from Ca- nada ; or Jackson, when he repulsed the British, with great slaughter, from Lou- isiana. Well acquainted with the country, and informed of the enemy's number, loca- tion, and condition. Brown's conduct and correspondence breathed' the utmost, per- haps extravagant confidence. From the neighborhood of Queenstown, on the 13th July, while reconnoitering Fort George, he wrote to Chauncey, "For God's sake, let me see you. ' All accounts agree that the force of the enemy, at Kingston is very light. I do not doubt my ability to meet them in the field, and march in any di- rection over their country, your fleet car- rying for me the necessary supplies. We can threaten Forts George and Niagara, carry Burlington Heights and York, and proceed direct to Kingston and carry that place. We have between us sufficient means to conquer Upper Canada in two months, if there is prompt aiid zealous co-operation before the enemy can be greatly rein- forced." This, it may be, extravagant but not unfounded confidence, Chauncey, suffer- ing with feverish prostration, reprimanded as " a sinister attempt to render the fleet sub- ordinate to, or an appendage of, the army." Even if so, it was better for him, and much better for the country, so to serve than de- mur for such a cause. He did nothing with his fleet at all comparable to what Brown proposed for it. A brave and skilful sea- man, of whom Brown's exactions may -have been unreasonable, demurred upon selfish and mistaken dignity. Though the navy " might be somewhat of a convenience, he confessed, in the transportation of provi- sions and stores for the army, yet the Secre- tary of the Navy had given him the higher' destiny to seek and fight, the enemy's fleet." On the 22d July, Brown was advised by General Gaines, commanding at Sackett's Harbor, that not only the fleet, but even the guns and riflemen he had sent for, (in boats, if the Commodore should not accompany them with his squadron,) were blockaded by the enemy. Doubtless, it was material that Chauncey's vessels should be exercised on the lake, before brought into action with British vessels accustomed to it. But the American Commodore's demur was unlucky, if not untimely. The navy had fought its way to public regard. It became the spoiled pet of the country. History must not re- press, that in September, 1813 (vol. i. 429), and July, 1814, the squadron on Lake On- tario, both times when Burlington Bay and Heights were in view, twice disappointed general expectation. Constrained to abide that disappointment. General Brown suffered other privations. Five hundred regular troops of General MoArthur's brigade ordered to his sup- port, and arriving the 8th of July from De- troit at Erie in Pennsylvania, did not reach Canada till after the second battle at the Falls of Niagara. Those cunning attend- ants on fortune, selfish, and dastardly de- serters in emergency, the Indians, all left the American standard. On the twenty- second of July, when Brown relinquished the last hope of prompt naval co-operation, his predicament became precarious. But resolved not' to abandon the enterprise be- gun, he came to the heroic if not despe- rate determination to disencumber his army of baggage, and push forward to Bur- lington Heights at all events. To mask that movement, and also replenish his provi- sions from stores 'at Schlosser, the army was led back to Chippewa on the 25th of July, whose classic grounds and proud re- collections soon elicited the memorable achievements of one of the most obstinate, sanguinary, and altogether extraordinary battles by night. Invidiously criticising the wild encounter of that bloody night, WUkinson condemns Scott for rebuking an 94 BRITISH FOEOE IN CANADA. officer's suggestion of retreat, by appealing to history for occasions when armies van- quished four times their number. Brown and Scott needed not to recur to ancient history for the military wisdom of never despairing and seldom yielding. Not long before, Bonaparte, snatching victory from almost defeat at Marengo, installed the greatest of modern empires. Some years after, Welling- ton, from near defeat at Waterloo,demolished that empire and reconstructed Europe. — The American general's smaller scale had a destiny to fulfil, the character of an army to redeem, and honorable terms of peace to vouchsafe : all of which the second battle of the Falls consecrated at Bridgewater or Lundy's Lane, as it is variously called, superadded to the first known as that of Chippewa. Owing, probably, to Generals Brown and Scott being disabled by wounds, no official accounts of that engagement reached us till the middle of August, when the British marched upon "Washington, and superseding Canada in public interest, absorbed atten- tion. Dissension among generals, infecting whole corps, and prejudicing individaals, produced conflicting and invidious accounts from officers in the action. The confusion of a night conflict, its vicissitudes, contra- dictions, mistakes, and disputed catastro- phe controverted between English and Americans, and among the latter them- selves, obscure and perplex the realities of that affair, of which, from all these causes, no full or satisfactory account has been published: Military reports of battles, be- ing compiled from the. various statements of . different officers, no one witnessing more than part, few agree in what they did wit- ness. Any sketch taken from them may be wrong, and must be imperfect. Jealousy of the different kinds of-troops, of brigades, regiments, and individuals, of each other, to say nothing of national prejudices, beget charges of injustice, to which this sketch, though made from all reliable information, American and English, may be obnoxious. But without motive to misrepresent, care has been taken to describe, correctly, that remarkable conflict. The battle of Bridgewater was unexpeci^ ed to both armies. General Riall had fol- lowed Brown from the neighborhood of Queenstown to the Falls, without his being aware of it ; and General Drummond fol- lowed Riall. But their attack was not in- tended till daybreak on the 26th of July. On the 25th, all the British forces and ar- tillery not having arrived, General Scott, more courageously than, perhaps, prudent- ly, without the design of either commander, or either army being prepared, precipitated the strange and severe nocturnal contest, by which, of six thousand- combatants, Beventeen_hundred killed, wounded or cap- tured, were sacrificed to the point of honor. [1814. Emboldened by the confusion in which a perplexed and obscure conflict closed after midnight, and the retreat of the American army next day, the British claimed victory, with some plausible pretensions. They claim, too, inferiority of numbers, though much superior, in their own well-chosen, position, with better armament, more am- munition, and every means of success, when they were defeated in that impressive trial of arms. "Without official authority for their num- ber, beyond their own accounts, chargear ble with the usual partiality of such state- ments, the English forces in Canada, that summer, exceeded all the regular troops of the United States, anywhere on this con- tinent. There were considerable forces in Canada before peace in Europe multiplied them. The Eastern British provinces. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, added many to Canadian levies, which were nu- merous and well organized. Early in July reinforcements began to arrive from Eu-' rope, with the utmost perfection of military armament and naval transportation on' board many transport vessels, though the unemployed British navy was itself suffi- cient to convey large armies without em- ploying transports. According to English and Canadian credible publications, the expedition to America was on a large scale, to be commanded by a lieutenant-general, and severa.1 celebrated generals, leading the ^lite of the Duke of "WeUingtou's army to the punishment, if not conquest, of the whole United States. No better use could be made of that large disposable force than to send them, in great numbers, to America. It was cheaper, more politic, less offensive to the officers and sol- diers than to disband them at home, that they should be employed abroad, where, if many perished, it was'an economy. Attacks on the State of New York, through Canada, and on the city by water ; on New England through New Brunswick ; on Louisiana from Bermuda, and on all the Atlantic coast from Boston to Savannah, were the gigantic plan of an incensed nation. Of the troops destined for their execution, it was said that twenty-five thousand were to be landed from Europe at Quebec, and ten thousand at Halifax. "While Brown maintained his foot- hold on the Niagara peninsula, which he did till the enemy gave up attempting to dislodge him, not less than thirty regiments of regular soldiers, besides all others, amounting to between thirty and forty thou- sand men of all arms, from Niagara to Que- bec, composed the Canadian army: with renown not greater than discipline, com- plete equipments, and the confidence of tried commanders in veteran soldiers. The same pontoons which carried them over the rivers of Spain and France, the same can- non which battered formidable fortresses Chap. IV.] BATTLE OF BRIDGEWATEK. 95 there ; the very English horses which wing- ed the flying artillery at Toulouse, and worsted ^ult ; the identical physical and ■ moral means of conquest subjugating the most martial nations of Europe, were trans- ported over the Atlantic to dismember, punish, and put down the least belligerent of all people in America, to whom warfare was but a remembrance, its exactions and seyerities novel, odious, and intolerable. From the 16th to the 25th of July, General Brown had no tidings and no fears of his enemy, but no hopes from his naval com- patriot. Major General Riall, with re- freshed and reinforced troops, had followed him to the Falls of Niagara, with every preparation made to attack, the American army, early in the morning of the 26th of July, in its former auspicious encampment at Chippewa. LieutenanlrGeneral Drum- mond, Grovernor of Upper Canada, sailed from York the evening of the 24th, and reached Niagara river early next morning. Thence sending forward some regiments drawn from Forts George and Mississaga, under Colonel Morrison, to join Kiall. Colonel Tucker, with about a thousand sol- diers, sailors and Indians, crossed to the American side against Schlbsser. To contend with all these superior forces, having control of aU the waters, the Ame- rican army at Chippewa, mustered in action not more than twenty-five hundred fighting men. Each of the two brigades contained some eight or nine hundred. The volun- teers were from five to six hundred. The killed and wounded on the 5th July, and in skirmishes afterwards, the sick and di- minutions by other casualties, and depart- ure of all the Indians, reduced by many hundreds the thirty-five hundred combatants who ventured to invade Canada three weeks before. Expecting no action on the 25th, especially towards evening, when it suddenly came on, three hundred or more detailed for washing and other camp services, were not taken from them into action. At noon General Brown was informed by an express of the British movement about Queenstown, the arrival of the vessels, boats and rein- forcements brought by Drummond. Soon after, by another express, he was apprised of the expedition of Colonel Tucker to Sohlosser. Lieutenant Riddle, sent out to reconnoiter, had not returned, but Captain Odell, commanding a picket on the north of the encampment, reported soouin the morn- ing to Major Leavenworth, officer of the day, who sent to head-quarters, that with a glass a troop of horse and two companies of infantry, in scarlet regimentals, could be seen, about two miles off, believed to be the British advance, near Wilson's tavern, not 1 far from the Falls of Niagara. There was no apprehension, however, of an attack or of any immediate hostile intention, except against the stores, ammunition, sick, and other deposits on the other side of the river, at Schlosser, whither it was known the enemy had proceeded, and which General Brown had no means of either defending, transporting or removing. His predicament perilous he felt, was more so than he was aware. He had no idea, however, of an attack, as the British had crossed over to Schlosser in force, stiU less of retreat, but courted battle. A march towards Queens- tovm, which might induce the enemy to return from the other side of the river, was his hazardous, not injudicious, and, as events soon proved, fortunate deter- mination. Nor was it, whatever mili- tary theorists or sciolists may say, incon- sistent with those improved principles of modern warfare, which, casting away the impediments of baggage, the supernume- raries of camps, crowds, and all that can possibly be dispensed vrith for an emerg- ency, take the boldest way to victory, risking much, that much may be accom- plished. It was a course which Cromwell, PredericTi or Napoleon would approve. Re- viewing the campaigns of Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, Turenne, Gustavus and his own. Napoleon testified that their principles were all the same, viz : to keep their force to- gether, and be vulnerable at no point, push them rapidly on important positions, tr-ust to moral means, the reputation of their arms, and the fear they inspired. Never did any one of these mighty commanders think of keeping open communication be- hind him, of regarding inferior hostilities in his rear, but always aimed by amassed means at one great object. A campaign is like an argument, in which the great posi- tion being carried, all the minor ones follow. And always the moral are more important than the merely mUitaxy means and conse- quences. General Scott was therefore ordered to march at once, report to General Brown, and call for help, if needed. "When he marched, there was no design or idea in either army of the contest that ensued. Taking his men from afternoon drill, when ordered to Queenstown, General Scott led out the first brigade; the 9th regiment, Major Leavenworth ; 11th, Major McNeill ; 22d, Colonel Brady; 25th, Major Jessup; all feeble in numbers : Leavenworth's regi- ment only one hundred and fifty ; Jessup's, some two hundred — ^not one well supplied with ammunition. Towson's company of artUlery, Harris' troop, and some volunt-eer cavalry, were with the rest, altogether not eight hundred jnen. With this small force, on their way to Queenstown, not to fight. General Scott fell in with the enemy, right in front, who retired, but it was believed intended to give battle. Major Wood, the en- gineer, having reconnoitered, and reported to that effect, Scott dispatched Assistant Adjutant General Roger Jones to inform S5 BATTLE OF BKIDGEWATER. [1814. Brown ; and without hesitation led his bri- gade, with the utmost alacrity, to attack the enemy. Though their force was unknown and his inconsiderable, yet with inferior numbers he had in like manner attacked and beaten the same troops a few days before. Inspired with the confidence of that suc- cess, he made immediate disposition for attacking much superior numbers, in a strong position. The rules of war were against, bat fortune favored the movement. The British, without counting General Drummond's reinforcement of eight hun- dred, arrived that afternoon; and Colonel Scott's that night, of twelve hundred more, at first far outnumbered otir troops. When the conflict began, the British could not have been less than from two thousand to twenty-five hundred strong. Their seven pieces of artillery were posted on the sum- mit of a hill, supported by a heavy line of infantry, flanked by cavalry. Scott's ad- vance was led by Captain Harris with his dragoons, and Captain Pentland's company of the 22d infantry, both officers much dis- tinguished throughout the action, towards the end of which Pentland lost a leg, was left on the ground, and taken prisoner. Between Wilson's tavern and Lundy's Lane, near the village of Bridgewater, the British artillery opened upon Scott, who formed and reversed his column, faltering under its destructive severity. As it must be some time before Ripley's brigade and Porter's could come to Scott's aid, he detached Ma- jor Jessup with the 25th, to seek and en- gage the British left, while the General attacked their right. The other three regi- ments were moved beyond the advanced companies, and stationed where, as well as during the change of position, their expo- sure and losses were so severe, that both McNeill and Brady, with many, if not most of the other officers, were disabled by wounds, and their regiments so much de- moralized as to be confused, some retreat- ing, their ammunition, too, at last falling short. Towson's-inimitable battery on the right, by incessant reverberations of the most exciting martial music, encouraged the column ; but the British guns were so high that his shot passed over them, while their's plunged down with deadly aim, and for some time Towsou ceased firing, as use- less. The action began towards evening ; for more than an hour was maintained by the first brigade alone, notwithstanding great disadvantages to contend against, and the loss of half their force; Jessup's detach- ment, meanwhile, whose loss in killed and wounded was in proportion to the other regi- ments, never faltering in its signal episode, till the enemy on the right were routed. By musketry, at a hundred yards, at first, and then the bayonet, the British left was put to flight by Jessup, who thereupon seized a road, which he discovered, to turn their flank, and with that advantage routed still more of them. Scott, with enthusi- astic and matchless bravery, prosecuted his onset, a personal example to all, if of extravagant, yet sustained and invincible ardor. ' It was Jessup's good fortune, the common effect of good conduct, to cap- ture General Riall retiring wounded, to- gether with Captain Loring, aid-de-camp of General Drummond, several other of- ficers, and altogether one hundred and sixty-nine prisoners — as many as were left unhurt of his own command. Drummond's dispatch confessed, that on his arrival he found Riall's " advance in full retreat ; and when his own formation was completed, the whole front was warmly and closely en- gaged, the principal American efforts di- rected against the British left and centre ; after repeated attacks, those on the left forced back, and the Americans gaining temporary possession of the road." Thus taught by the enemy, and the results, we are safe in denying the imputed rashness, and as was said, frenzy of Scott, on that occasion, in applauding the ability of his dispositions, though they began by a charge of seeming rashness, and at all events, ad- miring the excellent fortitude, as well as cou- rage, by which he made head against formi- dable odds, and introduced a hard-earned victory. The drooping took courage ff om the fearless, and vied with the example of a con- spicuous leader, foremost in every danger. Numberless were the instances of indi- vidual heroism, while the trained confidence and pride of corps pervaded the shattered brigade, held together, carried forward, and though broken into small fragments, in- duced to preserve the integrity and charac- ter of the whole. One of the bravest officers in the field, Major Leavenworth, of whose one hundred and fifty rank and file, one hundred and twenty-eight were killed, wounded, or missing, and only sixty-four could be mustered next day, sent to Gene- ral Scott that his rule for retreating was fulfilled : Scott having laid it down as an aphorism, said to be attributed to Moreau, that a regiment may retreat when every third man is killed or wounded. To which intimation, communicated by another gal- lant officer. Captain Harris, who volunteered to serve with infantry, when cavalry could be no longer serviceable, Scott's animating reply, uttered in a transport of intrepidity, imparted hope, confidence, and endurance to officers and soldiers. When Jessup's success and Riall's capture were made known to Scott, he loudly proclaimed it, calling for three cheers. Apprised by that vociferation where to aim in the dark, the British battery fired a broadside upon Scott's station, which, passing over the- heads of the infantry, struck a caisson of Captain Ritchie's guns and blew up several ammunition wagons. Most of his men Chap. IV.] BATTLE OF BRIDGEWATEK. 97 being killed or wounded at their guns, and he too wounded during the night, was ad- vised to retire. " Never," said the dauntless Ritchie, " will I leave this gun but in death or victory." Captains Bliss, Harris, and several other officers, when their own corps were no longer available, joined Major Lea- venworth, with his skeleton of a regiment. Colonel Brady, severely wounded. Major Jessup, suffering excruciating pain from several wounds, were of those noble re- mains who would not retire, even though some of them intimated an opinion that it should be ordered. General Scott's aid. Captain "Worth, and Brigade Major Smith, were both compelled, by severe wounds, to leave the field. Of Scott's brigade, one hundred and sixteen were killed, and three hundred and thirty-three wounded or miss- ing, so that not half the original number remained, whom he finally embodied into a bS,ttalion, and led to repeated charges. Before that, telling them to maintain their ground, he announced the thrice welcome tidings that General Brown, with Ripley's and Porter's brigades, were at hand. Vol- leys of musketry on the hill joyfully confirm- ed that grateful relief, then indispensable. Ripley's brigade and Porter's volun- teers, by cordial and expeditious, but cir- cuitous and unavoidably somewhat retarded advance, bring us to the next still more ex- eited and doubtful stage of that nocturnal conflict ; for it was sunset when they arrived, and after near two hours of evening battle, %y not more than one American to three Englishmen, during the remaining three liours of darkness, seldom if ever was there ■ fiercer fighting in the d-ark. As soon as Ripley heard Scott's firing, he formed his brigade. General Brown, whose aid. Captain Austin, had been to inquire what firing it was, ordered Ripley's and Porter's brigades to the field, and his aid to .tell Ripley where to take his station. Brown -then, with the engineer, Major McRee, hastened forward. Ripley and Porter lost BO time, the men trotting forward to move as rapidly as possible over the bridge, and nearly three miles they had to go. It was night when they formed for action. The formidable annoyance of nine heavy can- nons, Drummond having added two to Ri- all's seven, in battery on the top of a 'hill, at once, suggested the obvious expediency, if not absolute necessity, of overcoming so fatal a hindrance to any chance of success. It remains matter of question whether Brown, Ripley, or McRee was first to :deolare that the battery on that hill must be stormed and taken. General Armstrong awards the honor to the engineer Major McRee. The regiments of the second bri- ^de were the 21st, Colonel James MiUer, -the 23d, Major MoFarland, detachments of jthe 17th, and 19th ; with Captain Ritchie ^f Major Hindman's battalion of artillery, preceded by Captain Riddle's artillery. The first regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel Ni- cholas, was not attached to either brigade. General Ripley forthwith ordered Colonel Miller, who at once undertook to storm the park. Major MoFarland, with the 23d regiment, was to take it in flank, and Colo- nel Nicholas to keep the musketry em- ployed. After a few rounds his men re- coiled, fell back in confusion, and could not be rallied to face the terrible fire from the hill they were to scale. Major MoFarland was killed, and the 23d also faltered and retreated. But Ripley soon restored them to good order, and in person led them up the ascent, where they displayed in a few minutes, as intended. Miller, meanwhile, unsupported by either the 1st or 23d, never- theless, moved steadily upward with un- flinching intrepidity, drove the British from their guns at the point of the bayonet, took their whole park ; and then, forming his line within twenty paces of the retiring but hardly retreating foe, at least twice his number, a perfect sheet of fire, at half pisol shot distance, signalized the despe- rate efforts of the victorious to retain, of the partially vanquished to regain, the great armament and trophy, the palladium and key of the contest. During this strug- gle, of some continuance, the 21st regi- ment, gallantly led by General Ripley, marched up on the flank, by his order reserving their fire tiU within twenty paces, then poured it forth with such effect, that, superadded to Miller's, the British were driven down the hill, leaving Ripley, with the two regiments, in undisputed possession of the artillery and the eminence. "In the darkness «f the night, during that extraordi- nary conflict," said General Drummond's offi- cial report of it, "in so determined a manner weie the American attacks directed against our guns, that our artillerymen were bayo- uetted by them in the very act of loading, and the muzzles of the American guns were advanced within a few yards of ours." "With such unusual homage of reluctant truth, history needs no figurative embel- lishment, common in most descriptions of battles, but unnecessary for reality more romantic than fiction, truth fairly told by those interested to conceal or deny it. Com- pared with some other nations' sense of it, English and American truth is a remarkable characteristic. The British, driven down that hill, leav- ing their killed and wounded with their guns in charge of their conquerors, took shelter and counsel about two hundred yards from and underneath it ; where, shrouded in profound darkness and dis- comfiture, they re-organized for another effort. Soon" afterwards, some two hundred of the first regiment found their way up the hill, whither .also Major Hindman re- paired, with Captain Towson and Ritchie, 98 BATTLE OF BRIDGEWATER. [1814. with their guns; and, for a short time, General Brown was much elated with the triumph, which he hoped would be con- clusive. By that time a pale moonlight had disappeared, and nothing but impene- trable darkness prevailed. Sight was use- less ; no colors could be seen ; there was no music. One flag, picked from where it lay on the ground, struck from some killed or wounded standard-bearer, had to be handed by a corporal, as every officer of his regi- ment down to a column sergeant was dis- abled or gone ; on such occasions, many men besides the sufferers, disappearing from various causes or pretexts. Amid the gloom of a still, sultry night, in the wild scenery of a picturesque region, occasional shouts of onset and triumph, more frequent though fainter cries of distress from the wounded, and continual yells of the Eng- lish Indians, were overpowered by the pre- dominant murmur of the vast cataract, with eternal commotion, tumbling the waters of one large lake into another. Stunned by the incessant roar of mighty waters, the troops exhausted with fatigue, were parched with thirst. The toil and tug of war, how- ever, were only begun, when they seemed to be over. When Ripley, with his 700 and Porter with his 500 men, went to Scott's relief, reduced to less than 400, as his bri- gade was broken into fragments, Drum- moud was stimulated as well as strength- ened for further efforts by the continual arrivals of fresh troops : the British Annual Register confesses 1200, under Colonel Scott, received during the action. Moved by every feeling of soldierly and national pride, duty, and propriety, he was resolved to recapture the lost guns and restore the adverse fortune of the night, excited by national even continental or hemispheric ri- valry. Europe against America sharpening individual exasperation, made a struggle of more than for victory or death. That pecu- liar mixture of respect and aversion which prevails between English and Americans, despising, hating, and admiring each other ; the same lineage, language, some of the same Irish and other soldiery in both ar- mies, and some of the corps even dressed alike in the same gray uniform, the changes and vicissitudes of precarious conflict, im- bued it altogether with the bitterness of family strife, worse than civil war, or con- test for mastery, regardless of sufferings or consequences. Men on both sides of strong nerve, unflinching, were forced to give way. But with most a military conjuncture raged steeling affection, stifling apprehension, and in a. tempest of passion inflaming all to unmitigated extermination. One of the features of that remarkable battle was an old church dedicated by religious conse- cration to peace on earth and good-will to man. Near the fence of the graveyard of that temple of Christian piety, under the guns of the battery pointed at Scott's position. Miller, by the light of their blaze and report of their explosions, his only means of locating the artillery, moved in silent, stealthy desperation against it, poured in a fatal volley announcing his onslaught, and then prostrating the fence rushed in with the bayonet and seized the park from which the British were driven. What a deed for a churchyard ! filled with English graves, over which Americans strode to put more Englishmen to death. After about half an hour's absence from their place of retreat under the hill, being reorganized and reinforced, they were heard again moving up the ascent. Ripley clos- ing his ranks, forbade all firing till the flashes of the British musketry enabled the Americans to aim unerringly — for that pur- pose to reserve fire till they felt the very push of the bayonet. Still, superior far in numbers, the British marched on again, and after one discharge from the Americans as directed, many more rounds were exchanged between the combatants for some twenty minutes in close and furious battle. Never good marksmen, however, and with the dis- advantage of standing lower, the British now fired over the Americans, whose plung- ing shots were more effective, and the Bri- tish again forced to give way, retreated down the hill to their hiding-place. Fear is of one and the same pallid com- plexion. Courage wears manyfaces. Miller was as calm and Ripley almost as cold, as Scott was vehement. As the first regiment under Colonel Nicholas, conducted by Ma- jor Wood, was taking its position. General Brown repeated to Colonel Miller that he was to charge and take the battery with the bayonet, to which good humoredly he an- swered, " It shall be done, sir." During the first combat on the hill, the first brigade at some distance enjoyed a short respite. Scott was eager as ever for more fighting, and Brown even more so, if need be, superintending every operation, which in the total darkness could be done only by personal attention, rather feeling than seeing what must be done. When the firing on the hill ceased, General Scott or- dered all the men of the 11th and 22d re- giments who could be found, to be collected and formed into a battalion: on whose re- vival it was that Jessup's success was an- nounced by Scott. Without figure of speech, the ghosts of the skeletons of three regiments were wandering in utter darkness, invisi- ble on the margin of death's river, another Styx. Revived into a small battalion, the command belonged to Colonel Brady, with whom, too much exhausted by loss of blood for command, his Major Arrowsmith re- mained. After the enemy's repulse, when attempting to retake the cannon. Brown and Scott meeting, directed Leavenworth to take command of the battalion consolidated Ghap. IV.] BATTLE OF BRIDGEWATER. 99 from the three regiments of infantry, which were formed into column in Lundy's Lane. The 1st, 21st and 23d regimenijs were now on the hill, and Major Hindman, Cap- tains Towson and Ritchie, with their guns on the summit, near the church. The 9th, 11th and 22d consolidated, were on Lundy's Lane, or its proximity, with Captain Bid- die's company of artillery. The 25th, with Major Jessup, had returned and joined Leavenworth 8 battalion. Porter's volun- teers gallantly led by him,- were with Rip- ley, .and always among the foremost in the hottest fire, several of them killed, wounded and taken prisoners. After their victory they were appropriately employed in escort- ' ing the British prisoners to their place of confinement in New York. When information came that the British were advancing to retake the guns, Scott led his battalion-brigade in' an impetuous charge, which put the British left to flight: forming them again for another charge, when his shoulder was fractured by a pam- ! ful wound, after having his horse shot. As he retired in great pain, his farewell order to Leavenworth was to charge again. About the same time Brown was wounded, and though he did not dismount or retire till victory appeared won, yet exhaustion then compelled him to leave the field ; his aid, Major Spencer, was mortally wounded and captured. In the Canadian campaign, a young man, not thirty years of age, Scott won his major-general's brevet. While this sketch is in hand, after an interval of thir- ty-three years, as commander of the Ameri- can army in Mexico, he has by many won- derful victories throughout a triumphant campaign, realized the promises of 1814.' With matured knowledge of his vocation, and its ardor mellowed by time, the enthu- siastic Brigadier of Canada is a consummate General in Mexico. General Brown, when the victory of Bridgewater, as far as could be judged from all circumstances, was complete, was with difficulty supported on his horse as he retired to Chippewa, and thence to Buffalo, where his robust frame soon recovering health, he hastened to a more signal tri- umph over Drummond at Fort Erie. All that remained of the first brigade, after that terrible conflict, did not exceed two hundred and twenty men ; the ninth, eleventh, and twenty-segond regiments con- solidated under Major Leavenworth, not altogether one hundred. Many of the cart- ridges with which the Americans fired, when attacked on the hill, were taken from the cartridge boxes of the English lying deadaround them. Men and officers, after five hours' constant fighting, were com- pletely exhausted, and many almost faint- ing with thirst. There was no water nearer than the Chippewa. Before they marched, however, from the hill, the wounded were carefully removed, and the return to the camp behind the Chippewa was slowly in perfect order, entirely undisturbed by the enemy. Seventy-six officers were killed or wounded, and six hundred and twenty-nine rank and file ; of whom the first brigade lost thirty-eight officers, and four hundred and sixty-eight rank and file. The commander of the brigade and every regimental officer were wounded. Every officer of the brigade and regimental staff was killed or wounded. General Scott and Major Jessup had each' two horses shot under them ; Jessup was wounded four times severely; Scott has never entirely recovered from his wound in the shoulder ; Brady, Leavenworth and McNeill had each a horse shot under him. No battle in America, before or since, was ever so severely contested, or attended with such casualties in proportion to numbers. Three more attempts were made by the enemy to retake the guns on the hill, each one after an interval of about half an hour, and the conflict each time more strenuous, if not desperate, than that preceding it. For more than half an hour after the fourth and' last attempt, in one of which General Drummond was wounded severely, but re-' fused to retire, nothing more was heard. It was past midnight, and still as death, save the groans and complaints of the wounded. The British loss altogether, by their subsequent official report, amounted to eight hundred and seventy-eight ; the American by theirs to seven hundred and forty-three. Every general in both armies was wounded, and every officer, except Rip- ley, who had several shots in his hat. Battle had raged for more than five hours, three in the dark, when all firing ceased : over- come with fatigue and thirst, it was hazard- ous to refresh on the hill, because the enemy might cut them off from the camp at Chip- pewa. Majors Leavenworth and Jessup a opinion was made known to General Rip- ley, left in command, that the wounded should be collected and the whole army re- moved to camp. Wagons were accordingly sent for to carry off the wounded. Those who had sunk exhausted, those gone to take care of the wounded, the numbers who in all battles stray from their places, those left in camp when the rest went out. to battle ; all these diminutions left, in the judgment of reliable officers, not more than a thousand fighting men embodied, when they were marched back to Chippewa. Moving in as good order from as to Bridgewater, Ripley led them back to their encampment, be- tween one and two o'clock of the morning of the 26th July ; victorious according to every circumstance and indication except one, which the enemy, not vrithout rea,son, laid hold of to claim the victory."" The Bri- tish cannon, so nobly captured at first, and- kept afterwards against so many desperate- 100 BROWN'S DIAET. attempts to regain them, were left on the hill ; all but one of the American howitzers, exchanged by mistake in the darkness and confusion of the night for that one English gun, was left too. For want of horses, har- ness, drag-ropes and other contrivances to carry off these inestimable trophies, they fell at last into the hands of the English, who returned to the hill soon after the Americans left it. Major Hindman going there, by General Brown's order, to bring away the guns after Bipley had gone to Chippewa, found the hill, together with the guns, in possession of the British, who did not fail to proclaim the precious prize as proof that theirs was the victory, which perversion was further countenanced by liipley's destroying the bridge over the Chippewa, and some of his baggage, camp equipage and provisions, preparatory to his retreat to Fort Erie. All this, which became the subject of much controversy among the American of- ficers discrediting or defending Ripley, was more dexterously than candidly, but so com- monly as to be almost always the case on Buch occasions, therefore not unpardonably, turned by General Drummond into evidence that he was not conquered, but conqueror. " A howitzer which the enemy brought up was captured by us," said his dispatch. They captured nothing, but merely Jound a can- non accidentally left, when, an hour after the enemy's retreat, their conquerors in complete and undisturbed possession of the guns and the field, slowly and in per- fect order left it, and them to return to the indispensable repose of their camp. The struggle was over. Pride of success was supplanted by bodily exhaustion, anxiety for repose from excessive toil, and relief from tormenting thirst. The Americans therefore, but as victors, were marched to their encampment, as Brown had directed, though without the^ cannons captured, as he ordered. Vexed, mortified, stung by the omission to bring them away, when he heard of it, he unwittingly countenanced General Drummond's unfair assumption by censuring General Ripley, ordering him to march next morning at sunrise to re-occupy the hill and bring away the guns ; which was impossible. Ripley's division fit for duty that morning did not exceed sixteen hundred men. In the judgment of many, if not most of the officers, it would have been madness, with such a force, hardly refreshed from yesterday's labors, (for sun- rise came in three hours after their repose began the night of the battle,) to storm the hill of Bridgewater again. At noon of the 26th July, Ripley led the division from Chippewa towards Fort Erie, in good order, fthd encamping that night opposite Black Book, crossed himself to Buffalo to obtain Brown's permission to withdraw the divi' eion from Canada, and abandon an enter- [1814. prise towards which from the first he had been disinclined. Brown peremptorily for- bade that retirement, ordered the army to be stationed at Fort Erie, and sent for General Gaines from Sackett's Harbor, who arrived the 4th August, to take com- mand there till Brown should be himself well enough to resume it. Invincibly tena- cious of his foothold in Canada, he was resolved at all hazards not to give it up. Where so many were distinguished as at the battle of Bridgewater, few brevets were conferred ; only on Scott and the two engi- neer officers. The following is General Brown's unpub- lished diary of events, from the close of the battle at Chippewa, on the 5th, to that of Bridgewater, on the 25th July, 1814. "As General Ripley had not come up, and General Porter's command had been routed, the left battalion of Scott's brigade, commanded by Jessup, was outflanked and greatly exposed. It was the crisis of the battle. Captain Austin, being struck by a half-spent ball, which deprived him of his breath, and supported on his horse, for the moment, by Captain Spencer and Major Jones ; the major-general rode up in per- son to Major Jessup, and assured him of having speedy support. He then turned to the rear of Jessup's left flank, and met Col. Gardner, who informed him that Rip- ley's command was nearly up, and would be able, in a few minutes, to close with the enemy. The major-general returned ; but before any additional force came into ac- tion, the enemy was defeated by Scott's command. "They were promptly pursued by our whole army, and would have been killed or 'captured to a man, but for the retreat af- forded them in their works behind the Chippewa. " The enemy's loss was much greater than estimated by General Brown in his official report : and the services of the gallant Por- ter and his command were undervalued at the time : great execution was done by their brave encounter with, and advance upon the enemy, through the wood. They certainly effected as much as could have been ex- pected from undisciplined men. "July &th. It was late in the evening of the 5th, before the wounded of both armies could be taken care of. The dead remained on the field during the night. Much of our time was engrossed on the 6th and 7th in carrying the wounded to the hospital at Buffalo, and in burying the dead that were found in the woods and on the plains. General Brown was impatient at this de- lay. He was apprehensive that he could not arrive on the shore of Ontario, and meet our fleet on the 10th ; as, on examination of the enemy's works, the passage of the Chip- pewa bridge was considered too hazardous if practicable, and the country on our left jChap. IV.] BROWN'S DIAEY. 101 was represented as an impracticable forest. On the evening of the 6th, General Brown secured the interest of an inhabitant, who informed him of an old timber road that led, in a circuitous way, frotm the rear of Mrs. Street's house, to the conjunction of Lyon's creek with the Chippewa. "On the morning of the 7th, Generals Brown and Porter, with the senior engi- neer, the guide, and a small guard, explored this road. It was determined that it could be rendered passable for artillery in a short time. Accordingly, a heavy detail was im- mediately made for this duty, and at night it was reported ' passable for artillery.' ■ "As General Scott's command had mani- fested, from the moment of crossing the Strait, the greatest degree of emulation in the promptitude with which they exe- cuted their orders, as well as in the gal- lantry with which they improved each opportunity of distinction ; and, on the contrary, as General Bipley was tardy in the investment of Fort Erie, and his brigade had not participated in the laurels of the 5th ; the commanding general was induced to give him this opportunity to establish the reputation of his command ; and was par- ticularly anxious to diffuse throughout the ranks that stimulus to gallant achievement which is ever produced by the spirit of emu- lation. Accordingly, General Ripley, with his brigade, reinforced by Porter's com- mand and two companies of artillery under Major Hindman, was ordered to take, the road we had opened ; force a passage which existed formerly near the mouth of Lyon's Creek, and cross the Chippewa. We found that the "enemy had erected no work for the defence of this passage, and we believed, that it might be approached undiscovered, as- the road lay through a thick wood, and the enemy had confined himself to the lower side of the Chippewa since the battle of the fifth. " The materials for abridge were procured by taking up barn-floors, and selecting the light boats, which were forwarded in wag- ons, with the troops : and it was not sup- posed that General Ripley would be delayed but a short time in crossing ; after which he was to place himself upon the enemy's right -flanK towards his rear — when we should be governed by circumstances. — General Ripley advanced, but did not pur- sue that prompt and decisive course which the service he was on particularly required. The day was far spent, and he continued to doubt and hesitate." The commanding- general advanced to the front, and assumed the immediate command. The materials for the bridge were then advanced to the creek, and Hindmau's artillery to com- mand the opposite bank. The enemy ap- peared, but after a short cannonade, was disconcerted and "retired. It was soon re- ported that, apprehensive of our forcing a passage to his rear, he had abandoned his works. This proved to be true; and we found that he had destroyed the guns of his batteries, by breaking off the trunnions, and had thrown them into the Chippewa. The construction of the bridge was abandoned. Ripley's command marched down a road- running along the stream, and Scott's ad- vanced on the main road to the bridge, which had been destroyed by the enemy. With our boats, we were enabled to cross, during the night, Scott's and Ripley's bri- gades, and a part of our artillery. "July ^th. The army marched in pursuit of the enemy, -with the exception of Genei-al Porter's command ; which was left to guard the baggage, and rebuild the bridge across the Chippewa. As the enemy had a strong new work on Queenstown Heights, it was expected that he would occupy this posi- tion. We were greatly surprised, when, at our approach, he abandoned this work, and fled, leaving his entrenching tools and a quantity of stores. We immediately occu- pfed his post ; and advanced our column of infantry to the -village of Queensto-wn. The enemy retired to Forts George and Niagara, and left the country open to us in every direction. We could march to the shore of the lake from our present position, in a few hours, whenever our fleet should arrive. " General Brown had been induced by the Government to rely implicitly on the co- operation of the fleet, in the execution of the plan of campaign prescribed — and had experienced the greatest anxiety concern- ing his arrival at the lake shore, by the time appointed to meet Commodore Chaun- cey — to -wit, the 10th of July. In anxious expectation of the speedy arrival of the fleet, the army encamped — shaving every advantage in their position, of strength, of health, and convenience, which the country would afford. General Porter, reinforced by a detachment of New York volunteers, and having rebuilt the bridge over the Chippewa, brought up the baggage, and joined the main army on the 10th. " After remaining for some days in painful suspense, we found that the original ar- rangement intended for our supplies could not be realized. We could draw nothing from the depots at Genesee river and Sodus, -without the fleet. We, therefore, were dependent for provisions upon a line of supplies from the rear. During this halt, nothing of moment occurred, . except the loss of General John Swift of the New York militia. ■ This brave ofiicer was killed by a soldier of a picket near Fort George, which the general, with a few men, had surprised and captured. Detachments oc- casionally marched to the lake shore, for forage or for observation, without being molested. " The Indians left us about the 20th, and 102 BROWN'S DIAKT. [1814. were crossed to Lewistown. On that day, the works on Queenstown Heights were blown up ; and the army took a position near Fort George. As this movement might induce the enemy to close upon our rear, it was hoped that he would come out of his works and give us an opportunity to engage him. On the 22d,~we re-occupied ourformer position on Queenstown heights, which the enemy had possessed with a few men ; who were soon routed, and fled. General Por- ter, with his usual zeal, pursued them, and captured a few prisoners : of the number were nine officers. " On the morning of the 23d, the com- manding general received by express a despatch from General Gaines, command- ing at Sackett's Harbor, with advice that our fleet were in port, and the commodore sick. In consequence . of the delay of the fleet, the major-general had ordered from Sackett's Harbor all the riflemen at that post, with a battering train of artillery. It was hoped that this reinforcement, by coasting the south shore of the lake, could reach in safety some of the harbors or creeks near the head of the lake ; and thence be transported to the army. In this the major-general was also disappointed. Major Morgan, after being embarked, was detained at Stony Island, under the convic- tion that he was in danger of being cap- tured by the enemy's squadron. This in- formation from General Gaines precluded all hope of co-operation from the fleet ; and of the timely arrival of Major Morgan. It was therefore resolved to fall back to the Chippewa; and be governed by circum- .stances. It was the intention of the com- manding general (in which all his princi- pal officers coincided), to march upon Bur- lington, having first received a small supply of provisions from Schlosser — and removed from the army all unnecessary baggage. "With this object in view, the ariny fell back to the Chippewa on the 24th. General Scott, ever ambitious to distinguish himself and his command, was solicitous to be al- lowed to march for Burlington Heights with the first brigade ; and expressed nis wish to this effect, on the evening of the 24th. On the morning of the 25th, he made the request in form ; and was so tenacious on the subject, that he appeared quite vexed that the commanding general would not divide his force : — Scott honestly believed, that with the troops he asked, he would cover himself with additional glory, and add to the fame of the army. " General Brown received, about noon, by express from .Colonel Swift, who was posted at Lewistown, advice that the enemy appear- ed in considerable force at Queenstown and on its heights ; that four of his fleet had a.T- rived during the preceding night, and were then lying near Fort Niagara; "and that a number of boats were in view, moving up the straits. Within a few minutes after this intelligence, the major-general was further informed, by Captain Denman, (of the quartermaster's department,) that tiie enemy was landing at Lewistown ; and that our baggage and stores at Schlosser, and on their way thither, were in immediate danger of capture. It was conceived that the most effectual method of recalling him from this object, was to put the army in motion to- wards Queenstown. If he were in the field on the Canada side of the strait, our only business was to meet and fight him, without loss of time, as General Brown had almost ceased to hope for co-operation or reinforce- ments from any quarter. While the sup- port on which the general hitherto relied had failed to appear, the enemy, having the command of the Lake, could reinforce at pleasure. "General Scott, with the first brigade, Towson's artillery, and all the dragoons and mounted men, was accordingly put in march on the road towards Queenstown. He was particularly instructed to report the appearance of the enemy, and to call for assistance, if that were necessary. Having the command of the dragoons, he would have, it was considered, the means of col- lecting and communicating intelligence. " On General Scott's arrival near the Falls, he learned that the enemy's forces were directly in his front, a narrow piece of wood alone intercepting his view of them. Wait- ing only to dispatch this information, but not to receive any communication in return, the general advanced upon them. Hearing the report of the cannon and small arms. General Brown at once concluded that a battle had commenced between the advance of our army and that of the enemy; and without waiting for information from Gen. Scott, ordered the second brigade and all the artillery to march as rapidly as possible to his support ; and directed Colonel Gard- ner to remain and see this order executed. He then rode with his aids-de-camp and Major McRee, with all speed, to the scene of action. As he approached the Falls, about a mile from the Chippewa, he met Major Jones, who had accompanied General Scott, bearing the message from him, ad- vising General Brown that he had met the enemy. From the additional information of Major Jones, it was concluded to order up General Porter's command ; and Major Jones was sent to General Porter with this order. Advancing further. General Brown met Major Wood, of the corps of engineers, who had also accompanied General Scott. He reported that the conflict between Scott and the enemy was close and desperate, and urged to hurry on reinforcements ; which were now marching with all possible rapidi- ty.- The major-general was accompanied by Major Wood to the field of battle. On his arrival, he found that General Scott had Chap. IV.] BROWN'S DIARY. 103 passed the wood, and engaged the enemy on the Queenatown road and the ground to theleft of it, with the 9th, 11th, and 22d regiments and Towson's artillery : the 25th having been detached to the right to . be governed by circumstances. . "Apprehending that these troops were much exhausted, notwithstanding the good countenance they showed, and seeing that they had suffered severely in the contest, General Brown determined to interpose a new line with the advancing troops, and thus disengage General Scott, and hold his brigade in reserve. At this time, Captains Ritchie and Biddle's companies of artillery had come into action, and the head of Gen. Ripley's column was nearly up with the right of General Scott's line. In conse- quence, it was believed, of the arrival of these fresh troops, which the enemy could see and began to feel, he fell back at this moment ; and General Scott's line gave a general huzza, that cheered the whole army. General Ripley was ordered to pass Scott's line and display his column in front : the movement was commenced in obedience to the order. Majors McRee and "Wood had been rapidly reconnoitering the enemy and his position : McRee reported that the ene- my had taken a new position with his line, and occupied a height with his artiUery, which gave him a great advantage, it being the key of the whole position : to secure a victory it was necessary to carry the artil- lery and seize this height. McRee was directed by the commanding-general to conduct the second brigade on the Queens- town road with a view to this object, and to prepare the 21st regiment, under Colonel Miller, for the duty. Ripley's brigade im- mediately advanced on the Queenstown road. General Brown, with his aids-de-camp and Major Wood, passing to the left of the second, in front of the first brigade, ap- proached the enemy's position, and saw an extended line of infantry formed for the support of his artillery. The 1st regiment of infiinfcry, under the command of Lieut.- Colonel Nicholas, which had arrived that day, and was attached to neither of the brigades, but had marched to the field of battle in the" rear of the second, was ordered promptly to break off to the left, and form a line facing the enemy's at the height — with the view of drawing his fire and at- tracting his attention, while Colonel Miller advanced with the bayonet upon his left flank to "carry his artillery. As the 1st r«giment, conducted by Major Wood, under the command of Nicholas, approached its position, the commanding-general rode to Colonel Miller and ordered him to charge and carry the, enemy's artiUery with the bayonet; he replied, in a tone of great promptness and good humor, " It shall be done, sir.'.' At this moment the 1st regi- ment gave, way under the. fire of the. enemy ; but Miller, without regard to this occur- rence, advanced steadily to his object, and carried the cannon and the heights in a style rarely equalled — ^never excelled. At the point of time when Colonel Miller charged, the 23d regiment was on his right, a little in the rear : General Ripley led this regiment :' it had some severe fighting, and in a degree gave way ■ but was promptly re-formed, and brought up on the right of the 21st, with which were connected de- tachments of the 17th and 19th. " General Ripley, being nowvrith his bri- gade formed in line, the enemy driven from his commanding ground, had the captured cannon, nine pieces, in his rear. The 1st regiment, having rallied, was brought into line by Lieutenant-Colonel Nicholas on the left of the 2d brigade : and General Porter having arrived, at this time, occupied the extreme left with his command. Our artil- lery formed between the 23d and 21st regi- ments, on the right. Having given the order to Colonel Miller to storm the heights, as he advanced. General Brown moved to his right flank, by the rear, with Major Wood and Captain Spencer, as far as the Queenstown road : turning down that road, he passed directly by the rear of the 23d regiment, then advancing to the support of Miller: the shouts of our soldiers on the height, "at this moment, assured him of Miller's success ; and he hastened on, de- signing to turn from the Queenstown road up Lundy's Lane. In the act o£ doing so. Wood and Spencer, who were about a horse's length before him, were very near riding upon a body of the enemy — it being nearly dark : and nothing prevented them from doing so, but the exclamation of an officer before them: — ' They are the Yan- kees.' This halted our officers : and upon looking down the road, we saw a line of British infantry drawn ,up facing the west- ern fence of the road, with its right resting on Lundy's Lane. Th'e British officer, who gave this alarm, had at that moment dis-- covered Major Jessup's battalion. The ma- jor, as has already been stated, had, at the commencement of the action, been ordered by General Scott to take ground to his right. He had succeeded in turning the enemy's left flank ; had captured General Riall, and several other officers, and sent them to camp ; — then searching his way silently towards where the battle was rag- ing, he had brought his regiment, the 25th, after but little comparative loss, up to the eastern fence of the Queenstown road, a little to the north of Lundy's Lane. The moment Major Jessup was apprised that the British officer had discovered him, he ordered his command to fire upon the enemy's line: the lines could not have been more than four rods apart. The slaughter was exces- sive; the enemy's line fled down the Queens- town road at. the third oi fourth fire. As. 104 BROWN'S DIAET. the. firing ceased, and General Brown ap- proached Major jessup, the latter inquired ■where he should form his regiment ; and he ■was directed to move up Lundy's Lane and form upon the right of the second brigade. " The enemy rallying his broken corps, and havingreceived reinforcements, -was now discovered in good order, and in great force. The commanding general, doubting the correctness of the information, to ascertain the truth, passed with his suite in front of our line. He could no longer doubt that a more extended line than he had before seen during the engagement was near, and ap- pe'ared advancing upon us. Captain Spen- cer, without a word, put spurs to his horse, and rode directly up to" the advancing line, then turning towards the enemy's right, inquired in a strong, firm voice, ' What re- giment is that V and was as promptly an- swered, 'The Royal Scots, sir.' General Brown and suite, without loss of time, threw themselves behind our own troops, and awaited the attack. The enemy advanced slowly and firmly upon our line. Perfect silence was observed throughout both armies until the enemy's line approached to within from four to six rods. Our troops had levelled their pieces, and the artillery was prepared : the order to fire was given, " and truly awful was its effect. The lines closed in part before that of the enemy was broken : he thgn retired precipitately, the American fire following him. The field was covered with the slain, but not an enemy upon his feet was to be seen. We dressed our lines upon the ground we occu- pied. General Brown was not disposed to leave it in the dark, believing it to be the hest in the vicinity. His intention then was to maintain it until the day should da^wn, and be governed by circumstances. " Our gallant and accomplished foe did not leave us much time for deliberation : he showed himself again -within twenty mi- nutes, apparently in good order and undis- mayed. General Ripley now urged the major-general to order up General Scott, who had, during this time, been held in re- serve with his three battalions. The major- general »rode in person to General Scott, and directed him to advance : that officer was prepared, and expecting the call. As General Scott advanced towards the right of the second brigade. General Brown pass- ed to the left to speak with General Porter, and see the countenance and condition of his militia, who, at that moment, had been thrown into some confusion, under a very galling and deadly fire from the enemy. They were, however, kept to their duty by the exertions of their chief, and most nobly sustained the conflict. The enemy was again repulsed by the whole line, and driven out of sight. " But a short time had elapsed, when he ■was once more seen advancing, in great [181-4. force, upon our main line of troops, under Generals Ripley and Porter. General Scott, now on our left, had given to his column a direction, which would have enabled him, in a few minutes, to have formed line in the rear of the enemy's right, and thus have brought the enemy between two fires : but, in a moment, most unexpectedly, a flank fire from a party of the enemy concealed on our left, falling upon the centre of Scott's command while in open column, blasted our proud expectations : his column was severed in two, one part passing to the rear-,:- the other, by the right flank of platoons, to- wards our main line. About this period General Bro-wn received his first wound, a musket ball passing through his right thigh. A few minutes after, Captain Spen- cer, aid-de-camp to the ma,jor-generaJ, re- ceived his mortal wound. The enemy had nearly closed with our main line. Moving up to the left of this line. General Bro-wn received a violent blow from a ball of some kind, on his left side. It did not enter, but such was its force, it nearly unhorsed him : (in the general's own words) he ' began to doubt his ability to sit his horse.' Meeting with his confidential friend. Major Wood, he thought proper to state to him his wounds and condition. Wood exclaimed, with great emotion, ' Never mind, my dear general ; you are gaining the greatest vic- tory which has ever been gained for your country.' His heroic soul (says the gene- ral) was exclusively occupied with the bat- tle, which was then, if possible, raging with redoubled fiiry. This was the last despe- rate effort made by the enemy to regain his position and artillery. A broader display of heroism was never obtained from the ranks. The hostile lines met, in several places, and we captured many prisoner^;- who surrendered at the point of the bayo- net. Porter's volunteers, who were not ex- celled by the regulars in meeting the charge, were seen precipitated, by the incitement of their gallant commander, upon the enemy's line, which they broke, and, hand to hand, compelled many to surrender. " The enemy now seemed to be effectually routed ; his forces disappeared. In a con- versation which occurred a few minutes after, between the major-general. Majors Wood and McRee, and two or three other officers, it was the unanimous belief of all, that we had nothing more to apprehend from the foe with whom we had been con- tending ; but it appeared to be admitted by. the whole that it would be proper to return to camp." The idea did not occur to any one present, that it would be necessary to leave behind a man or a cannon. It was observed by Major MoRee, expressly, that there would be no difficulty in removing the cannon? by hand. Wagons had been, by previous order of the major-general, pro- vided' for the wounded. General Brown, Chap. IV.] BROWN'S DIARY. 105 suffering Severely from his wound, now left the- field with Captain Austin, his surviving aid, observing to the other officers, that they would remain and aid General Ripley by all the means in their power. As the general moved towards camp, many scat- tering men were seen by him on the road ; not a man was running away, none ap- peared to .be alarmed, but having lost their officers, were seeking water, and were either drinking , or straggling for drink. This scene assured the major-general that it was proper for the army to return to camp, in order that the scattering men might be arranged to their companies and battalions, the army reorganized and refreshed before morning. An officer was accordingly sent to say to. General Ripley, that the wounded men ajid the captured cannon being brought off; the army would return to camp. "Being supported on his horse, the com- manding-general moved slowly to his tent. Within a few minutes it was reported to him that General Ripley had returned to camp, having left the captured cannon on the field. General Ripley being immedi- ately sent for. General Brown stated to him that there was no doubt on his mind, but that the enemy had retired, and that our victory was complete. He appeared to be of the same opinion, as was every officer present. General Brown then, in strong and' emphatic language, ordered General Ripley to re-organize his battalions, to see that they were refreshed with whatever could be afforded in the camp, and put himself, with all the men he could muster, of every corps, on the field of battle, as the day dawned, there to be governed by circumstances ; at all events, to bring off the captured cannon. It was not believed that the enemy would dare to attack him, if 'he showed a good Countenance. Gen. Ripley left General Brown under the con- viction that he would execute the order given to him ; he did not make the slight- est objection to it; none was suggested from any quarter. " As day ajjproached, finding that no co- lumn had moved. General Brown ordered his staff to go to every commanding officer of corps, and order them to be promptly prepared to march in obedience to the order given to General Ripley ; but it was sunrise before the army had crossed the Chippewa. General Ripley led on his troops as far as Bridgewater Mills. Halting his column there, hi returned to the commanding- general, and stated his objections to pro- ceeding further. General Brown persisted, when he informed the general, that General Porter was also opposed to proceeding. At these words, General Brown replied, ' Sir, you will do as you please ;' and had no further intercourse with him until they met at Buffalo. " General Brown had entertained no dou.bt of the intelligence or personal bravery of General Ripley, nor has he ever expressed himself to that effect. In consequence, however, of the events of the night of the 25th, and more especially on the morning of the 26 th, his confidence in him as a com- mander was impaired. The general be- lieved that he dreaded responsibility more than danger; in a word, that he had a greater share of physical than moral cou- rage. General Scott and the major-gene- ral being both severely wounded, a courier was despatched, without loss of time, to General Gaines, ordering him on, to take the command of 'the gallant remains of the army of Niagara." The military or even the general reader vvill hardly object to my adding General Jessup's narrative to General Brown's of those remarkable events, as follows : " After the battle Majors Wood and Jessup, and Captain Ketchum, examined it at dawn on the morning of the 7th, and were nnani- mously of opinion that the road could be made practicable with but little labor, and that a force might be put in motion on it which would be able to attack the enemy in flank, or turn his position. And the road was repaired in the course of the day, so as to admit of the passage of artillery over it. On the morning of the 8th, Gfeneral Rip- ley, with his brigade, Porter's volunteers and Indians, and two companies of artille- ry, was ordered to move rapidly on this road," cross the Chippewa, and attack the enemy's right flank, whilst Scott, with his brigade and the remainder of the artillery, should hold him in check in front. Plank and timber had been prepared to construct a bridge, shouM it become necessary, which, with a number of small boats to be used as pontoons, were loaded on wagons^and trans- ported on the road to the Chippewa. Ge- neral Ripley, finding the difficulties to be overcome greater than had been anticipated, did not move so rapidly as was expected. General Brovm, impatient of the delay, pro- ceeded to the front and took the direction of the operations. Arrangements were made to construct a bridge, and an advan- tageous position was taken by the , artillery to cover the passage of the river, and com- mand the opposite shore. General Riall, alarmed at this movement, in place of send" ing his light troops to defend the pass, de- stroyed his heavy artillery, tore up the bridge over the Chippewa, abandoned his worlcs, and retired to Queenstown. Scott'a and Ripley's brigades crossed the Chippewa in boats during the night, and General Por- ter with his command was left on the west- ern side in charge of the baggage, with or- ders to repair the Fridge, pass the baggage over, and join the army as soon as possible. " General Brown, with the troops that had crossed, moved forward on the morning of the 9th, expecting, as the enemy had a 106 JESSUP'S NARRATmE. strong work at Queenstown, that General Riall -would wait for Mm and fight there ; but as we approached, the work was aban- doned so precipitately that the enemy left his entrenching tools and a large quantity of public stores in our possession. We oc- cupied the heights, and General Riall, after - detaching part of his force to Fort George, took a position in the open country with the remainder of his force ten or fifteen miles from the fort. " General Porter, whose force had been augmented by a detachment of New York volunteers, having repaired the Chippewa bridge, brought up the baggage of the army and joined on the 10th. The infantry was then pushed forward to the village of Queenstown, and the artillery, with Porter's brigade, occupied the heights. The army remained in this position until the morning of the 20th: in tke mean time several de- tachments were made to the Lake and into the country; but nothing of any conse- quence occurred except that in a skirmish with a British picket, a post of the picket was captured by Gen. Swift, of the New York volunteers, who was murdered by one of his prisoners. "On the 20th the army moved to the vici- nity of Fort George, and two companies of the 25th, under Captain White and Lieut. Seymour, engaged and drove in the ene- my's advanced pickets. Major Jessup be- ing officer of the day, had advanced with those companies to reconnoiter the ground, and observe the enemy previous to posting the guards for the night. On tho"22d the army returned to Queenstown, which the enemy had occupied in our absence, and from which he retired on our approach. The writer could never comprehend the ob- ject of the movement to Fort George. We had no battering train, and our force was not sufficient to warrant the attempt to car- ry the place by storm, particularly when General Rjall, with a force known to be nearly equal to ours, was in the field, and within striking distance of us. "We should have sought and beat him first, and then we might have taken the fort at our leisure. It is an axiom in military science, that where the alternative is pre- sented of a fort to be attacked, or an army in the field to be fought, the army should be fought first, because, even with a nume- rical superiority the assailant might be so crippled in the attack on the fort as to fall an easy prey to the army in the field. Had Riall been attacked, his whole force must have been captured or destroyed ; and our troops, flushed with victory, could have beaten Drummond on his arrival, and after- wards have taken the forts on both sides of the Niagara ; but the favorable moment was allowed to pass, and we were conse- quently, during the remainder of the cam- paign, tbrow;[x upon the defensive. General [1814 Brown, contrary to his usual habit of rely- ing on his own sound judgment, was, it is thought, overruled by the zeal and impor- tunities of General Scott, who stood almost alone in favor of attacking Fort George, whilst Porter, Leavenworth, McRee, Wood, and Jessup, and before the matter was de- cided, Ripley, were for attacking RiaU. In- formation having been received of the ar- rival of Lieut.-Gen. Drummond-with large reinforcements, our army broke up its en- campment at Queenstown on the morning of the 24th, and retired behind the Chip- pewa, except the 9th regiment, which was left in and near the block-house, on the north side of that river. " On the morning of the 25th, it was ascer- tained that Gen. Drummond was at the vil- lage of Queenstown with a large force ; and Gen. Brown was informed that he was de- taching the greater part of his force to the American side of the Niagara, against our depQt at Schlosser. Major Leavenworth was officer of the day. Major Jessup crossed the bridge about 2 o'clock, P. M., and was informed by Leavenworth that a detach- ment of the enemy was near Mrs. Willson's house, about two or three miles from Chip- pewa, but in what force he could not ascer- tain. A picket consisting of a troop of dragoons, and at least two companies of in- fantry, had been distinctly seen, and Majors Leavenworth and Jessup both expressed the opinion that Gen. Drummond would not trust such a force in our immediate neigh- borhood beyond supporting distance from the army. Major Leavenworth had report- ed at head-quarters what he had seen, but Gen. Brown was so strongly impressed with the belief that the enemy's main object was Schlosser, that he could not believe there was any other force than a few light troops in our front, which he supposed the British general had pushed forward to cover his real design, and believing that to menace Fort George would be the better plan to counteract the movement on Schlosser, he ordered Gen. Scott with his brigade. Tow- son's ?,rtillery, Harris' dragoons, and all the mounted volunteers, to move immediately to Queenstown. The brigade moved about 5 o'clock, P. M., and with the dragoons and volunteers, perhaps exceeded t«'elve hun- dred men — the 25th was about three hun- dred and fifty rank and file. As we ad- vanced the enemy's picket slowly retired, and it soon became evident that he was in considerable force. Information was re- ceived at Mrs. Willson's that Gen. Riall commanded, and that a wood, not exceed- ing half a mile across, alone separated him from us. The 9th regiment, which had been detached to the left, was called in, and General Scott, having despatched an officer to apprise General Brown of the po- sition and probable force of the enemy, in- formed the officers commanding corps that Chap. IV.] JESSUP'S NIERATIVB. 107 he would immediately attack. He ordered Major Jessup to the right, with instructions to pass through the wood, and be governed by circumstances. The enemy began the battle by a fire on our advance, commanded by Captain Pentland. The 9th, 11th, and 22d regiments passed the wood, and formed within four or five hundred paces of the enemy's line. Captain Towson posted his artillery on the right of the 9th, and a most obstinate and sanguinary conflict ensued, which continued perhaps an hour. On our side both officers and men evinced the most heroic courage, but the enemy was so su- perior in force and position, and his battery so destructive, that no impression could be made upon him. When Major Jessup moved to the right, he discovered a narrow road ■through the wood, which the enemy had either not observed or had neglected to oc- cupy. Determining at once to avail him- self of the advantage thus presented, he left Lieut. Seymour with one light compa- ny to occupy in extended order the whole front which the regiment would have co- vered in line, and advancing rapidly on the load, was soon on the enemy's flank. That •part of the line being composed of militia and volunteers, fled in disorder without firing a gun, and the major placed himself in Riall's rear. Here he encountered "seve- ral detachments of the enemy, aU of which he routed, and made numerous prisoners. Whilst making dispositions to attack the enemy's battery in rear. Major Jessup was informed by a prisoner that General Drum- mond was a short distance behind, with a heavy reserve. Sensible that, under the cir- cumstances of the case, it would be folly to attempt to carry his intention into effect, and that the safety of the army depended upon holding Drummond in check, and keeping him out of action until General Brown should arrive with Ripley's and Porter's brigades, he seized the Niagara road, took a position to attack advantage- ously any force that might advance, and detached Captain Ketchum with his compa^ ny to make prisoners of all who should at- tempt to pass either to the front or rear. General RiaU and ten or fifteen other of- ficers, and among them the aid of General Drummond, were captured, with from two to three hundred men. The General, with seven or eight of the officers, was sent to the rear of our line, but several of the officers, and nearly all the private sol- diers, escaped. We had, however, deprived them of their arms. It' had now be- come quite dark, and the firing had partly ceased, when, about twenty minutes after Riall had been sent off the field. General Scott's command gave three cheers, which drew a heavy fire froni tlie enemy. Major Jessup moved with his command slowly and silently towards the rear, keeping a fence between his line^ of march and the Niagara road. He had proceeded but a short dis- tance when he was informed that troops were advancing, and he soon met Captain Biddle, of the artillery, from whom he re- ceived the pleasing intelligence that Gene- ral Brown had arrived with his whole force, and was about to renew the action. Not knowing where to find General Brown or General Scott, or where to apply for orders. Major Jessup decided to resume his former position in the rear, and he had nearly at- tained it, when he met a part of the ene- my's force advancing, which he attacked and routed with great slaughter. A few moments previously, a heavy firing on and near the heights announced that our troops had attacked the enemy there. General Brown then approached Major Jessup, and informed him that Colonel Miller had car- ried the heights with the bayonet, and had taken the enemy's artillery. By his order the major fell back and joined General Ripley, on the heights, by whom he was posted with his -command on the right of the line which was then forming. "The enemy gave us but little time to rest ; he advanced in line, supported by a heavy reserve, evidently with the inten- tion of charging ; his left was almost in contact with the 25th before the firing com- menced. Our troops took deliberate aim, and our fire was so terrible, that in a few minutes his line recoiled — ^then broke, and officers and men fled from the field. Our line was adjusted-, and the cartridges taken from the boxes of the soldiers who had been killed and wounded, and distributed among those who remained imhurt. In about half an hour, the enemy approached again in great force, and in good order, and after a severe conflict which lasted fifteen or twenty minutes, he broke and again fled from the field. Major Jessup, who, about the time General Riall was taken, had re- ceived a wound by a ball passing through the right shoulder, received in this contest a slight wound in the neck, and a shot through the right hand. In a short time the enemy was again seen to be advancing, apparently with undiminished force. To preserve the front of the 25th, Major Jessup was obliged to form his men in a single rank, and to put all the files closer into that rank. . The contest was now more obstinate than in any of the previous attacks of the enemy ; for half an hour the blaze from the muskets of the two lines mingled ; but ou? fire was so well directed, and so destructive, that the enemy was again compelled to retire. During this contest. General Scott joined the 25th, and whilst conversing vrith Major Jessup, received a wound in the left shoulder, which compelled him to leave the field. General Brown soon after approached and inquired for General Scott, wishing to devolve on him the command, as he was severely wounded j but being informed that 108 JESSTTP'S NARRATIVE. General Scott was also wounded, he retired. Major Jessup soon after received a violent contusion on the breast by a piece of a shell, or perhaps the stock of a rocket, which brought him to the ground ; in a few moments, however, he rose and resumed his command, which had temporarily de- volved on Captain Murdock, In this at- tack Captain Kinney and Ensign Hunter, of the 25th, were killed, and Lieutenants Sholer, M'Chain and Dewitt were severely wounded. 'So sanguinary had the last con- flict been, that, when it terminated. Ma- jor Jessup found a considerable interval between his corps and the troops on the left of him.- He formed the 25th behind a fence, where Major Leavenworth, with the fragments of the 9th, 11th, and 22d, not exceeding in all a hundred men, soon joined him and took post on the right. By- great exertions on the part of Captains Murdock and Watson, the 25th had been furnished with a good supply of cartridges before Major Leavenworth joined. On the morning of the 26th, the wounded were placed in boats, and in the evening of that day arrived at Buffalo. Whilst this movement was being made by water, the army abandoned its strong position behind •the Chippewa; and after destroying the greater part of its stores, fell back to the ferry opposite Black Rock, a short distance below Fort Erie ; and G-eneral Ripley, who commanded; but for the opposition made by Wood, MoRee, Towson, Porter, and other officers, would have retreated to the American shore. The army was finally encamped at Fort Erie by the positive order of General Bro-wn ; and measures were taken immediately to cover the troops. — Had General Drummond availed himself of this hasty and ill-judged retreat, not a man of our army could have escaped. Whether it was the purpose of General Ripley to de- fend Fort Erie, or to cross the Niagara, he should have held the Chippewa, which was a strong fortress in itself. There were only two places where it could have been passed ; at the bridge which he commanded, and which three hundred men were sufficient to defend against the whole force of the ene- my, and at the junction of Lyons Creek with the Chippewa, where there was a floating bridge. To cross at the former place so, long as the American general chose to hold it, was impossible ; and to have crossed at the latter, would have inr volved the destruction of the British army, even supposing our army to have perform- ed one half of what it was capable of; for Drummond, after having eirossed at Lyons Creek, would have had several miles to march on a narrow and difficult road, through a dense forest, liable, at every hundred yards, if opposed by an active and determined enemy, to have fallen into an MJibuBcade. Half of Porter's brigade, with [1814. what remained of the 9th and 25th regi- ments, would have been sufficient to defend this defile. The American general could have held General Drunimond in oheck during the remainder of the campaign. At all events, had his object been to hold Fort Erie, he should have maintained his position at the Chippewa until the Fort had been strengthened, and an entrenched camp formed near it ; had his object been to de- stroy Fort Brie and abandon Canada, (as it no doubt was,) he should unquestionably have maintained his position until the sick, the wounded, the baggage and public stores had been sent to Buffalo, and transports prepared to cross the army at once to that place. By leaving the Chippewa he put the army, its artillery, all its supplies, and the whole Niagara frontier into the power of the enemy. Fortunately for his reputa- tion, and that of the country, Drummond failed to avail himself of any of the advan- tages thus offered to him. Ripley was per- sonally brave ; displayed great gallantry on the night of the 25th ; — ^but he was a junior officer ; — his flight from Chippewa had shaken the confidence of all the principal officers of the army in his capacity to com- mand in chief; that of General Brown had been previously shaken — ^who, there- fore, sent orders to General Gaines at Sack- ett's Harbor to repair to Fort Erie and take command of the army." Among the mortally wounded was Gene- ral Brown's aid. Captain Ambrose Spencer, bearing the name, and son of an eminent magistrate. Chief Justice of the State of New York at the era of her greatest juris- prudential celebrity. Yoving Spencer was taken prisoner. General Drummond, with assurances of his convalescence, proposed to exchange Captain Spencer for Captain Loring, the aid of Drummond; taken prisoner by Major Jessup. General Bro-wn, though he questioned the fairness of an exchange of an uninjured officer for one severely, and who might be mortally wounded, sent a fla^ to inquire into Captain Spencer's con- dition, whether he was even alive. The messenger with the flag was detained, without being permitted to see- Spencer. Anxious for his release. General Bro-wn informed Drummond that Captain Loring should be given even for Spencer's body. His corpse was accordingly sent to the American shore, and General Brown re- quested the Secretary of War, as matter of faith, however revolting to honor and hu- manity, to relea.se Captain Loring. General Scott's gallantry at the Falls of Niagara made his fortune ; for he Jiever was in battle again till thirty-three years afterwards in iVIexico. So true is it that a single occasion, -well seized, often esta- blishes, as failure to make the most of one opportunity, mars, character for life. His brevet was unanimously and warmly Chap. IT.] REFLECTIONS, ON WAR. 109 approved. As he returned from Canada, ■wounded, but convalescent and buoyant with youthful spirits, respect and attention ■welcomed him everywhere. The students of Princeton College, -when he arrived at that seat of youth, rising to influence, saluted his presence ■with the cordial ho- mage of the least selfish and most enthusi- astic of mankind. Arriving there during the annual commencement, the young gen- tleman who delivered the valedictory ora- tion, introduced the general in his speech ■with electrical effect on the auditory. The to^wn of Petersburg, in his native county, presented him a sword, and "what was much more, both to his honor and his happiness, one of the richest and more respectable families of Virginia received him into its bosom by. marriage ■with a lady of uncom- mon attractions, to -whose hand it -would have been vain for him to aspire ■without considerable, above all, military distinction. If battle, bloodshed and hostilities are not mere animal contention of brute force, but ■war justifiable as a necessary and in- evitable evil, there are moral consequences ■which philosophy extracts from its dis- tresses to be weighed as national results. None but fiends or fools could contemplate ■without horror, the sixteen hundred human beings killed or mutilated at Bridgevrater, unless some great benefit like religion flourishing from martyrdom, sprang from the blood-soaked eartjh, in such other^wise lamentable destruction of life. To ■wage the "war declared by the United States against Great Britain, invasion of Canada ■was almost the only alternative. Exulting in the miserable abortion of that attempt in 1813, and surprised by the mere fact of the insignificant incursion in 1814, but mortified by undeniable defeat of superior numbers at Chippewa, the belligerent re- presentatives of England, in that colony, bent on retribution, resolved to wash out an unlooked-for stain which tarnished their great nation's character, and endangered their dominion. The impression, even illu- sion, of superiority is more powerful than armies. Vastly superior in numbers in Ca- nada, considerably so at both battles at the Falls of Niagara, deeply versed in the art, and familiar with the habitude of warfare, a people justly renowned for stubborn va- lor, always hard, as many believed impos- sible, to beat, were fairly worsted in the two Canadian engagements. Victory, a decisive, is not the only test of national confidence and estimate. Numbers are not always masters ; even the vanquished may be formidable. Four millions, for seven years, contending against eighty millions, founded, the Prussian monarchy, as three overcame twenty, after seven years of revo- lutionary resistance to Great Britain in America. The British Annual Register's summary of the battle of Bridgewater, adopting General Drummond's assumption of his victory, qualified, if not annulled, the consequence by adding, " that though an- other American attempt to penetrate into Canada was defeated by British valor and discipline finally triumphant, yet the im- provement of the American troops in those qualities, was eminently conspicuous." — Thus, the British soldier's assurance of suc- cess was impaired by confession, that the army was teaching its foes how to conquer them. American war, on however small a scale, which had, if not arrested, at least alarmingly contested, the British trident, was endangering the lance, too. No na- tional arrogance could be so stolid, as, with- out absurdity, to treat such enemies with contempt. And what was to be gained by further warfare, but teaching them how to excel their masters ? Continual skirmishes, sieges, sorties, and other demonstrations, following the two pitched battles in Cana- da, proved only corollaries to the problem solved by them, that the American army, like the navy, was superior to that of Eng- land. As soon as the double elements of military ascendant were well combined, and strict discipline added to stern enthu- siasm, the mercenary Briton was subdued. Nations, like individuals, have their trials. The effect of a single peradventure, small, but any unquestionable proof of courage, fortitude, and capacity for forcible vindica- tion, mostly durable, encourages repetition, and impresses belief that it is characteristic. Coarse, vulgar English prejudice, uttered by envious and odious journalism, continued abuse of the United States as a licentious and knavish nation. But English better sense perceived, and dispassionate judg- ment pronounced them also martial and formidable. Not a little of that impression came from the seemingly insignificant inva- sion of Canada, which, during the months of July, August, and September 1814, not only defied, but invariably defeated, the great power of Great Britain by land and water, ending, perhaps fortunately, not by the conquest of a British province, but dis- comfiture of British armies and fleets, where- ever Americans encountered them. Further results, political, moral, and belligerent of war, were attested by the Canadian campaigns of 1813, when aU was disastrous with superior American num- bers, compared with 1814, when all was successful with inferior. If the events of 1814 elevated internationally the Ameri- can character, and insured the country from further foreign aggression, what was the effect of hostihties on republican insti- tutions, on the American Union, on indi'vi- dual morals and general welfare? War is a science learned only by itself, and per- fected, like all other sciences, by appro- priate professors. Without martial fecul- ties, no nation can protect itself from in.- 110 REFLECTIONS ON WAR. justice. Mere unregulated martial spirit ia not enough: it must be organized. Mili- tary practice, the habit of warfare, confi- dence in themselves, the courage of corps, disciplined subordination, are the schools of soldiery. If this country were near Europe, a standing army would be neces- sary to its existence. Inscrutable destiny is so preponderant in human affairs that tlfe foreign wars of the United States have been with a mother country, to whom it was bound by the strongest ties, with France, to whom it was indebted for inde- pendence, and with Mexico, a neighboring republic, whose interests with ours are al- most the same. It is vain to suppose that any wisdom can always preserve peace, or policy select either enemies or friends. Has war proved detrimental to republi- canism? Democratic progress has been con- tinual since the declaration of independence, and military chief magistrates its most liberal promoters. Washington reduced at- tempted centralism to republican federal- ism, which Jackson carried to democra- tic radicalism. A severe and arbitrary re- strictive system, and the annexation, by questionable constitutionality, of Louisiana, were Jefferson's expedients for avoiding war, which was declared under the Presi- dencies of Madison and Polk, the least mili- tary of American chief magistrates. Has that government proved disadvan- tageous to war? The common European belief, till dispelled by the French revolu- tionary wars, was that mankind, naturally timid, ignorant and slothful, require a separate class to lead them into danger, and teach them not to fear death ; a caste educated and endowed with hereditary privileges, to induce them to set examples of heroism. Nobles were the only officers. Fearful soldiers, their instinctive timidity reformed by noble officers, artificially cou- rageous, were to be led into danger and instructed in heroism. Soldiers were to be raised to courage by compulsion, like flowers by manure. But whatever their aptitude, they could never become leaders. Enlisted at low wages from the vulgar and refuse of the merest populace, armies were thus commanded under the great Frederick, Marlborough, Turenne and other renowned leaders. In England the basis was the same, but with a mercenary superstruc- ture, whether noble or plebeian : and money still commissions their officers. The seaman is impressed, the soldier hired, the officer buys his rank. Everywhere throughout Europe, law or society has invented an honor which is not courage, and a point of honor often dishonorable for the profes- sion of classes and the protection of states. A Grecian said, better an army of deer commanded by a lion, than an army of lions led by a stag. But Roman military virtue [1814, was not confined to any class ; and the French Revolution demonstrated, by a large harvest of military heroes, that they rise from the ranks as well as aristocracies. The American experiment, taking sol- diers by enlistment, is no advance beyond European hostilities, if not retrograde ; for except in Great Britain, European soldiers are no longer enlisted. To officers, the Unit- ed States allow no titles, though more than any European pay for all lower grades ;'both officers and soldiers no half pay or pension for the war of 1812, nor the permanency or consideration which in other countries at- tend superannuated officers. The emolu- ments, livelihood and prospects of all the superior American officers, are narrow, compared with those of like grades in other countries. Scott, Worth, Jessup, Tow- son, and some few others of the distinguish- ed in the campaigns of 1814, are still in the army. But Miller, the hero of Bridgewater, and McNeill obscurely vegetate on the stinted salaries of custom-houses, while many of the surviving officers of that war are compelled to earn a living as they may. What, then, was it that nerved the arms that struck so powerfully for victory at the Falls of i Niagara? Why is it that but one traitor officer nas in seventy years disgraced the American army? Why, without na- tional vanity or historical romance, may it not be asked, has the star-spangled banner, by sea and ashore, seldom if ever been struck when Americans were disciplined ? It cannot be from the privates alone that the spirit came to overcome the English ; for they were all got by enlistment, and many of them the same by birth and habits as the English themselves. Energy of wUl put forth in constant efforts for advancement, educa- tion, consequent greater intelligence and activity, familiarity with fire-arms, lives of adventure and hardihood, will explain some superiority, but not the whole, which nearly every trial throughout 1814 evinced. Do I flatter myself and mislead by the asser- tion, that the greater the liberty the greater the excellence, whilever the liberty is regu- lated ; that man, like religion, like trade, like at least the useful, if not the fine arts and sciences, like everything perfectly li- berated from all but indispensable govern- ment, is improved ? What is indispensable time only can determine, and that time is yet only in process of fulfilment; but in military as in civil progress, has so far vindicated self-go verm ent. These reflections will be found justified by an almost unbroken course of success, when- ever war tested national superiority, till the peace. Not till the 3d August, 1814, was Lieu- tenant-General Drummond sufficiently re- covered from the discomfiture of Bridge- water, to follow the American invaders to REFLECTIONS ON "WAR. Chap. IV.] Fort Erie, to which he laid siege with about four thousand, nearly all regular troops, who, after attempting to carry it by storm, on the 12th August, were demolished by a sortie on the 17th September. If Commo- dore Chauncey, in July, or General Izard, in September, as ordered, had supported Brown, there is every reason to believe that the whole British army, under Drum- mond, would have been compelled to ca- pitulate in Canada, like Burgoyne at Sara- toga, and Cornwallis at Yorktown. Ordinary appreciation, and admiration of battle and victory, is naturally greater, when hundreds of thousands of combatants, led by renowned captains, with immense carnage, contend for provinces, frontiers, kingdoms and dynasties, in the heart of the country ravaged by hostilities. Yet, their philoso- phy teaches, that the little victories in Ca- nada were significant, if not decisive, of empire in this hemisphere. National strug- gle begun for independence, and renewed for similar principles, was to determine which was the strongest people in America. On few occasions, if ever before, had Bri- tish soldiers turned to fly from Americans in equal combat; much less in superior numbers. British troops are seldom put to flight. There belongs to the free-born Briton a spirit of hardihood, and pride of endurance, which his American offspring cannot but respect. American reverence for England, mixed by English injustice ^and contumely, with inimical recollections, nevertheless is so impressive, that Ameri- cans seldom think Englishmen vincible. That filial reverence , was a revolutionary disadvantage, under which they contended for independence, diminished, but not ex- tinct during the many years of British domineering and American submission, which provoked the long-deferred war of 1812. Natural impression, and habitual c>iusideration, required violent shocks to provoke American vanity to self-respect, and overcome filial and colonial vene- ration. A small American army over- came a lirger .one of those strenuous men of the mother country, by superior intelligence, agility, and the still greater energy of greateT freedom. The charm of British invincibility, shivered to pieces at .sea on the deck of a single frigate, was broken near the Falls of Niagara by a bri- gade. Each victory inaugurated a career of triumphs. A hundred thousand soldiers could not do it more effectually. Every succeeding Canadian battle manifested, till those of Plattsburg and Erie established, that the confidence and illusion of success, so largely instrumental to its attainment, were transplanted from the British to the American standard, ashore' as at sea; that vows of victory 6r' death, much oftener led to victory than death ; that the American army, like the navy, could be victorious if 111 it would. The secret revealed by the blaze of triumph made known that far from im- possible, it was feasible, if rightly willed and bravely insisted on. To yield, long the American, became at last British necessity, and the habit exacted by the one and con- ceded by the other people. Contumelious English annals began to confess, that the Americans were not degenerate offspring of Britain. Americans, more afraid of Eng- land than of death, enforced that reality. After a long tract of discomfiture, when the English General Stuart, with a few thou- sand men, boldly faced and defeated the all-conquering French at Maida, that little victory turned the tide of triumph which soon began to flow, till, under Wellington, at last it reached the Emperor in the metro- polis of France. To the student of history, the view reaches farther in the doctrine of warfare, its martial, political and territorial effects. The battles which made Cromwell the master of Great Britain and arbiter of Eu- rope, which immortalized Turenne, . and which signalized the prowess of Spain, when mistress of the world, were fought by small armies of a few thousand inen. Cou- rage, strategy, every military virtue, were as well displayed on the smaller as the vaster scale. And since, beginning with Louis the XlVth's lust of aggrandizement, armies, carried further by Marlborough and Frederick, till stretched to enormous di- mensions by Napoleon, immense forces have struggled with immense carnage for mastery, have France, Germany or Spain changed materially and permanently their boundaries or power? Military reaction has equalled action with mechanical pre- cision. Nations, states and principalities, overrun by hundreds of thousands of men in arms, with conscription and paper mo--^ ney, swelling the bulk of war, remain much as they were when ten thousand settled their fate. The Canadian tournaments which began at Chippewa, not planned by government or systematically executed, gaining no ter- ritory, costing some blood, made strong im- pression both in England and America. Just where Great Britain, turning from vanquished France, transported from Bor- deaux the veteran conquerors of number- less battles, and the American government shrunk justly alarmed by the vast display of British power, and overwhelming shout of continental vengeance, a few young of- ficers without experience of arms, but by mortifying defeats, the army like' the navy, long trodden down by European contumely and fettered by republican parsimony, re- solved by noble effort to rescue the Ame- rican flag from its degradation where it had been most degraded, in Canada, or perish in the glorious attempt, like the haval effort at sea. Nor did the army, like, the "navy, 112 REFLECTIONS ON WAR. [1814. fear the trial, for, like the navy, they felt the just confidence of their capacity at least equal to that of their enemies. By the peace of Europe, this country was left single handed to strive against Great Britain ; a predicament providential for the future and lasting amity of both nations. Revocation of the orders in council removed what Eng- land deemed the chief cause of war. Peace in Europe put an end to that for which the United States stiU contended. England had no occasion or pretext for impressment ; the United States had no cause of complaint. Nothing but the theory of a principle re- mained in controversy. Still Great Britain persisted with re- doubled power, vigor, resoui-ce and acri- mony; the United States almost humbly seeking peace. In that relative position of the belligerents, the last campaign was fortunate for this country, warning to that, salutary and durably tranquilizing for both. Peace with Canada conquered might have been long deferred and dearly bought, might have cost the pacific institutions and predilections of the American republic. Peace without the Canadian battles, without Chippewa, Bridgewater, Erie and Plattsburg to memorialize, would have been too humili- ating to one nation and too flattering to the other to last. It must have been an uneasy truce. Both belligerents needed more war ; which Providence gave such as to be the pledge of lasting and respectful amity ; the only- relation that nations seldom interrupt and never regret. The hazardous martial excursion, which Brown and Scott, perhaps contrary to human reason, led into Canada, a rash experiment to conquer or die there, a selfish thirst per- adventure of mere renown, revived the martial and national spirit, created an army, raised the drooping credit of govern- ment, excited the enthusiasm, and corrobo- rated the union, of the people. The tone of public sentiment was entirely changed. English inveterate and revengeful enmity most opportunely still further invigorated American nationality. Battles in Canada which conquered nothing but victory, did more to make peace than all its solicitation at St. Petersburg and London, negotiation and arrangement at Ghent. The treaty of Ghent without those battles would have been the shame of the United States, and beginning of another war. The veterans of the American revolution had fallen into the sere : their sap was gone. The officers of the mere skeleton of an army kept on foot, had never seen a battle, or performed more than garrison duty. Except some Indian combats, there had been no battle in North America for thirty years, during which period, the most enervating influence of lucrative prosperity had undermined American energy, which was nearly all turned to growing rich. Till an English frigate struck her flag and an English army fled, there was no trial of strength with the mighty English, proved in a thousand combats by sea and land throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and Ame- rica, magnified to American reverence by irresistible exaggeration, fomented by Eng- lish arrogance. The best American regular soldiers were but a few dispersed sea fen- cibles, employed to keep dilapidated forts or overcome marauding savages. Recol- lections of Bunker's Hill, Saratoga and King's Mountain were obscured by the pusillanimous surrenders at Detroit and Niagara, the dreadful massacres at Raisin and Hampton; the miserable abortions at Williamsburg and La Cole. A fewdavming successes introduced the third year of hos- tilities ; two prior years of which but for naval prowess would have been an histori- cal tissue of American incapacity for war. The jousts on the banks of the Niagara were like duels, which human reason condemns but human infirmity sufiers. War itself is only a necessary evil, unjustifiable in all but extreme cases. When its ravages and bloodshed are diminished, shall it therefore be condemned or its triumph less? The national sacrifice in Canada, at a small cost, taught Great Britain to respect the United States more effectually and less painfully than its conquest would have done. Bioodiej battles, more extensive and expensive con- quests would not better have inculcated the necessity of forbearance and the wisdom of peace. Thirty-five years of it since, not- withstanding numerous continual causes of contention, attest the virtue of that amity which those battles contribute to ensure. As before intimated, the United States have lost ground by treaties, but never by hostilities. Several treaties with Great Britain in 1783, 1794, 1815, 1841, 1846, and many negotiations demonstrate that her controversies with the United States -have always been more success- ful, by the influences of consanguinity and arts of diplomacy, than by force of arms. Stratagetical science and military learn- ing may censure Brown's experimental bat- tles as contrary to well-known rules of the art of war. His magazines left at Schlosser, where the enemy might at any time have taken them and paralyzed thereby his whole adventure, his little army divided at both battles, fighting by detachments, when every principle of the common sense of attack dictates consolidation of power and concentration of blows, not to mentioa other less important errors, have been cen- sured, and are obnoxious to it. But there is genius as well as fortune in war: of which the ruling spirit is that courage at the same time ardent and considerate which will not brook defeat. By that he triumphed over his ovrn errors and his CfiAP, rv.] RESULTS OF BROWN'S SUCCESS. 113 enemy's resistance, not merely by success, but by certainly deserving it. Bi-owti's Canadian campaign of less than seventy days, monumental for his fame, glo- rious for the American army, was inestima- ble in its beneficial national consequences. It defended the Atlantic seaboard more ef- fectually, and infinitely cheaper than a hundred thousand militia coula have done. With complete command of the waters, the British could transport and land forces as, and where they would, which it was impos- sible to anticipate, provide against, and^for the most part to resist. From the time of for- mal annunciation to our government of bar- barons systems of warfare, pursued through- out the summer and autumn of 1814, from Eastport to New Orleans, there was hardly a city or place near the coast, Portland, Salem, Newport, New London, New York, Balti- more, Norfolk, Washington and so to New Orleans that was not threatened, many at- tacked, some captured and all kept in con- tinual alarm. No army could be every- where ready to repel these some actual, all apprehended assaults. The invasion of Canada kept a large hostile force occupied there. If Brown's, instead'Of two or three had been eight or ten thousand strong, they would probably have detained the British who captured Washington from venturing there." Massachusetts and Connecticut might have escaped the hostile visitations by which their coasts were beleagured and many of their towns captured, which Mas- sachusetts failed to defend. The thirty or forty thousand British troops with which Canada swarmed after the peace of Europe, would have overwhelmed large parts of the Atlantic shores ; for how could sudden and unexpected inroads be resisted, of which the mere dread was oppressively costly in the numbers of militia called forth ? One hun- dred thousand good troops could not have prevented such inroads by one-fifth of their number. The defensive effect of offensive 'waf in Canada was strongly felt. But in all wars the moral exceeds the •actual influence; hope or fear do more than force. - The efifeet of Brown's campaign was, thetefore, siarikihg, prompt, palpa^ ble in lowering the tone of British Confi- dence, as betrayed by the English and Canadian press, the thfrmometers of •public sentiment and expectation. The London press, alinouiicing Jiews nnfa^ vorable from Ontario, declared the ac- counts "doubly disagreeable, coming so unexpectedly, at a mome'nt when we hoped that the mighty efforts of the undi-vided strength of Britaiil Were about to crush the stripling insolence of the United States into its native nothingness. We can hardly supposCj that an army so sti:on^ in num- bers, so high in character, and so stoeus- toined to •victory, would be sent so Jar to act eventually upon the proceedings or coin- 8 missioners at Ghent. The differences with America •will not be so wgH or so promptly settled by discussion as by acting. Ame- rican ascendency on the Lakes vtill make Mr. Gallatin and his associate commission- ers assume a tone of insolence the very re- verse of that national style in which they would treat if Lord Hill, at the head of twenty thousand men, should penetrate into the heart of their territory. But, if he waits till frost sets in, the negotiations of Ghent will freeze too." English demands and expectations were as loffy as that arrogant tone. All the lakes, at least all Ontario and Erie, all the fisheries, all the colonial trade, excluding this coun- try, from both East and West British Indies, new boundaries for it ; east, north and west ; New Orleans, if not all Louisiana, and much of Massachusetts, taken from the United States; no American possessions north of the Ohio ; Indian sovereignty within the United States, and no United States au- thority among their Indian borders ; were postulates of British public ' sentiment and views of government, in the spring of 1814. Wantonly enforced by illegitimate hostilities proclaimed as the rule and the right of British warfare against America, lineal offspring of the maritime •wrongs, by which at sea they provoked the long-de- ferred and reluctant American appeal to arms, these haughty, vindictive and in- supportable expectations rapidly disap- peared under their continual discomfitures during the summer, and were'*^ abandoned before the British reverses in Louisiana were known at Ghent, where their Carna- dian failures su'fficiently established the impossibility of peace on any such'terms; while American population, manufactures, military science, discipline and po-wor, union, ' nationality and strength were in consta,ut development under the same administration, policy ftnd state of par- ties which declared and prosecuted the war. In August, the London press, still unapprised of the changes of affairs and prospects, persisted in plans of con- quest, when the Canadian official jour- nal; the Quebec Gazette of the 23 d Sep- tember, 1814, more than confessed the hopelessness, and declared the danger of at- tempting it. "With all our strength," said that voice of official warning and despondency, "with all our strength, it would be rashness to penetrate far into the United States, and might produce another Saratoga. British troops on the Niagara have novr an enemy to contend with not to be contemned." This lowered tone, strik- ing the flag of Conquest, deprecation in Quebec of the conquering war, directed from London, probably regarded the waters and banks of Lake Champlain, where Brit- ish fleets and armies had justbeen defeated; 3s wen as those of Lake Ontario. But the 114 distinct allusion to the enemy on the Ni- agara unquestionably acknowledged the stunning blow of Brown's signal victories there. Drummond's army of six thousand five hundred superior troops, "strong in numbers, high in character, and accus- tomed to victory," had not only been over- thrown by inferior numbers, low in cha- racter and unaccustomed to victory, but the English army was demolished. Consisting; at first of the eighth regiment, or King's Own, four hundred and fifty men, the forty- first regiment, consolidated four hundred ; the eighty-ninth regiment, six hundred and fifty ; the one-hundredth regiment, six hun- dred ; the one hundred and third regiment, eight hundred ; the flank companies of the one hundred and fourth regiment, two hun- dred ; the first Koyal Soots, seven hundred ; the Glengaries, three hundred; and the Koyal Artillery, one hundred and fifty ; from which total, deducting what they lost by the capture of Fort Erie and battle of Chippe- wa, there remained at- least three thou- sand five hundred combatants, defeated by PENOBSCOT. [1814. two thousand five hundred at the battle of Bridgewater. After that battle, Drum- mond was reinforced' by De Watteville's regiment, one thousand strong ; the eighty- second regiment, seven hundred and fifty ; the sixth regiment, six hundred, a.nd the ninety-seventh regiment, five hundred. Not less than six thousand five hundred excel- lent British regular troops, without count- ing their hordes of Indian and Canadian militia, had been routed, mostly killed, wounded, captured, aU demoralized and dis- couraged. In defiance of the " mighty ef- forts of the undivided strength of Britain," three or four thousand American troops held possession of that part of Canada, where in May, the defeated commander of the province had executed a number of persons convicted of high treason for even wishing well to us. Such were General Brown's important defence of the Atlantic cities, and argument for peace, by his bold invasion of Canada and adventurous cam- paign. CHAPTER V. SUBJUGATION OF PENOBSCOT— BOSTON AND PORTSMOUTH ATTEMPTS TO SUR- RENDER THE SHIPS OF WAR. The provisional articles between the United States of America and his Britannic Majesty, done at Paris in 1782, and the de- finitive treaty of peace between them signed there in 1783, opened questions of bound- rrries between the two countries which were not settled for seventy years ; and then by treaties arranged at Washington, surren- dering large portions of territory in North Eastern and North Western America to Great Britain, the power of whose influence and dread of whose hostilities «fiected what no war would have done : nor was there danger of the alternative of war, as urged by those calling themselves peace- makers, if this country had refused to surrender the portions of Maine and of Oregon yielded. The United States have purchased from the Indians, from France and from Spain, and lately by mixture of conquest and purchase got from Mexico, large territorial acquisitions ; and to Eng- land only have yielded ground. The north- west angle of Nova Scotia, said by the before - mentioned articles and treaty of peace to be formed by a line drawn due north from the source of the St. Croix River to the Highlands, and an exception of islands within the limits of the province of Nova Scotia, were questionable premises which tempted England, in 1814, to under- take the conquest of the Penobscot Valley, about one hundred miles of the nortii- eastern part of Massachusetts, compre- hending forty-two towns, a considerable number of inhabitants, and great maritime advantages. For nearly a hundred years the river St. Croix had been the undisputed western boundary of Nova Scotia. The country be- tween the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot, defended for near a century by Massachu- setts from the Indians, was part of that commonwealth, both colonial and inde- pendent. In 1814, from Eastport to Cas- tine, not less . than forty thriving towns, each containing several hundred inhabit- ants, were represented in the State Legis- lature at Boston, and in Congress, at Wash- ington. That region then beginning to develop its excellent territorial and mari- time resources, lumber trade, fisheries and navigation, as much part of the old Bay State as Boston, was coveted by England, claimed at Ghent, in scarcely veiled frivoli- ty of pretext — as Frederick claimed Silesia, seized beforehand ; relinquished indeed by equivocal stipulation, and not without sug- gestions ultimately realized, of an equiva- lent north of it for a highway between Chap. V.], CAPTDKE OF EASTPORT. 115 Halifax and Quebec, which by unfounded demand in the beginning, England suc- ceeded at last in wresting from the United States. The valley between Passamaquoddy and Penobscot enjoys the maritime advan- tages of almost every place near the At- lantic, having its own peculiar water chan- nel to the ocean, besides numerous islands on the coast. A range of lofty moun- tains in the interior, one of them the peak of Katahdin, towering above any but the White Mountains of New Hampshire, through that space, connected with the Alleghany range, shows by vast continen- tal configuration, that Maine and Missis- sippi, which in 1820 entered the American Union as twin states, are linked together by bonds of natural and territorial as well as commercial association, which no Euro- pean invader should be allowed, or perhaps can sunder, Androscoggin lakes, several fine rivers, and a sea coast of unsurpassed seafaring opportunities, render that north- eastern extremity of the United States a rich correlative of the south-western valley of the Mississippi. That country England subdued without resistance. The govern- ment of Massachusetts made no eifort to prevent, if it did not connive and rejoice at, its subjugation. The same jealousy of southern extension and opposition to the war paralyzed resistance to English inva- sion of Massachusetts, and part of the north- east was almost peaceably and permanently reduced to English dominion, just before the south-west defeated a much more for- midable invasion there. As the repulsion of English invasion of Louisiana was the most brilliant, so was submission to that of Massachusetts the most ignomini- ous and alarming event -of the war ; and but for the victories of the former, and other American victories, the latter might have remained a lasting loss and stigma to the American Union. On the 12th July, 1814, the governor of the province of New Brunswick, Sir John Sherbrooke, officially communicated from St. Andrews, in that province, through Lieutenant-Colonel Fitzherbert, to Briga- vice as First-Lieutenant of the Constitutioni bad been promoted to the command of the Adams. Returning from a cruise on the coast of Ireland, having captured several prizes, and run the gauntlet through the numberless British cruisers swarming the ocean, attempting to make Portsmouth, she struck a rock at Mount Desart, going at a rapid pace among the archipelago of unin- habited islands in that difficult navigation. After at first making for Castine, when the Adams wa5 got off the rocks. Captain Mor- ris deemed it better to sail up as far a^ Hampden, there to overhaul and repair his vessel. On the first of September he was advised by express of the approach of the enemy, who, on the wet, dark night of the second of that month, favored by a fresh breeze, arrived within three miles of Mor- ris, kd by Commodore Barrie, in the Sylph and Peruvian sloops-of-war, with a, trans- port, a tender, and ten barges, accompa- nied by about three hundred land troops under Colonel John ; altogether some seven hundred fighting men, soldiers and seamen. As soon as apprised of dan- ger. Captain Morris mounted his guns, some on a commanding eminence, selected by General Blake for his militia, others on the wharf, commanding the river below, and hasty arrangements were made for battle. General Blake, summoned by Cap- tain Morris to his reinforcement, appeared with three hundred and seventy militia. But their destitution of arms or ammuni- tion was the first symptom of suspicious defection. Many of the militia were with- out muskets ; and if they had had mus- kets they would have .been useless, as most of ■ them were without powder. Captain Morris^supplied them from his ship with both. The spirit of the men was not bad. The neighboring people worked with cheer- fulness at the temporary fortifications pre- pared. The crew of the Adams were more than three hundred excellent combatants, well armed with cutlasses and pistols, and skilful at great gunnery. Captain Morris, and his lieutenants Wadswortli, Madboa, Watson, Parker, Beatty — in a word, all his force were men tried in frequent dan- gers; There Was no Want of inen, of a*- mamentSj or courage^ — of means to defeat the enemy, had not the politics 6f Maja- Chap. V.] Bachusetts perverted the generals, and morally disarmed the men at first not armed with weapoais, never with the fire, with- out which that of the flint is in vain. The British official accounts of American misconduct there, the best testimony, afford deplorable materials for American history. The people, the navy, the small detachment of army there, all behaved well, except the militia leaders. The little force of United States artillerists at Castine, manfully re- fused to surrender, not thirty men, when surrounded and summoned by several hun- dred. They fired their cannon, blew up the fort, and carried off two small brass guns with their carriages. After mastering Castine, the enemy pro- ceeded to Belfast, which they left occupied by Major-General Gosselyn. A strong party of militia assembled in the road foui- miles from Castine, callefl together by the alarming tidings ; but sheep without a shep- herd, if not indeed ordered to retire, they dispersed before the enemy reached them. On Sunday, the 2d of September, when re- ligious worship, besides alarm of invasion, brought all the people together — on their way to Hampden, General Sherbrooke and Admiral Griffith, eighteen miles above Cas- tine, at a small place which they called Buckstone, tested, if not already aware of, the defection of the principal inhabitants, whose town they threatened to destroy un- less the two brass guns and carriages car- ried from below and concealed there, were delivered up, which demand was instantly complied with ! At daylight on the mor- ning of the 3d of September, the fog so thick that it was impossible to reconnoiter, the British by land and water advanced upon what they understood were fourteen hundred American militia, whom, as the mist cleared away, about seven o'clock, they saw well posted on advantageous po- sitions ia front of the town, well armed, and most of the mqn, probably, well dis- posed for battle. General Blake had re- ceived a reinforcement of three companies ; the neighboring towns abounded with able- bodied men ; though the number engaged was not probably as many as the British reported. . But it was enough to defeat them if headed by well-disposed commanders. No impeachment of the men's courage is necessary if their commanders deemed it wrong to fight. As soon as the British land troops approached General Blake on the hill. Lieutenant "Wadsworth's battery there, and Captain Morris, on the wharf, dependent entirely for protectioa in flank and rear on General Blake's command, that command retreated, dispersed, and fled in great con- fusion, without an effort to prevent the mise- rable rout, which left the seamen entirely un- covered on all sides, with nothing but their boarding pikes and cutlasses to rely upon. Having the hard choice of captivity or pre- THB ADAMS DESTROYED. 117 cipitate escape. Captain Morris ordered Lieutenant Wadsworth to spike his cannon and retire across the bridge behind. At the same moment orders were given to fire the ship, spike the guns of the wharf bat- tery, and join the retreat across the creek. Before all this could be done, the enemy had gained the hiU from which the militia fled : and it was impossible for. the seamen to reach the bridge. Retreating in front of their assailants, they plunged through the creek and escaped towards Bangor, thence farther into the interior of a region then thinly inhabited. As it was not practicable to subsist a .feody of three hundred men to- gether in those wilds. Captain Morris or- dered them to separate and make the best of their way to Portland. Before many days those children of the ocean, mostly un- manageable ashore, performed a pilgrimage of two hundred miles to that place, where every man joined his commander, at a time when desertion from the British navy was so rife that hardly a boat's crew, though well officered, could be trusted to any distance. Such was the moral superiority explaining constant victory, which British wounded pride referred to so many unfounded phy- sical causes. Commodore Barrie, the naval command- er, whose barges had not been in action, joined Colonel John in pursuit of the mi- litia, flying at full speed and pursued toward Bangor, by water and laud: but they were too nimble for us, said the com- modore's cutting sarcasm. " At Bangor, those who opposed us at Hampden threw off their military character, and as magis- trates, select men, &c., stopped all pursuit by unconditional surrender.". Disgrace of American arms did not, however, end there. "About two hours afterwards," adds the commodore, " Brigadier - General Blake came into the town to deliver himself up a. prisoner, and with one hundred and ninety-one nieu was admitted to parole." The commodore's official dispatch states that the English loss amounted to one man killed, one captain and seven privates wounded. Adjutant-General Pilkington was then despatched to subdue Machias, the only remaining unconquered place of that region. Seventy men of the fortieth regi- ment of the TJnited States, with thirty militia, in the fort near Machias, evacu- ated it in the night, abandoning their co- lors and guns ; the town was taken . on the 9th September, not only without oppo- sition, but pursuant to Brigadier-General John Brewer commanding the district's unconditional surrender. By a written proposal to the British commander Brewer, because forsooth there was no hope that an adequate force would be furnished by the United States to protect the country be-, tween the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy, 118 CONQUERED TERRITORY. offered his parole and that of his brigade not to bear arms during the war, upon con- dition that, while they consider themselves under the British government, their private property should be safe, and their usual occupations." " The inhabitants, " said Admiral GrifBth's official dispatch, " of several townships have sent deputations to Castiue, to tender their submission to the British authority. " " Brigadier-General Brewer, who commanded the militia in this district, and some other respectable per- sons," said General Sherbrooke's dispatch, " has sent a letter to General Pilkington, and next day was appointed toweceive those gentlemen and accept their terms." " The county of Washington has passed under the dominion of his Britannic majesty. This accession of territory wrested from the enemy embraces about one hundred miles of sea coast, and includes that inter- mediate tract of country which separates the province of New Brunswick from Lower Canada." Our narrative is relieved, by these British accounts, from selection of terms to charac- terize this subjugation, which remained in British possession till the 27th April, 1815, when restored, pursuant to the Treaty of Ghent ; but by the Treaty of "Washington, signed by Mr. Webster with Lord Ashbur- ton, in August, 1842, there was substituted ^ for the conquered valley of the Penobscot, a larger and more convenient dislocation of ancient Massachusetts, as " an inter- mediate tract of country separating the province of New Brunswick from Lower Canada," in the very terms of its original military conqueror. On the 21st of September, 1814, returned to Halifax Sir John Sherbrooke, with Rear- Admiral Grifith, issued their joint procla- mation for the government of that part of the United States as British conquered ter- ritory, observing the established regulations and formalities on such occasions. The whole people were disarmed, and required to swear allegiance to Great Britain or re- tire from their homes : in other respects not molested, but protected in their pro- perty, business, and religion. Provisional government 'established by the conquerors, was maintained by martial law, subject to such ulterior permanent arrangements as the British government might order, or a treaty of peace stipulate. AH judicial of- ficers were continued in their functions, administering municipal law, as before the conquest of the territory. General Gerard Gosselyn was appointed the military com- mander. All revenue and tax-gatherers were to account to the English custom house. All inhabitants swearing allegiance were promised protection, or threatened with punishment, as they kept or broke that oath. Sea vessels were to be register- ed, and coasters licensed at Castine, which [1814. was, declared the port of entry, and opened to all lawful British commerce. Resolutions of the legislature applaud- ed the governor for what "he had done to defend the State, and the militia for their alacrity, discipline, the good condition of their arms and equipments, and earnest determination to defend to the last extre- mity their native soil at all hazards ;" which mockery of the governor and of the un- armed militia, unprovided with either mus- kets or powder, whose officers led them to flight at the first glimpse of the enemy, and when they had escaped by flight, voluntaxily returned to surrender, was carried still far- ther by a speech of a senator, named Blake, who said " he hoped to God the State would rise in opposition to the general govern- ment; it was time to break off all inter- course with the republic ; he hoped before the legislature rose, the season for action would come ; he was ready to change our constitution for that of Great Britain, mo- narchy and all." The Centinel newspaper, published at Boston, stated that "Major Putnam, Captains Fillebrown and Vamum, arrived under parole from Eastport, speak highly of the good conduct of the British regiment there, so abused by the Virginians for their reputed misconduct last year at Hampton. All alarm at Eastport has sub- sided. Commodore Hardy has assured the inhabitants that the expedition had only in object the capture of Moose island, wmch, he repeats, belongs to his royal master. The soldiers behave remarkably well there ; yet this is the corps said to have committed such outrages at Hampton." The New Bedford Gazette published that "a report was current in New York, a few days since, that this town had been burned by the Bri- tish. It appears that the story originated in Providence, Rhode Island. As the ad- ministration harpies have lately renewed their efforts to render the wax popular, it is not unlikely this story was fabricated with a view to excite a spirit of irritation against the enemy." When the 4th of July,- 1814, was celebrated at Dorchester, where Wash- ington commanded in 1775, one of the sen- timents drunk was "our country united (to Britain) and happy till the pestilence of democracy poisoned and blighted it." On the 22d of September, 1814, the Salem Ga- zette proclaimed "as indispensable to self- preservation that a State deserted by the general government should reimburse itself by retaining the amount of imposts, taxes, and proceeds of captures within the State that might have gone into the national treasury, exchange the prisoners of war kept in the State for such of her own citi- zens as were in the hands of the enemy, invite neighboring States to a convention of alliance, amity, and commerce, make an honorable peace with Great Britain before the anti-commerbial States do it, leaving Chap. V.] JOHN HOLMES. 119 the whole burden af the war on the com- mercial States, and by these means free Massachusetts- from the evils oppressing her." From such foul exhalations of dis- tempered public sentiment arose the Hart- ford Convention, thus obviously indicated. On the 16th. of March, 1814, in the same Salem Gazette, Timothy Pickering, who represented that district in Congress, pub- lished, with his respectable name signed to the shocking infidelity, "for myself, as a member of the national legislature, I do not hold myself under any obligation to give my vote to redeem the paper money, exchequer bills, or other loans to continue this unnecessary and iniquitous war." The Endymiou frigate and other British vessels of war established their hospitals at Nan- tucket as if it were a British port, while represented in Congress by Mr. Artemas TCard, son of the general who competed ■ with Washington for the command of the American army before Boston in 1775. Mt. "Wilson, who lived near Belfast, repre- sented in Congress the Penobscot district after its subjugation ; and no member voted more constantly against all grants of money, men, or other provision for war, either of- 'fensive or defensive, than Mr. Ward from Boston, and Mr. Wilson from the north- east of Massachusetts. The hearts of the common people of New England remained American, however la- bored and exasperated against the national government, still steeled for resistance to English hostilities. But in the progress of the war, its privations, exactions, and mor- tifying reverses,- the party opposed to the . national administration in possession of the governments of every one of the five New England States, carried unconstitu- tional and delirious opposition to the verge of forcible resistance by authoritative hin- drance, machination and contrivance, at the time when the enemy, tired of waiting for New England co-operation, assailed the Eastern States, as they had the Southern and Western war States, with devastating and unmerciful war ; and then- it was that a considerable part of Massachusetts was -subdued to English possession, without the slightest resistance from, if not connivance of, the State government. At the same time, in 1814, there was found an unlooked-for champion in the Senate of Massachusetts, in John Holmes, who came forth from among the opponents of the war and Madison's administration, one of their most eloquent and popular supporters. Finding that government, in- stead of being driven from its ground by Eastern frenzy, was strengthened by it, we might have hoped, said Mr. Holmes, that such futile opposition would have been discouraged. Everything inflammatory and seceding that could be, was done, by Massa- chusetts, but to no purpose. Some twenty or thirty out of more than five hundred towns labored by emissaries, were all that could be seduced : of them the poor fisher- men signed a recantation, declaring that they are not oppressed. You boast of for- bearance: but you forbore only because afraid to go further. You complain of Southern aggrandizement, with ten piem- bers in the Senate, an undue proportion, according to your population. Massachu- setts has become contemptible, a by-word of reproach. Your conduct has disgusted the people everyvrhere. In the great State ,of New York they have risen against your cabal and hurled defiance in your teeth. Thex-e is among us, a restless, daring and ambitious faction, who, I do not hesitate to proclaim, prefer the British government, monarch^/ and alli- Your proceedings are viewed with detestation and abhorrence. Every outrageous doctrine of Great Britain I have heard advocated on this floor, [and here Mr. Holmes recapitulated the ques- tions in issue,] by gentlemen who advise us to count the cost, to state the account, debit and credit, and see whether we can maJie money by it. Every right is estimated in money. Suppose the South and West to count the cost of our fisheries, and give them up for cheaper supplies from England. The ocean, you say, is England's exclusive domain, and you would give her even a worse line of frontier for us than she got by the peace of '83. I believe she may make peace with us on the assurance that we will let her have whatever she wants, full of her partisans as are our public bodies. We are under French, influence forsooth ! But now that France is under English influence, what becomes of that aljsurd imputation? Show me the nation that for twenty years has not been barba- rous, inglorious, in your always English pre- dilection, as it was either opposed to, or in alliance with, England. You desire to send Mr. Madison to Elba; to. do it by foreign, I suppose, as you have failed to do it by domestic force. The British army that de- posed Napoleon is coming this way : and I am not sure but that many of our country- men, hoping for restoration of the old order of things, finding it can only be done by force, are rejoiced at the prospect. On the 29th July, 1814, at General Dear- born's request. Governor Strong issued orders for detachments from seven of the divisions of State militia to remain in the service of the United States, General Blake's brigade to be ordered to Castine, and Gen. Brown's to Machias. But they were with- held from command of the United States officers; the east of the State was then already conquered, the few militia hastily collected there had neither muskets nor pow- der, their commanders set the first example of flight and voluntary surrender. Sher- brooke's communication through Brewer to 120 THE NAVT ABANDONED. Strong, Brewer's unconditional surrender to Pilkington on the pretext that the country was not protected by the federal govern- ment, morbid inaction and malcontent administration, -with distempered public opinion everywhere, conspire to infer that the authorities, civil and military, of Mas- sachusetts had no objection to Sherbrooke's proposal of a peaceable restoration of the Penobscot Valley to Great Britain, Ac- cordingly the British conqueror, " conceiv- ing it of importance that his government should be informed, of such successes," called on the admiral for a vessel of war to carry the news to England. And his aid. Major Addison, was dispatched in the Martin sloop-of-war with the colors of Massachusetts, to be displayed, with other trophies, in the capital of Great Britain, to the indelible dishonor of a State, the only one of the American Republic whose con- stituted authorities surrendered part of it, together with its flag, without contest, to the enemy. Massachusetts had military annals and glorious recollections : New England inva- sions of Canada, Acadia, Nova Scotia ; ex- peditions to Quebec, Montreal, Cape Breton, Crown. Point; Massachusetts leading the way, bearing the brunt, furnishing most of the troops and paying most of the charges. But in 1814 their energies were spent in disaffection, their politics perverted to fac- tion, and their religion to politics. When their old enemy, more than ever vindictive and devastating, brought war to their doors, cold-blooded party and government disarm- ed a martial people by deadening tteir loy- alty. Yet there was nothing in Governor Strong's speeches and official correspond- ence ■with the national government so pro- minent, pertinacious, or vehement as his insistance for pay of the militia he refused to put under the orders of that government. Boston, the cradle of American independ- ence, had become the arsenal of political revolt against the American nation; the educated classes of a calculating people, sacrificing their interests to their preju- dices, and patriotism to bad passions ; secta- rians with whom it was dmcult to agree and dangerous to differ. Of that distempered condition, not of the popular but educated, and, as they deemed themselves, better classes of New England, especially in the seaport towns, there were abominable demonstrations in Boston and Portsmouth, in 1814, more hostile to the national cause, and more disgraceful to the local powers, than the tame submission of Penobscot. When the ship-of-the-line called Washington, building at Po^mouth, under the superintendence of Captain Hull, was in danger of being burned by an assault from the numerous English cruisers on the coast, the State authorities of New Hampshire refused to co-operate in the protection of [1814. that national vessel. " The navy," said the report of the Massachusetts legislatiire, " IS in » situation rather to Invite than re- pel aggresaion, and requires protection instead of affording it" — ^vile abnegation, also uttered in Congress. Wherefore, the Washington was deserted by the State pow' er, which repudiated all care of that na- tional bulwark. Hull had two hundred seamen at Portsmouth, where there were also two companies of Fnited States artil- lerists, to whom two companies of United States-infantry were added. On the 20th May, 1814, the Governor of New Hampshire addressed the Secretary of War concerning the militia, who, when called out, had been expressly ordered not to serve in any Unit«d States post, or under any officer, military or naval, of the United States. The go- vernor, according to the usual anxiety on that subject, desired to know from the Se- cretary of War whether such militia w6nld be paid by the federal government. The Secretary's answer did not satisfy that in- quiry; whereupon the legislature of New Hampshire, then in session at Concord, resolved by large majorities to disband the militia called out for defence of Portsmouth, its important Tiarbor, and the ship-of-the- line there, on the sorry plea that the federal government did not want, as it would not pay, the militia; who were not subjected to even musters and inspection for the na- tion; and could not be employed_or paid as mere allies, independent of one and the same national command. Fortunately there were seamen and soldiers of lihe United States at Portsmouth, to deter the appre- hended attack. After her second capture of a British frigate, the ship Constitution put into Bos- ton^ where her commander, Bainbridge, was employed to superintend preparations for the third of her glorious cruises. One of the three line-of-battle ships, the Independ- ence, was also buUt at the Charlestown uavy-yardj in charge of Commodore Bain- bridge. These vessels, and the Washing- ton, at Portsmouth, were objects of particu- lar malevolence, which the British men-of- war, it was apprehended, would especially strive to destroy. The Independence and Constitution were therefore so arranged with armaments at Charlestown as to enfilade the harbor, in case of any hostile attempt upon it. Cannon were also mounted by Bainbridge on batteries ashore, palisade's were put up, a chain of sentinels kept con- stantly on guard, and every preparation made for vigorous defence. The militia of Charlestown, weU disposed, and of Boston, though not so much so, voljinteered their services to mount guard. Still Bainbridge was disquieted by the large number of Bri- tish vessels of war hovering on the coast and off the harbor. Threats of destruction were notorious, and that numerous troops Chap. Y.] THE FRIGATE CONSTITUTION. 121 were provided at Halifax and Bermuda to put them into execution, at every assailable point. Bainbridge, himself as much of a federalist as an officer might be, no adherent ©f Madison's administration, perceived to his great regret that the state and Boston autha- rities were more than tardy; they were averse to measures of adequate defence. As the danger increased, his uneasiness induced him to make ofScial application to the adju- tant-general of the state. Brooks; by repeated letters endeavoring to enlist his assistance, impart his own well-grounded apprehen- sions,' and rouse the local pride as well as fear of danger. With an enterprising ene- |ny at our threshold, with the interests of both state and general government in jeo- pardy, should it be a question, said he, which of them shall repel the assault? If the enemy enters these waters to attack the navy yard, both Charlestown and Boston wUl be endangered. The commodore, therefore, entreated the adjutant-general to confer with the governor and ascertain his deter- . mination. - To this appeal the governor and council answered by suggesting, that the Independence and Constitution ought to be removed beyond the forts "Warren and In- dependence, that is, abandoned. The com- mittee, directed by the State executive to make that,shameful suggestion to the naval commander, insisted that, as the ships were national property only, their destruction ought not to involve danger to the town. Finding Bainbridge not only inflexible but indignant at the base suggestion, they asked, what would he do, if the Boston authorities should withhold all defence, by which: means the national vessels, like CastLne, might be capfiired without serious resistance. Bain- bridge nobly replied, that the ships in his care belonged to the country, and he would defend theta to the last. If Boston thought proper to suflfer bombardment or capture without it, as appeared to be the design of some of its rulers, on their heads the dis- grace should rest ; but he would perform a duty which he owed to no particular admi- nistration, but to the nation and his own character. The men (shall they be'ealled?) of Massachusetts left him to separate the national cause and honor from theirs, and as he told them, answerable for all the terrible consequences. An .enterprising British officer, a favorable wind, a dark night, the accidental rashness which sacked Washington, any of the incalculable con- tingencies of war, might at that moment have laid Boston, with the ships, in ashes. The governor refused General Dearborn militia even to man the harbor forts. While tiie invasion of north-eastern Massachusetts was in progress, as before liescribed, the summer was suffered to elapse at Boston without a single step by the State or local authojities to defend-tie capital from eon- quest. Popular discontent, however, rose to the height of the emergency, and -seconded the naval commander in preventing the select and respectable men, so called by Sher- brooke as the authors of the surrender of the Penobscot, from yielding the national ships as the State towns were surrendered. What !^said the people, in street groups and accidental communions, at a time when there was scarcely any business, but all thorough- fares and public places were thronged with idle and anxious wayfarers^^what ! give up the old frigate, which first brought dovm the English "flag? Let the enemy burn a ship, every timber of which is an American trophy ! Murmurs of the streets, emotions of the thoughtless but faithfiil mass, threats, and signs of a people formidable in their outbreaks, the terrors of a Boston mob sfr. conded the constancy of Bainbridge, and the national vessels were at any rate left where and as he had fortified them. The summer wore away with continual incursions and alarms everywhere, and in- flamed accounts of hostile enormities. After the capture of Washington and attack of Baltimore, aU the cities on the Atlantic were fortified by local contributions.. Pub- lic meetings, numerous volunteer encamp- ments, and universal -efforts of defence spread over and around the whole country. At length, about the period of the final con- questof Penobscot, the inhabitants of Boston generally, of all parties, roused by tlie tid- ings of general resistance and the urgency of their dangers, overcame the disafieetion of their public servants, erected redoubts and breastworks, moored hulks to be sunk in the harbor, the militia garrisoned the forts, and British contemplations of attack were deterred by the countenance of manly pre- paration. But for this national and sa- lutary reaction, Boston was in peril «f " invasion like Maine, all the constituted au- thorities being perverted to the creation of a separate sovereignty, when by every con- sideration required to vindicate what they had. It was in 1814 that the blockade, so long withheld from New England, was extended to all the coasts of tdie Eastern States, the marauding ravages, so long confined to other places, repeated there with uncommon vexa- tions, and their colonial neighbors of Nova Scotia proclaimed that England would bo. deceived, if she relied on the aid of New England. The Acadian Recorder, a Halifax journal, deprecated "the avidity of searoh.- ing after, and thepleasure taken in reading the speeches of -Governor Strong, with the federal answers. No publication from the American press has so fatal a tendency. The English reader, finding sentiments so just, so consonant with his own, swallows the poison, and dreams tiat the man, his Senate and House of Assembly, are friends of Britain. Nothing is more erro- 122 NEW ENGLAND ASSAILED. [1814. neous. Madison and his democrats are unwittingly our friends, and the change that ■would put a Strong in the President's chair, would be the greatest evil we could experience, not from increase of force or talent, but the federal mania which has bewildered our sense, and paralysed our arm. Can we forget that Boston was the cradle of rebellion ? Can we imagine that the people of Massachusetts have repented of their evil deeds? We hope, from pre- sent appearances, that the federalists will come in for a share of alarm on the favored northern coasts of the United States. We have no desire to know the destination of our preparations. To the result we look forward, and fervently pray it may be suc- cessful." Such were common opinions of the North American British provinces adjoining and hating New England. In the same Halifax Recorder of the 27th June, 1814, a 'sturdy Briton, who signed himself " an anti-federal Englishman," in still stronger terms of indignant depreca- tion warned his government against any trust or faith in the Bostonians, at that time objects of both American and English reprobation. The anti-federal English- man's ire was kindled by the Boston atten- tions to Perry, presenting him a service of plate for " our first triumph in squadron," which this angry Englishman pronounced " a lie, whether on metal, canvas, paper, tablet, or falling from any lips : a deliberate lie of six thousand federalists of steady and sober habits, professed enemies of the late French emperor, yet more given to scan- dalous falsehood than any of his notorious bulletins. Who is it thus exults in debase- ment of Britons ? Not our sworn enemies, the democrats. No such thing ; but our staunch friends, the federalists ; for what is Boston but the hotbed of federalism? The democrats only amuse us by vaunting their rabble army. The federalists provoke our just indignation by basely calumniating our navy." When all calculation on New England was abandoned, the British ministry re- solved on conquering part of Massachusetts, and no portion of the United States was more severely visited than the East. A highway through Maine, from Halifax to Quebec ; Canada and Louisiana united, as of old, by the" Mississippi boundary; the fisheries, exclusively English, were among the dreams of transatlantic ambition. — During the summpr of 1814, the naval vex- ations of the shores of the Middle States, were renewed on those of the East, with all the legalized rapacity of the British mari- time code. Smacks, fishing craft, oyster and clam boats, everything afloat, and all assailable ashore, isolated hovels, the huts of watermen, private dwellings, factories, salt. works, were attacked. Towns and cities, navy yards and barracks were threat- ened ; Barnstable, Alexandria, Salem, Bos- ton, Newport, were insulted and alarmed. New London, on the most frivolous pretext, was bombarded for two days, by a furious, harmless, senseless, and salutary cannon- ade. Lords of the ocean, masters of the world, gentlemen of noble families, loaded their floating barracks with plunder of the poor and non-combatant, whose hard earn- ings are spared by the rudest hostilities by land. Sir George Collier, from the quarter- deck of the frigate Leander, on the 2l8t September, 1814, sent his barges fiill of men ashore near Salem, in chase of a fish- ing boat, with a note bearing his rank and title to Colonel Appleton, commanding some militia of the Cape Ann regiment, hastily assembled, threatening, " if not al- lowed to examine the boat, which he. be- lieved to be a fisherman, he would destroy every house within two miles of the cove." Such aggressions made daily annoyances of the neighborhood, whence the Essex Junto, as the most rancorous opposition were called, sent their representative to Congress, Timothy Pickering: undeniable proof that, however delirious was the anta- gonism to their own government and obse- quious their applause of the enemy, there was no criminal understanding between the British and most of the violent opponents of the war. The rugged shores of New England, with their thousands of inlets, the abiding- places of transcendent navigation, from Fairfield, Connecticut, throughout that commonwealth along Rhode Island, the whole extent of ancient Massachusetts, including Maine, all the way from Fair- field to Bastport, from New York to New Brunswick, studded with bright and busy villages, with their white churches and glittering spires, neat, crow(i»d school- houses, ambitious private dwellings, resi- dences of the staid and decent gentry of an orderly, intelligent and polite popu- lation, keeping strictly the puritanical Sabbath, and busy in all useful arts, were roused from slumber and disturbed at worship, by sons of the invaders of their sires, whose injustice was the tradition of every hamlet, come again to harass their coasts, blockade their ports, capture their craft, degrade their flag, impress and im- prison their mariners, and destroy the com- merce and the privateering by which they were enriched. Pulpits, courts, legislative halls which had resounded with intem- perate British apologies, felt British inva- sion in their vestibules, their property rob- bed or ransomed, their worship profaned, their supposed exemption from war's cala- mities for unworthy enmity to fellow-coun- trymen, requited by the nocturnal orgies and merciless hostilities of enemies despis- ing and punishing all Americans alike, es- pecially those disloyal to their own country, Chap. V.] BATTLES OF PLATtSBUKG. 123 and obsequious to its foes. Party could not make head against such appeals for country. In vain the pulpit, the bar, the bench, the politician, had argued against the popular motives excited by such les- sons, taught by an infuriated enemy. In the midst of these conflicts and con- tradictions, all the constituted authorities of all New England being combined in oppo- sition, most of them' unconstitutional opposi- tion, to the national government and the war, which England prosftcuted against New England as fiercely and unwarrantably as against the war states, many individuals resolved on separate peace, if not alliance, with the enemy, and that last effort of the eastern anti-war party, the Hartford Convention, was matured, to break the Union, without forcible resistance. Go- vernment was nowhere forcibly hindered, however assailed or perplexed, by sea/- port disaffection striking for wealth, with- out revolting for power. There is a fund of instinctive mother wit, pervading common people, continental nationality throughout these United States, that holds the population together beyond the power of individual, sectional, or party, however well educated or contrived sedition. The situation of the country often critical, and that of govern- ment seemingly desperate as in 1814, in 1776, and 1781, rights itself as it were providentially. British seeming might, and American apprehended inability, in collision and contrast, strike American tri- umphs from such conjunctures. American vitality abides in the sense of individual and universal sovereignty, the elasticity of republican independence and recuperation of self-government. During the war in 1814, there were infuriate pairtisans who de- sired our discomfiture, numbers who pre- ferred selfish gain to general welfare, and a large party inclined. to make almost any peace, rather than let another party wage any war. But few who would have joined the English in arms, and hardly any who did not prefer republicanism to monarchy, which had few admirers, and England, with many admirers, few adherents. The Eastern disaffection of leading politicians was too selfish for the body of the people, who shrunk from rebellion. Threats of disunion remained so long unexecuted, that England ceased to rely on New England, whom another campaign would have pro- bably found carrying on the war like the rest of the country. CHAPTER VI. BATTLES OF PLATTSBURG. From the ignominious and suspicious surrender of the Penobscot, one of the most dishonorable events of the war and Boston treachery, the transition is pleasant to the twin battles of Plattsburg by land and wa- ter, among its most glorious exploits, and the naval victory presenting not only a highly edifying view of the morals of the American navy, but probably the first step in a great naval reformation. The fortune of war was completely re- versed on the Canadian frontier between the years 1813 and 1814. In 1813 our forces on Ontario, Champlain, and the St. Lawrence, were more numerous than^ the British ; yet, not merely failed, but shame- fully, in every attempt at conquest. There seemed to be something in the hostile soil to discomfit Dearborn, Bloonfield, Pike, Wilkinson, Chandler, Winder, Boyd, Hamp- ton, Burn, Boerstler, Smythe, Van Een- sellaer — every American officer attempting to carry American arms into Canada.. In the autumn of 1814, there^ were about thirty-five thousand British regulars, and nearly aU veteran troops, there, kept in check, and worsted in frequent and severe encounters, by never more than ten thou- sand American troops, counting all from Detroit to Plattsburg, men and officers in- experienced, mostly mere recruits, few or none of whom had ever been tried in bat- tle. The British were not merely veterans, but renowned, fresh from European cam- paigns, completely equipped, su^iplied, and corroborated by recollections of recent ex- ploits', the admiration and master-strokes of the world. Five regiments of the late arrivals from Europe were sent to Drum- mond, to replenish his casualties. A bri- gade, under Major-General Kempt, went to Kingston, thence to make a descent on Sackett's Harbor. The remaining fourteen or fifteen thousand men were concentrated, in August, between La Prairie and Fort Chambly, under Major-General de Botteur 124 PREyOST'S APVANOE, [1814. burgh. The three hrigades into which they were distributed were comnianded by V Major-Generals Powers, Brisbane, and Eot binson, with General Baynes as Adjutant- General, and the Governor-General, Sir George Prevost, commander-in-chief. So large -and fine an army of British troops had reason to be confident of certain suc- cess. To the general order of universal devastation, announced by Admiral Coch- rane, and in process of execution every- where, from Eastport to New Orleans, was added the promiscuous retaliation of what Prevost denounced as American aggres- sions, besides recovery of lost, and acqui- sition of new territory, thus making such impression on the United States as would deter them from future hostilities. To these general principles of warfare, specific directions as to Canada added, destruction of American vessels on the lakes, and fort- resses on the frontiers, particularly the mi- litary occupation of some point on Lake Champlain to secure Canada. The eon- quest of the Penobscot Valley, of the outlet of the Mississippi, and of posi- tions on the borders of Vermont and New York, were Castlereagh's dreams, British schemes, and American perUs. Prevost was not to penetrate far into the interior, but expected to march as . far as Crown Point. As soon as General Izard left the borders of Champlain with four thousand of the best troops there, Prevost made arrangements to attack Plattsburg, and to capture that hindrance to his advance to Crown Point and Ticonderoga, ancient seats of British conquest over Americans, and also as a de- monstration to retard Izard's advance, and increase his avowed, angrily avowed ap- prehensions, that his march to Brown's succor would be interrupted. When- ever he went, he wrote to the Secretary, on the 11th August, 1814, not only should he move "with the apprehension of risk- ing the force under his command, but with the certainty that everything in the vicinity he left, and the lately erected works at Plattsburg and Cumberland Head, would, in less than three days after his departure, be in the possession of the enemy." Nothing oc- curred to warrant these misapprehensions, the ebullitions of temper rather than fear. On the first of September, three days after Izard began his march to the west, Prevost put his army in movement, not to interrupt or disturb Izard, who was beyond his reach, and would hardly have been disturbed if he had gone directly towards the St. Law- rence, because Pre vest's primary object was the capture of Plattsburg, from which he would not have been diverted. Passing the frofitier at Odletown on the first of September, he advanced on the third to Champlain town, which was abandoned by the Americans on his approach. General Macomb, as officer next in rank to General Izard, was left by him in cam- mand of that frontier. Like Izard, war had always been Macomb's vocation, which he had followed as his only profession from the time he entered the army as a very young lieutenant. Without Izard's autho- ritative tone and manner, perhaps his ia- formation and decision, his exclusive habits and unpopular demeanor, Macomb, access- ible, sociable, playful, was a well-traiiied and industrious soldier, with no supercili- ous aversion to militia, volunteers, and those irregular troops whom Izard con- temptuously designated as people requiring a popular leader. Macomb's brigade was broken up by Izard in selecting his men to take from that station, where he left only fif- teen hundred fit for field duty, to make faea j against the British fourteen thousand. Fall- ing back upon Plattsburg, Macomb had b^.t a few days in which to prepare for the ma^ serious attack, as to disparity of numbers, ever mtade on the Americans : nearly ten to one. More than three thousand regular troops were left by Izard with MacSmb, per- haps twenty-five hundred of whom might be rendered available behind entrenohmente, but not more than fifteen hundred fit for the field. Pursuant to authority from the executive, militia were called out from New York and Vermont, about three thousand two hundred of whom repaired, of all par- ties, to Macomb's standard, under Generals Moers and Strong; good troops as they proved, as such troops are for any sudden and defensive operation, especially when- ever they are protected by streams, woods, and forts, associated with regular soldiers, and commanded by a leader willing to make the best, instead of inclined to niake the worst, of such indispensable com- rades in arms in nearly every American conflict. Besides completing his entrench- ments, Macomb employed hig men in harassing the enemy as they advanced, and preparing by such apprenticeship for the contest soon to ensue. General Izard had constructed a redoubt, which he called Fort Moreau, after the name of the French general, whose residence at Morrisville in Pennsylvania, the place, at one time, of General Brown's home, was not far from General Izard's seat, Farley, in that neigh- borhood. With better taste in patriotism, after Moreau's departure from this coun- try, in English pay, by Russian induce- ment, to make war on France, General Macomb, to remind his troops of their brave countrymen, of whom he had no in- vidious feedings, named the two redoubts he constructed Ports Brown and Scott, names^ dear to American soldiers, and electrifying the ardor pervading their ranks. Generals Izard and Macomb differed much as to the condition of the place and troops left by the former to the latter's oare, who found AMimCAN "PREPARATJONS. Chap; VI.] it, h6 said, ifi great confusion, the ord- nance, the stores, the works, in no state of defence ; the garrison composed Of conyales- cents and recruits of new regiments, un- organized and unprepared-for their difficult task. To excite their emulation, that in- dispensable spur of mankind from child- hood to death, Macomb assigned to different parties the separate defence of the several forts, declaring, by general orders, that he relied on each party to defend his particular charge to the last extremity. Major Ap- plingof the rifles, M^'or Wool, now Gene- ral Wool, Captain Sproul, and General Moers, from the 6th to the 11th September, contested every inch of ground with the enemy, who advanced, nevertheless, with irresistible resolutioB, in overwhelming numbers, driving the Americans into Plattsbutg before them. The militia, in the field, and even in the Woods, often timorous, fled at the sight of scarlet ; and, as that was the dress of the New York dragoons, the militia sometimes ran away from their own fellow-soldiers. But a few days' practice under officers who gave every encouragement, brought them to the Saranac river better disciplined, and, when on their own side of it, with the bridges taken up, easily rallied to resist and successfully repel attempts of the British to force their way across the fords. The enemy marched steadily forward, in two parallel columns, through the neighboring forests, the west- ern column, led by Generals Power and Robinson, on higher ground; the eastern column near the lake, on iow and swampy ground, led ,by Genel-al Brisbane, can- nonaded from the Amerioail gunboats, manned by thirty-five men each, armed with a long twenty-foUf pound gun and carronade, one of which, the Netly, was commanded by the present Captain Breese, brother of the present senator. Majors Appling and Wool, and Captain Sproul, Were indefatigable with their small corps in opposing aiid harassing the steadily ad- vancing, enemy. But every road, on every side, was crowded with the British irre- sistible troops, who, by the 7th September, drove all their opponents under their bat- teries,, and began to erect their oWn just beyond the Saranac. The bridge over that iBtream was taken up by lie retreating Americans, and the planks piled up for breastworks, which enabled our people to defeat several attempts to cross the river. British sharpshooters, who, from the bal- conies and windows of houses fired on the Americans, *ere driven away by hot shot, by which the Ameriijans burned their own captured dwellings. Repeated attempts to drive our people from their hew breast- worksi to force the fords, or otherwise by ffihy means to get over the Saranac, were fconstantly defeated; From the 7th to the 11th September, the British batterieSj tod 125 other arrangements for assault, were com- pleted, however, and then all depended on the shipping; for, without capturing or destroying the American flotilla, taking Plattsburg was deemed an almost useless conquest. As long as McDonough com- manded the lake, Prevost could make no extensive or permanent advance, or im- pression with the army, large as it was, and prohibited by orders from hazardous enterprise into the interior. Meantime, the militia from New York, and from Vermont, poured into Plattsburg, so that Macomb was sustained by a regular and irregular force altogether exceeding seven thousand men in arms, well disposed for resistance, and admirably commanded. The splendid North American autumn was beginning to brace the pure air, tint the forests with its various hues, azure the bright skies, and ruffle the clear lakes of that region of beautiful woods, waters and hills, every knoll of which, from Mon- treal to Saratoga, was the classic ground of American battles, every hut fuU of tradi- tions of the old French war and the war of the Revolution, The hamlets and villages abounded with those who remembered Gates, Schuyler and Arnold, and could re- peat the stories of Amherst and Abercrom- bie. Arnold's flotilla at CrowU Point, Bur- goyne's surrender at Saratoga, were the themes of a population of fishermen, marks- men and woodsmen, inured to adventures and hardships, whose frontier enterprises had taught them the stratagems and boldness of individual hostilities. The Saranac, like the mighty St. Lawrence, contravening the common course of Ame- rican rivers, by flowing northeast, empties into Lake Champlaiu in the midst of the town of Plattsburg, surrounded by an am- phitheatre of hills, whose distant horizon reaches the lofty peaks of the Green Mount- ains, which give their name to the State of Vermont. Natural configuration combined with historical recollections to embellish the scene of the approaching battles, memora- ble as probably the last to be fought be- tween Europeans and Americans in that region, destined, with alLthe Canadas and all the lakes then contended for by Great Britaiu, to be peaceably absorbed by the . United States of America. The contest of ship building, so long, ex- pensively and vexatiously kept up on Lake Ontario, had been waged also on Lake Champlain, where a young lieutenant com- manded the American flotilla, an abortive attempt to destroy which, by the enemy, has been mentioned. The British, as usual, beat us in building. Their frigate, the Con- fiance, of 37 guns. Was finished soon after our sloop-of-war, the Saratoga, of 26 ; and they were able to go forth on the lake with not only more gUns and more men than we, but the great advantages of more and heavier 125 CHAMPLAIN SQUADRON. [1814. guna on the decks of one and the same ship; not only more numerous crews, but veteran seamen, many of them fresh from their large ships-of-war at Quebec, commanded by officers of greater experience than ours, nearly all of the Americans being untried in action, and having their proof under fire to make as well as reputation. On the 3d of September, Commodore McDonough (as he was styled) anchored his squadron off Plattsburg, to cover the entrenchments there. The American shipping consisted of four vessels and ten gun-boats or barges, altogether fourteen craft, carrying 102 can- non, .manned by 850 men, many of them not seamen, and their marines supplied by soldiers from the army. The British squad- ron had also four vessels, with twelve gun- boats or barges, altogether sixteen, car- rying 115 guns, and manned by 1000 mostly tried and veteran seamen and of- ficers ; their greater number of thirteen cannons, enhanced by eleven of them being mounted in one superior ship. The Ame- rican commanders were McDonough in the Saratoga, Henley in the Eagle, Cassin in the Ticonderoga, Budd in the Preble. The British were Downie in the Confiance, Pring in the Linnet, McGhee in the Chubb, and Hicks in the Finch. That jealousy which seldom fails to alienate different corps of the same troops, and still more prevails between the land and sea service, broke out among the British, to the advan- tage of Macomb and McDonough, whose situation was too perilous, and their forces too few to venture to quarrel with each other, and they were furthermore, both army and navy, commanded by gentlemen of great amenity and strong disposition to make the best of their precarious situation by harmonizing not only with each other, but the militia, volunteers and irregular levies unavoidalDly summoned suddenly to their aid. As soon as the Governor- General of Canada was reinforced by large bodies of Wellington's troops in July and Au- fust, fresh from their triumphs in Spain and ranee, he was ordered to carry the war into New York by way of Lake Champlain. Utter failures of the American army in every Canadian attempt gave rational en- couragement to the belief that whatever, 80 large a force undertook must be effect- ed; for, till Brown checked the tide, it was a continued flood of victory. As the flo- tilla at Isle Aux Noix was necessary, indeed indispensable to the advance of the Bri- tish army, positive orders were given to the quarter-master-general and commissary- general to suspend all other work, and every branch' of service whatever that would interfere with the construction and equipment of the frigate Confiance. Her size, tonnage and armament were all made so much greater than those of the largest American ship, the Saratoga, as to leave no doubt of the capacity of the English ves- sel to overwhelm the American. Captain Fisher superintended the British naval pre- parations, which were urged with the ut- most expedition. Early m August Com- modore Yeo, who commanded both Lakes Ontario and Champlain, was called on by the governor-general to put the Champlain division of his command under immediate orders for the contemplated service. Then it was that the jealousy between the sea and land officers, seldom sleeping, began to show itself. Yeo answered Prevost's im- portunity that the Champlain squadron had already nearly a hundred men more than its complement, and he sent Captain Dow- nie, of the ship Montl^al, to take the place of Captain Fisher, who had prepared the squad- ron for action . Disappointed by Yeo, the go- vernor-general applied to Admiral Otway, at Quebec, and Captain Lord James O'Brien, who instantly sent from - their ships, the Ajax and Warspite, the required supply of experienced seamen. On the 3d of September the gun boats in ad-' vance of the squadron, under Captain Pring, accompanied the army as it slowly proceed- ed along the lake, waiting for the whole fleet, and took possession of La Motte, a small is- land. In a council of war held by the British generals, it was unanimously resolved that the attack on Plattsburg must be simulta- neous by land and water, and therefore that of the army was deferred till the whole squadron arrived. Naval ascendency on the lake was deemed indispensable to land operations. Entire confidence prevailed in the superiority of the British vessels, their heavier metal,more numerous veteran crews, and much more experienced officers. Their commander assured the army that with hia ship alone he would take the whole Ameri-. can squadron ; but that he was determined not to go to battle, or out of harbor, till his vessels were all ready. On the 8th of September, considering them so, he slowly moved along- the lake, in that pride of strength which is often the forerunner of disaster, his vanity of prowess inflamed by uncommon supervision. A large British army occupied the circumjacent places, watching the naval operation, waiting only till it removed the sole obstacle to their tri- umphant progress. Commodore Downie'a frigate, 160 feet long by 40 feet beam, with a crew of more than 300 picked seamen, and a first Lieutenant Robertson, who, after his commander's fall, fought the vessel at least as well as before that event, heavily armed with eleven guns more than the American Commodore, those guns larger, heavier, better sighted, on the smooth waters of the lake, was a formidable floating bat- tery, and as sho moved majestically into action, without returning a shot, till close aboard her despised antagonist, was fa- Chap, VI.] voredby the breeze, ■srMoh to all physical, superadded that natural advantage. Con- trary to naval usage, if not honor,, there was a furnace in the Oonfiance to prepare red-hot shot, several, of which struck and Bet fire to the Sara.toga. The British army and navy had reason to rely on the latter clearing the way for the former's capture of Macomb's two thousand recruits and convalescents, supported, as the haughty Britons contemptuously said, by a rabble of militia. It was said that the Confiance had many things on board for use ashore after her assured victory ; even women, one of whom, the steward's wife, was killed in the action. To the jealousy of corps between army and navy, and confidifcce of success, was added on the eve of battle a taunt, still further to goad Downie to indiscretion. As he moved gradually along the lake, Prevost sent an officer to apprise him of the resolution of the council of war, that the army depended on the navy for suc- cess in a simultaneous attack. To 'that rather overbearing communication, Cap- tain Downie's lofty answer to the staff of- ficer who bore this message was, that he considered himself, with his vessel alone, a match for the whole American squadron. At midnight on the 9th of September, he sent to inform the Governor-General that ■ the -fleet would get under way then, dou- bling Cumberland head next morning at sunrise, and attack the American flotilla, anchored in the bay off Plattsburg. Its ^an- chorage was out of reach of land batteries, the vessels and barges so stationed along the shore that the enemy could not get be- tween them and it. At break of day, on the 11th of September, the troops were all drawn out in expectation of the promised action on the water; but as the British ships did not appear. Sir George Prevost ordered the army to return to their quar- ters, and sent Commodore Downie the in- sulting message, that the army were all at their posts at the time appointed by the navy, and the General hoped that nothing but weather had prevented the Commo- dore being as good as his word. Stung by that unmerited and harsh reproach, Downie hastened his attack, as the only reply he deigned to give. The fine weather had disappeared before approaches of the in- clemency frequent at that season. But the wind was fair for the British squadron, which, at seven o'clock on Sunday morning, doubled Cumberland head, the Confiance proudly leading far in advance of all her companions, and at eight, as her com- mander uniformly boasted, rushed forward alone to take the whole American squad- ron. Such was the assurance of that ability, that a British barge, filled with amateur spectators, accompanied the other sixteen Vessels, wiioh misled McDonough to sup- BATTLE ON THE LAKE. 127 pose that there were thirteen British barges, when there were but twelve; the thirteenth being filled with idlers; who came not to bear the brunt of battle, but witness, enjoy, and share the victory. The persons in the ama- teur barge, with her gay colors streaming, were among the many indications of that extreme naval confidence which that day turned- to military alarm and panic, the ■sudden result of unlooked-for discomfiture : fright, flight, and consternation of the army at night succeeding contemptuous attack by the navy in the morning. The position chosen by McDonough for his flotilla is agreed, by nautical judges, to have been admirable ; in which he waited at anchor in perfect quiet and order, cha- racteristic of American naval discipline, in contrast with the clamorous defiance of British sea fights. Nor was that taciturn composure the only national contrast. I am not able to state whether, like Colonel Short at Sandusky, and Colonel Drum- mond at Erie, Commodore Downie, to the overweening confidence of British valor, added the fuel of vulgar profanity. But like the Spartans at Thermopylae, and Crom- well's soldiers when an English army has never been surpassed in heroic courage, the young American commander, then thirty-one years of age, introduced his ap- peal to mortal combat by intercession to Almighty God ; neither Pagan, as Leonidas, nor Puritan,- as Cromwell's prayers. Mc- Donough, a member of that denomination of American Christians who, with affec- tionate reverence for a mother country, are said to belong to the Church of England, solemnized the sacraments and sacrifices of that Sabbath by prayers ; among other pious invocations, reading that ordained by the Protestant Episco- pal ritual before a sea fight : " ! most powerful and glorious Lord God, we make our address to Thy divine Majesty in this necessity.: that Thou wouldst take the-~ erly side of Lake Champlain ; and a river, called Saranac, on its way easterly, passes through this village, dividing it into two parts, and empties its waters into the bay, being a part of Lake Champlain. This stream, for the distance of foijr miles, or more, in consequence of its rocky shores and bottom, is rendered impassable by fording, and at that time there were but two places where they crossed it on bridges. On tibe south side of this stream, a short distance from>the lower bridge, was the place selected for the forts, it being on an eminence commanding a view of the whole village. In this situation we find it at the time of the invasion ; we also find that Commodore McDonough, with his fleet, lay at Cumberland head, watching the motion of the enemy. On the 6th of September, 1814, the enemy made their appearance at that village. .The inhabitants, together with our troops, oh finding the enemy were near, threw down the upper bridge, and took the plank off from the lower one, and made every other arrangement to prevent the enemy from reaching the fort ; and by their skill and bravery they prevented them crossing the river. General Macomb, know- ing the situation that he was in, and judg- ing from what he saw of their movements, what their future operations would be, al- though he was sanguine as to his being able to -check them in his front, yet he clearly saw the need of a larger force than he then had, to check their right wing, which extended up the river, at which place the river might be forded. In this 131 situation he wisely took the precaution to send across the lake into the Green Mount- ain State for assistance. His call was quickly responded to, and by Saturday, the 10th, there were about two thousand volun- teers, who had crossed the lake and reported themselves to him. They were ordered to encamp at the .mouth of Salmon river, a few miles south of the fort, there to wait his order. During this time the enemy had brought up and mounted their artillery, and it was clearly ascertained that the battle would take place the next day. Ac- cording to expectation, the enemy's fleet appeared at an early hour. The cannon- ading soon began, and it was soon found that the enemy were crossing at the up- per ford with intent to come round on the rear of the forfe The militia were in- stantly ordered to meet them, which order was promptly obeyed, and the enemy were soon compelled to re-cross the river in great haste. During this time Commodore Mc- Donough had conquered the enemy's fleet — the centre had been kept back by the force at the fort. General Prevost, finding him- self completely checked and beaten at every point, ordered a retreat that night, and the next morning the enemy were all far on their way home." In a most important result, the naval victory on Lake Champlain, in 1814, sur- passed that on Lake Erie in 1813. The former enabled Harrison to recover lost ground, whereas the latter prevented the loss of any. In the then temper of Massa- chusetts, if not most of New England, it is difficult to estimate the danger to the Union of Prevost's penetrating with a conquering army to Crown Point, and taking up win- ter quarters in New York, near New Eng- land. But perhaps no territorial or political consequence of that victory deserves atten- tion so much as the great naval reforma- tion, which may be not Tinreasonably ascribed to the religious exercises on board the commander's ship preliminary to the conflict. The primitive and edifying sub- limity of the young commander of a squadron preparing - for combat, by' introducing it with devotional exercises, going to pray- ers before he ordered his crew to clear for action, which nothing but pure religious reverence could induce, instead of rousing his men by the animal excitements common on such occasions, was an act which victory recommends to great consequences. It was in strong contrast with English practice and seafaring character : of both men and officers of their naval and commercial marine. The British tar, familiarly and fondly so called, has been deemed incurably and excusably, if not laudably thoughtless; profane, in- ebriate, careless of danger, brave like a beast, addicted to conflict, and reckless of futurity. A few years before the battle on 132 NAVAL REFOEMATION. Lake Champlain, the most eminent and learned of all the judges that have pro- nounced Admiralty law in -England, Sir William Scott, afterwards Lord StoweU, in a suit for seamen's wages, in the year 1799, treated them as a peculiar race of mankind, beneath the rest. "Common mariners," he- said, " come before the court with so strong a title to the indulgence and favora- ble attention of the court, from their ig- norance and helpless state, placed in a pe- culiar manner under the protection of the court." " A sailor may remain a sailor to the end of his days, as it is not usual to be minute in the inquiry made into his cha^ raoter." After thus degrading seamen to a lower stage of humanity, the judge spoke of drunkenness, for which {it was the case of a mate) " the court will be no apologist," he said. " At the same time, it cannot en- -tirely forget that, in a mode of life_pecxi- liarly exposed to severe peril and exertion, and therefore admitting, in seasons of re- pose, something of indulgence and refresh- ment, that indulgence and refreshment is naturally enough sought by such persons in grosser pleasures of that kind, and, there- fore, that the proof of a single act of in- temperance, committed in port, is no conclu- sive proof of disability for general maritime employment. Another rule would, I fear, disable very many useful men for the ma- ritime service of their country." Such philosophy for the sea, inculcated by the highest English authority, for of- ficers, left the common mariner where, in both English and American marine affairs, he always was some years ago. The hard- ships, destitution, and privations of that large class of useful men, several millions, probably, of English and Americans, were much less than their utter want of religious instruction. Those " poor children of the sea," when ashore, inhabited the land- lord's profligate den, frequented the brothel, and lived without either- home, faith, or fa- mily. "When McDonough introduced battle by prayers, there was not,- in all the British dominions, or United States of Anierica, a single place of worship appropriated to - mariners. Naval chaplains said foirmal prayers, on certain occasions, on shipboard. But there was no religion; and "no Sun- days off soundings" was a seaman's pro- verb. By universal opinion, as Lord StoweU reasoned, a sailor remained a sailor to the end of his days, and it was not usual to be minute in the inquiry made into his cha- racter. The Gospel was never preached to them, at sea or ashore, as they were deemed inaccessible to religious influence. A man-of-war was a floating Pandemonium, full of turbulent spirits, stimulated by ar- dent drinks, awed by iron severity, lashed and fettered for misconduct. The British veteran seamen on board the Confiance, im- pressed, perhaps years before, imprisoned [1814. for life in floating barracks, habitually pro- fane, inebriate and brutal, like nearly all sea- men, were licentious, quarrelsome, and law- less, encouraged in bad, as if incapable of good habits ; and, as fighting men, infinitely below soldiers in all the privileges and ele- vation of manhood. Since 1814, a wonderful reformation h^ taken place in the American marine, both naval and commercial ; and is it unreasona- ble to consider' McDonough's example as having contributed to that change ? Then there were not, it is said, more than one or two, now there are from fifty to one hundred officers of the American navy, professors of religion. In the American commercial ma- rine, there are eight hundred masters and ten thousand common seamen, devout and sober, more than in 1814. No government inter- ference has wrought this reform, which is the spontaneous growth of seed sown by in- dividuals like McDonough, daring to be re- ligious. Libraries and temperance contri- bute their, no doubt, valuable help. But individual piety has been the principal pro- moter of such a moral advance in the American over the British marine, that every person desirous of safe conveyance for himself or his property, on the ocean, prefers an American to a British vessel. There are other, and still more interest- ing, views of this reformation which need but be glanced at. Of what utility'were English or American missions to reclaim heathen countries while, with every minister of Christianity, went a hundred or more de- praved and disgusting seamen, whose ha- bitual misbehaviour more than counter- vailed all that missionaries could preach of a creed thus practically refuted and rendered odious? Wherever sober and religious crews accompany pious missionaries, their labors may be effectual, but not till then. And of what avail are clumsy annual at- tempts by act of Congress to abolish flog- ging and drinking till seamen are morally prepared for more humane and civilized treatment? -A moral and religious marine, sober, civilized and christianized seamen, will be an American reformation, should it be accomplished, the benefits of which to mankind it is difficult to over-estimate. The lash will disappear with the grog ; the sea- man will be a gentleman ; and there is no other way to make him so ; all attempts by law, or other than moral means, must fail to get rid of brutal conduct and brutal dis- cipline. If, therefore, the example of the brave and modest lieutenant from the banks of the Delaware, who, without offence, rebuked the universal naval indifference to religion, in both the American and British marine, commercial as well as militant, and rising calmly from that pious rebuke, went to battle refreshed by it, to fight with the considerate valor which is far superior Chap. VI.] GOVERNOR CHITTENDEN'^S PROCLAMATION. 133 to animal or factitious, above all, drunken courage — if that admirable example of true heroism is effectual — ^there was in Mac- donough's victory on Lake Ohamplain an edifying result far exceeding the conse- quences for 'which triumphs in arms are jBommonly celebrated. In the roused temper of the nation, the barbarian destruction of the metropolis by the enemy, far from alarming, did but excite public ardor for resistance, while every victory^ inspired the highest confidence. Everywhere .defeated, by land and water, except at -Washington, where government alone was thought to blame, and in Massa- chusetts, where treachery explained disas- ter, the mighty. British became more odious than ever, and no longer feared, if not de- spised. Nowhere was the revolution in public sentiment more remarkable than in Vermont, by the victories of Plattsburg. - The federal party carried the autumnal elections for Congress in that frontier State, where five federalists superseded as many republicans in the House of Representatives. The governor, Martin Chittenden, was an adherent of Governor Strong and his doc- trines. On the first of September, when the British army began its advance to Plattsburg, and General Macomb sent an express, earnestly calling on Governor Chit- tenden for aid, not to invade Canada, but •defend Vermont, he, then at Burlington, the State capital, resolved to do nothing, but go home to nis residence at Jericho, and there disgracefully wait events. On the 4th of September, Macomb, by another express, re- newed his instances, informing the governor that the enemy had that day marched to at- tack Plattsburg. An officer of the militia. Gen. Newell, tendered his brigade to the go- vernor, to repair to Plattsburg, or anywhere else, to oppose the enemy: to which the governor's cold-blooded answer was, that he had no authority to order the militia to leave the State. On the 6th September, the cannonade, then begun, was distinctly audi- ble at Burlington, and Governor Chitten- den's residence at Jericho. But housed and recreant there, the chief magistrate still held ofT; when the people, on their own sponta- neous motion, in numbers crossed the lake, and following the cannonade, hurried to Plattsburg, without distinction of party, to tender their services for their country. The reports at Jericho then were, that the enemy had forced his way over the SaranaC, and Macomb, in imminent peril, was in great distress for reinforcements. On Sunday, the eleventh, when it was apprehended that Plattsburg had fallen, the governor was careful to say that he had neither ordered nor advised the volunteers to go there. He stood skulking behind constitutional demurrer and unmanly pretext, till the whole region was in a ferment of exultation; not only that the enemy was defeated and driven- back to Canada, but that Verrdont volunteers, un- der General Strong, strictly and emphatic- ally volunteers, for they had neither orders nor countenance from their commander-in- chief, had bravely resisted the attack at Plattsburg, shared in the pursuit to Chazy, and shared too in thc^jlentiful spoils cap- tured at every stage ofnostile flight. After part of the New York militia were dismissed by General Macomb, as no longer needed, the Vermont volunteers had aU gone home, and it was notorious that the enemy had abandoned all idea of assailing any part of that region, on the 19th September, 1814, still tarrying at Jericho, Governor Chittenden's obeisance to the mighty mas- tery of success at last appeared in his pro- clamation : "Whereas, it appears that the war in which our country is unfortunately engaged, has assumed an entirely difierent character since its first commencement, and has been almost exclusively defensive, and is' prose- cuted by the enemy with a spirit unexam- pled during pending negotiations of peace, which leaves no prospect of safety but in a manly and united determination to meet invasion at every point, and to expel the invader : "And whereas, notwithstanding the signal and glorious naval victory lately achieved by our gallant commander, McDonough, and his brave officers and seamen over a superior naval force on Lake Champlain: and a like discomfiture of the enemy's whole laud force, concentrated at Plattsburg, by General Macomb's small but valiant band of regular troops, aided and powerfully supported by our patriotic, virtuous, and brave volunteers, who flew to meet the in- vader with an alertness and spirit unexam- pled in this or any other country; — it is made known to me that the British army is still on the frontier of our sister State, col- lecting and concentrating a powerful force, indicating further operations of aggres- sion : "And whereas, the conflict has become a common and not a party concern, the time has now arrived when all degrading party distinctions and animosities, however we may have differed as to the policy of de- claring, or the mode of prosecuting, the war, ought to be laid aside, that every heart may be stimulated atid every arm nerved for the protection of our common country, our altars, and our firesides ; in the defence of which we may, with a humble confidence, look to Heaven, for assistance and protec- tion. "Now, therefore, I, Martin Chittenden, Governor and Commander-in-Chief in and over the State of Vermont, do issue this, my proclamation, earnestly exhorting all the good people of this State, by that love of country which so signally distinguished our fathei:s in their glorious and successful 134 VERMONT. [1814. struggle for our independence, to unite both neart and hand iu defence of our common interest and everything dear to freemen. " I do enjoin it upon all officers of divi- Bions, brigades, regiments, and companies of the militia of this State, to exert themselves in" the execution of their respective duties, in placing those under their command in a complete state of readiness, and without further order, to march at a moment's •warning to meet any invasion which may be attempted, and to chastise and expel the invader. " And I would earnestly recommend it to those, who, by the lenity of our laws, are exempt from ordinary military duty, where they have not already done it; to organize themselves into companies, and equip, and stand in readiness to meet the approaching crisis ; reminding them that it is their pro- perty, themselves, and their families, that are, in common with others, to be pro- tected. " And more especially I would recommend it to the Select Men and civil authorities of the respective towns, to be vigilant in the execution of the duties enjoined on them, in providing ammunition, and in affording such assistance to the militia as their situa- tions may require. " After witnessing the severe and degrad- ing terms imposed on many of our unfortu- nate fellow-citizens on the sea-board, no man who is mindful of what he owes to his coun- try, and to his own character, can advocate submission while resistance is practicable. The fate of Alexandria forcibly appeals to the proud feelings of every American, to exert the augmented force and resources with which it has pleased a beneficial Pro- vidence to bless us for the defence and se- curity of that soil and those rights rendered inestimable by having been purchased by the blood of our fathers." In that complete conversion from faction to patriotism, Governor Chittenden did but follow a popular movement which was irre- sistible. The sovereign people of Vermont took the war in hand and to heart with, a spirit which no State authority, much less individual dissenter, could withstand ; strongly in contrast with the disgraceful inaction of Massachusetts. In almost every town in the western part of Vermont, mili- tary organization was perfected ; arms, ammunition, and transportation, spontane-< ously provided, points of rendezvous desig- nated, so as to repel any hostile attempt. Generals Strong and Orme cordially se- conded the popular movement, and the whole pastoral commonwealth was afoot with martial energy ; defensive, indeed, but patriotic and repulsive ; and such as, if Mas- Bichusetts had not chilled it in Maine, would have recovered the conquered territory there, notwithstanding the enemy's marine advantages. For the battle of Plattsburg, four thousand Vermonters, by forced march- es, rushed from their native hills to action ; and with some advantages of position, fa- vorable to raw troops, repulsed the British veterans with admirable constancy. Mr. Samuel S. Phelps, now and long a distin- guished Senator from Vermont, Mr. Jacob CoUamer, of the present House gf Repre- sentatives, and the father of Lucius P. Peck, another member of the House at present, all served, with many more citizens of that State, on that occasion. The whole people were up in arms and in spirit, so that no governor or constituted authority could hold back against the universal impulse. From the commencement of that era of uninterrupted and wonderful American successes everywhere, by land and water, we may invoke the London journals as fur- nishing the best historical accounts that can be presented, of British views, plans, hopes, fears, confidence, disappointments, and mortifications, from the capture of Paris, 31st March, to the treaty of Ghent, 24th December, 1814. France was hardly subdued before the conquerors were ordered to America. On the 29th of April, 1814, a number of the largest class of transports are fitting out — the Courier, officialjournal, published — ^with all speed at Portsmouth, as well as the troop ships at that port, for the purpose, it is sug- gested, of going to Bordeaux, to take the most effective regiments in Lord Welling- ton's army, to America. On the 19th of May, it added, "The expedition to America is upon a much larger scale than was ori- ginally imagined. "A man attempts our life and fortune, and because he fails, he is to expect generosity and forbearance from us ! Why, what drivelling doctrine ! Let us insist upon a, full indemnity. Let us interdict them from the Newfoundland fisheries. As to Louisiana, that is the busi- ness of Spain, in which we should support her. Let us insist upon their recantation of their new-fangled law, by which they would debauch our subjects from their allegiance ; and let us demand their adoption of the law of nations as recognized in Europe. This is what we have a right to demand. This is not vengeance, but justice. Any- ''thin^ short of this will neither satisfy the demands of a wise policy, nor the expecta- tions of the British empire." On the 21st of May, it said. We were glad to find in the palace yard meeting yesterday, a true British feeling with regard to America. Vigorous war vdth America, we repeat, with the hard hands and honest hearts that applauded that sentiment yesterday; vigorous war! till America accedes to the following de- mands : A new boundary line for Canada ; a new boundary for the Indians. The in- dependence of the Indians, and the integ- Chap. VI.] ENGLISH TESTIMONY. 135 rity of their boundaries, to be guarantied by Great Britain ; the Americans to be ex- cluded from the fisheries, &c. ; the Ameri- cans to be excluded from all intercourse with the British West India islands ; the Americans to be excluded from trading with our East India possessions ; and their pretended right to the northwest coast of America to be extinguished forever; "the Americans not to be allowed to incorporate the Floridas with their republic ; and the cession of New Orleans to be required, in order to insure us the due payment of a privilege to navigate the Mississippi. Fi- nally, the distinct abandonment of the new-fangled American public law ; the ad- mission of the international law as it is at present received in Europe ; and the recog- nition of our right to search. Again, 31st May. " It is computed that the reinforcements which have joined Sir George Prevost, since the last campaign, will enable him to take the field with an army of twenty thousand efiective men. This force will move against the American army from the Canadian frontiers, whilst twelve thousand of the best troops of the Duke of Wellington's army will be landed on the American shores. The regiments which are to go from the- south of France, have all arrived at Bordeaux to embark." 29th September. " Peace they may make, but it must be on the condition that Ame- rica has not a foot of land on the waters of the St. Lawrence. Our Canada frontier must be secured by an extension of ter- ritory; the Americans must have no settle- ment on the lakes." 13th October. "From the American coast we are in hourly expectation of re- ceiving new successes. A letter from St. Johns, about twelve miles distant from Lake Champlain, announces the rapid ad- vance of the British army in tbat direction, and holds out a hope that the American flotilla on that lake will be captured or burnt in its harbor." A month before that vain hope, the American flotilla had captured that of Great Britain ; and within a week, the London official press was constrained to dole out the melancholy reverses of high- wrought expectations. On the 17th October, the death of General Boss (described as one of the brightest ornaments of his profession) was an- nounced. On the 18th October. " American papers have been received to the 17th September. We regret to state that they are of an un- favorable nature. Our flotilla upon Lake Champlain has been attacked, and, accord- ing" to the American papers, taken or de- stroyed. Sir George Prevost had advanced from Odletown to Plattsburg, which he attacked. The American general, Macomb, was stationed there with a strong force, and d, battle is said to have been fought on the 10th September." 22d October. " We have received some more details from Montreal papers, and private letters, relative to the late opera- tions on Lake Champlain and at Plattsburg; and it is with infinite regret that we state, that the picture they draw is very different from what we had expected. -These jour- nals and private letters assert that the most ample preparations were made for the ex- pedition against Plattsburg, and that a force of not less than 14,000 men, under the command of General Sir George Pre- vost. and immediately led by Major-Gene- ral Brisbane, Power, &c.,. had proceeded to Lake Champlain for this purpose." 24th October. " Major-General the Hon. Sir Edward Pakenham Is, we understand, appointed to succeed the late lamented General Ross in the command which he held in our American army. 'This gallant officer is brother-in-law to the Duke of Wel- lington and brother of the Earl of Long- ford. He was adjutant-general of the British army in the late' Peninsular war, and is an officer of distinguished merit." On the 25th October, with the account of the defeat of the army and fleet at Plattsburg, it is added, "One impression, we presume, is made upon, every mind, that peace with America is neither practicable nor desirable until we have wiped away this last disgrace." 27th October. " The Hon. Major-General Sir E. Pakenham transacted business yester- day with Lord* Bathurst at his office in Downing Street. He is expected to leave town on Saturday to take a command in America. The hostile mind of the Jeffer- son party against this country is not only not moderated, but it is become more ma- lignant than ever." 28th October. " We have made some ex- tracts from the Boston papers. They are loud in their exultation at their success at Plattsburg. Sorry are we to say that they have but too much reason." 29th October. "There was a report last night that the negotiation at Ghent had finally broken off. We do not believe this, but peace with America is neither desira- ble nor practicable till we have vriped away, by fresh successes, the late disasters on Lake Champlain. Major-General Gibbs accompanies the Hon. Sir E. M. Pakenham to America, in the Statira frigate." By November, the mercury sunk from fever, above blood heat, to below the freezing point ; and then it was -semi-officially pub- lished, that " Great preparations are mak- ing to send out to India all the troops that can be spared from the increased exigencies of the war in America; and not a single disposable corps in the country will be left unsent to one of these situations or the other." 136 ENGLISH TESTIMONY. [1814.- The official press, TTith its ministerial disclosures, is not the only vade mecum for these British acknowledgments of American triumphs. To the Courier we can add the Times newspaper, with its extensive im- pression on the whole European as well as English mind. That journal enjoyed a high rejiutation for fairness, and exemption from a mere factious spirit of opposition to the government, its ambition being rather to utter independently the language of British feeling and British interests. The follow- ing are extracts from it. 17th May, 1814. ""We shall inquire a little into the American title to Louisiana, &c." " When they behold such an importa- tion as they never before witnessed, from Bordeaux, it is more than probable that they wiU hasten to show the sincerity of their repentance," &c. 24th May. " They are struck to the heart with terror for their impending punishment ; and, oh, may no false liberality, no mistaken lenity, no weak and cowardly policy, inter- pose to save them from the blow. Strike ! chastise the savages — for sftch they are in a much truer sense than the followers of Tecumseh or the Prophet. The prospect they present is so cheering, and we cannot but flatter ourselves, that if all our rein- forcements reach the intended scene of operations in due time," &c. &c. 7th October. " This is not the language, indeed, of courtly negotiators, but it is that of conquerors, which, we trust, we shall be well entitled to use at the end of the pre- sent campaign." 14th October. "There is little doubt that the account of our troops being in pos- session of Plattsburg is correct. Letters are said to have reached town from- thence, dated three days subsequent to the entry- of the British. One of the writers speaks of the great alarm the Americans are in, and adds, with great good reason, for we are prepared to give them a tremendous good di'ubbing." 21st October. " The ship which brought over the account of the Champlain disaster, was the Ajax, a Dutch ship-of-war, which had carried out the Dutch minister to the United States, a measure which we think the Prince should not so hastily have adopt- ed. They should have remembered that the fate of war was uncertain ; that the present chiefs of the American Government have been subjects of the English crown, and rebels from their allegiance ; and that it is no miracle in the present day to see nations throw off the galling yoke of rebel chiefs, and return to the paternal government of their natural sovereigns, &c. We do not wonder to hear sentiments of regard for these wretches expressed by the writers in the Journal de Paris, whose short-sighted policy leads them to consider everything that is pernicious to Great Britain is con- ducive to the interests of France." " This writer says, f we put up sincere vows that the country of Washington and Franklin may preserve its independence, and not fall again under the yoke of England.' What would the journalist say, if we were to declare we put up sincere vows that the coun- try of Toussaint (a man equal in virtue to Washington, and far superior to Franklin) may preserve its independence, and not fall again under the yoke of France ? Under the head of Vienna, the same journalist in- forms us, that Prince Talleyrand has pre- sented, or was about to present, an import- ant note to the Congress. It is, no doubt, meant to be insinuated, and, indeed, private accounts from Paris go to that effect, that the note is to urge the continental powers to adopt some principle hostile to our naval preponderance, under the pretence of es- tablishing some improvement in the law of nations, some code of maritime law more lenient to neutral trade." 22d September. "It is true that at the other extremity of the United States, the war is becoming exceedingly odious. The Virginia farmer, a selfish mortal at the best, begins to feel the personal pressure of war, levies, and contributions, and is ready to execrate, &c. Alarms, too, are spread of British troops landing in' Florida; of expeditions against Georgia; of distribu- tions of arms to Indians in that quar- ter, &c." 25th Oetober. "Now we have reduced ourselves to the dilemma of being ebliged to carry our point by main force, or to re- tire from the contest ten times worse than we began it ; with the mere postponement of an abstract question which has no re- ference to our present state of peace ; with a fund of the bitterest animosity laid up against us in future ; with our flag dis- graced on the ocean and the lakes; and with the laurels withered at Plattsburg, which were so hardly, but so gloriously earned, in Portugal, Spain, and France." Afterwards, on the 13th of November, 1814, deploring anticipated disgraceful peace, the Times said: "To have taught the Americans to beat us by land and water ; to retire from the contest with the disgrace of Lake Champlain and Platts- burg on our backs." 3d December. " Suggestions are copied from the Canadian papers, as to the neces- sity of having all the country along the St. Lawrence, between Kingston and Mont- real. These considerations will demand our most serious consideration when we come to be in a condition to conclude peace, without disgrace to our military and naval character, which cannot be till after we have wiped away some of those stains which the glory of Britain has so unac- countably endured." Gth December. " On a par with the folly Chap. VI.] of aggrandizing Kussia and Austria, would be tSe infam^ of concluding a' disgraceful peace ■with tne United States of America ; and yet any peace we can now conclude, must be disgraceful. We have not cured the wound sustained when the flag of the Guerriere was struck. The American navy is far greater at this day, and infinitely more proud, than it was when the war began. The American army, then a mere jest and burlesque, begins now to count its laurels. Nevertheless we are forced to ac- knowledge that the rumor of a speedy ad- justment of difficulties (as they are deli- cately termed), between us and America, continues to acquire consistency. Its effect is felt in the state of the funds, and in the prices of American produce. The story is, that the English ministers have, in the vul- gar phrase, 'knocked under;' in other words, having impoliticly advanced terms which would have been justified only by a vigorous and successful campaign, they have, in consequence of the disaster on Lake Champlain, fallen, in an equal degree, below the just expectations of the nation. To all such tales, however, we are back- ward in giving credence." 13th December. " If we could give credit to reports circulated yesterday, with much confidence, we should believe that ministers had sacrificed the glory and> best interests of the country by a premature peace with the Americans. Unfortunately, however, for the credit of this assertion, we at the same time hear that the most active mea- sures are pursuing for detaching from the dominion of the enemy a very important part of his territory. Accounts from Ber- muda to the 11th ultimo, inform us that all the disposable shipping in that quarter had been sent off to the Mississippi. Sir Alex- ander Cochrane left Halifax at the latter end of October, for the same destination ; and a large body of troops from Jamaica were expected to assemble at the same point. It can hardly be supposed, that while they (the ministry), are so largely sacrificing the national resources, with the one hand, they will render the object of the sacrifice altogether null with the other. The American navy grows under the pres- sure of a contest with the greatest naval force that ever existed. Paradoxical as this appears, it is a simple fact; and it proves, more than a thousand arguments, the utter impossibility there is of conclud- ing a peace at the present moment, with out rendering ourselves the contempt of our antagonists, and the ridicule of all the world besides. Shall we allow the Guer- riere to go to sea with impunity, and to bear to every part of the world a visible record of our shame in that defeat which entailed on us so many subsequent dis- graces? A new frigate of that name, mounting sixty-four guns, is at Philadel- ENGLISH MOANS. 137 phia, nearly ready for sea. The Washing- ton, another new ship, carrying ninety guns, is fitting very fast for sea, at Boston ; and the Independence, of ninety guns, has been recently constructed at Portsmouth, in New Hampshire. The last' mentioned vessel is considered to be more than a match for the largest man-of-war ever built in England." , "27th December. Peace witli America is announced. Those who have attended to the observations which we h%ve froni time to time thought it our duty to make on the war so iniquitously waged against Great Britain by the dominant faction in America, may form some idea of the feelings with which we announce the fatal intelligence, that a treaty of peace was signed at Ghent, on Saturday last, the 24th instant, subject, of course, to the ratification of both govern- ments. The terms of this deadly instru- ment are understood to be, in substance, nearly as follows, &c. &c. " We do not mean to avoid the force of the great argument for peace, which is founded on the pressure of the existingtaxes," &c. &o. "28th December. Without entering into the details of the treaty (on which we have much to observe hereafter), we confess that we look anxiously to its non-ratification, because we hope an opportunity will be offered to our brave seamen to retire from the contest, not as they now are, beaten and " disgraced, not with the loss of the trident, which' Nelson, when dying, placed in his country's grasp, but with, an ample and full revenge for the captures of the Guer- riere, Macedonian, and Java, and the nu- merous other ships that have been surren- dered on the ocean ; besides the whole flotillas destriyred on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain. Let us not deceive ourselves : these victories have given birth to a spirit which, if not checked, will in a few years create an American navy truly formidable. They have excited in other nations who fool- ishly envy our maritime preponderance, an undissembled joy at beholding our course so powerfully arrested. "As to the opinion that peace with Ame- rica is necessary to preserve our European influence, anybody may see that political weight and influence can never be gained by submission ; by abandoning what we pro- posed as a sine qua rum ; by waiving all question on our disputed maritime rights ; or by patching up a hollow peace at the very moment when our adversary is dou- bling his military force, and threatens to push the war into our provinces. "29th December. Public credit must eventually suffer ; for it is the general opin- ion that nothing but the probability of a new war in Europe could have occasioned the disgraceful compromise of our transat- lantic quarrel. Unable as we are to pene- trate the thick veil which hangs over the -138 ENGLISH DISGUST AT PEACE. -* — negotiation at Vienna, it is not for us to say what dark machinations aginst the ho- nor and interest of England may be brew- ing there; but urgent and serious must these dangers be if they touch us closer than the defeats we have received, by sea and land, from the once despised arms of America. It may suit party writers to make very light of such considerations. The ministerialist may affect to forget that the British flag was ever struck to the Ameri- can. The oppositionist may tell you that, in spite of national humiliation and the dis- credit brought on the country, he rejoices, because ministers have humbled themselves to the dust. With the principles which we have uniformly maintained, with a zealous affection for the interests of the country, and that which is its best interest, its honor, each of these modes of considering this im- portant subject is alike inconsistent. It is inconsistent with common sense to deny that our naval reputation has been blasted in this short but disastrous war. It is in- consistent with the spirit and feelings of Englishmen not to regret that the means of retrieving that- reputation are cut off by a premature and inglorious peace. Hostili- ties are not to cease. This part of the treaty, at least, we hope, wiU be religiously attended to by government. " 30th December. Even yet, however, if we could but close the war with some great naval triumph, the reputation of our _ maritime greatness might be partially re- stored ; but to say that it has not hitherto suffered in the estimation of all Europe, and what is worse, of America, is to belie common sense and universal experience. Two or three of our ships have struck to a force vastiy superior. No : not two or three ; but many on the ocean, and whole squad- rons on the lakes ; and their numbers are to be viewed with relation to the comparar tive magnitude of the two navies. Scarcely is there an American ship of war which has not to boast a victory over the British flag. Scarcely one British ship in thirty or forty that has beaten an American. Belt accident, or be it misconduct, we inquire not now into the cause. The certain, the inevitable consequences are what we look to, and those may be summed up in a few words, — the speedy growth of an American navy, and the recurrence of a new and much more formidable American war. From that fatal moment when the flag of the Guerriere was struck, there has been quite a rage for building ships of war in the United States. We are well convinced that every ship and every soldier employed in maintaining the vital contest for our maritime ascendency, far from diminishing, will add a propor- tional weight to our influence at Vienna. But in truth, Vienna and all its fetes and all its negotiations are infinitely insignifi- eant to us now compared with," &c. &c. [1814. " 31st December. Whether Mr. Madison may or may not ratify the treaty of Ghent, will perhaps depend on the result of the expedition to New Orleans. The forces from Falmouth and Cork, supposed to have been destined for that expedition,- appear, by letters brought by the Amphion, not to have touched at Bermuda, but to have pro- , ceeded direct to the mouth of the Missis- sippi, whither Admiral Cockbum followed them with such vessels as he could collect. The permanent occupation of New Orleans would be a fatal blow to the American views of aggrandizement on the side of Lou- isiana ; but that blow Mr. Madison has it now in his power to parry by a mere stroke of the pen. On the other harid, if the ex- pedition should encounter any serious ob- stacles, he would probably delay it, if not wholly refuse to ratify the treaty. 7th January, 1815. Keferring to the cap- ture of Pensacola by General Jackson, the Times says: "It is true that eight or ten thousand British troops wiU soon be in the neighborhood of the Floridas, and might with ease out off General Jackson and his motley crew ; but their operations will be doubtless paralyzed by the President's rati- fication of the treaty." 31st January. "By letters received yes- terday from Jamaica, we learn that the force destined against New Orleans, consisting of about ten thousand men, saUed from Negril bay, in that island, on the 28th of November. The usual run from thence to New Orleans, scarcely ever exceeds a fort- night ; so that the whole might be expected to be before that city on the 12th of Decem- ber, and probably to have made themselves masters of it by the 24th, the day when the gratuitous cession of all our conquests to a barbarous enemy, was so magnanimously made at Ghent." Were it necessary, a surfeit of similar confessions might be extracted from the British press, and superadded to the leading articles, thus somewhat copiously incorpo- rated with my text ; and that press will be again often called on to testify. But for the present, enough is presented to prove, without disparagement to our able ministers in Europe, whose merits shall not be over- looked or undervalued, that peace was not made exclusively at Ghent, nor by solicita- tion or negotiation ; but that Chippewa, Erie, Bridgewater, and Plattsburg, were peace- makers more persuasive than the Congress at Vienna, the English income tax, the ma- nufacturers' cry, or the pauper's wail. Love of peace, an American attachment as preva- lent as European addiction to war — an American sentiment, too, to be cultivated as the European frequency, cruelties, and expenses of war are to be deprecated — American love of peace becomes an infirm- ity when it undervalues the science of indispensable hostilities, or the pacific im- Chap. VI.] REGENT'S SPEECHES. 139 portanoe of demonstrated national capacity for war. The colonial press reverberated, indeed preceded, the Metropolitan, in the univer- sal British moan for the loss of naval domi- nion. The Halifax Journal of the 30th of October, 1814, republished from a Quebec paper: " The victory gained by the Americans on Lake Brie has excited enthusiastic joy throughout the United, States." The. t*o. great political parties in that country are hieing w^ith each other for the honor of that victory ; and all opposition to the war seems for a time to be forgotten in the gratification of national pride which it has afforded. " The contest, if it ought ever to have been BO, called, between Great Britain and the United States on the water, has been in- deed gratifying to the Americans, and mor- tifying to the British subjects beyond any- thing that could have been figured by the utmost stretch of imagination : vessels of an inferior class have been, as it were, thrown into the way of the enemy's ves- sels, fresh from port, fully prepared, and manned with picked seamen, so as at least to afford them a semblance of superiority over British oflScers and seamen beyond ■what was ever obtained by the most power- ful and brave of the numerous nations with whom they have contended. "How long this disgraceful state of things is to last, we cannot tell; but if it is not quickly remedied, we are sure that it will not only prove ruinous to these provinces, but dangerous to the. naval existence of British greatness, which has arisen from the superiority of her naval officers and seamen over those of every other nation ; for, although the Americans cannot, for the present, with their eight frigates, destroy the two hundred ships of the line of Great Britain, their success wiU infuse fresh vigor into all her enemies, which ought always to be counted as consisting, or likely to consist, of every nation that navigates the ocean. The good citizens of London, may triumph in their victories in Spain and Portugal, but the conquerors of Vittoria, and the Pyrenees wiU no longer defend England, should she suffer the sceptre of the ocean to slip out of her hands. Then, in the insulting language of one who hates her, she must take the rank among na- tions to which her population and territo- rial resources entitle her — the rank from which her trade and seamen have raised her — ^we must receive governors from Rome, and kings from Normandy." -It is not the public journals of England, however, on which we are to rely alone for the history of the Canadian campaign of 1814. Proofs of the highest and unquestion- able authenticityremainto.be accumulated.' In the regent's before-mentioned speeches to Parliament, that of the 30th July, re- ferring to the United States as the only remaining enemy of Great Britain, added, "I am persuaded you will see the necessity of my availing myself of the means now at my disposal, to prosecute the war with in- creased vigor ;" and in the speech of the 8th of November, 1814, referring to the accu- mulation of British troops, he said, " I availed myself of the earliest opportunity afforded by the state of affairs in Europe to detail a considerable military force to the St. Lawrence, notwithstanding the reverses which appeared to have occurred on Lake Champlain. I entertain the most confident expectation, as well from the amount as from the description of the British force in Canada, that the ascendency of his majes- ty's arms throughout that part of North America will be effectually established." For the invasions of New York and Lou- isiana, what, in the estimate of the best British officers was deemed the maximum of force necessary to overrun and subdue each, viz : fourteen thousand men, were organized of veteran troops, led by tried commanders, supported by superior naval squadrons, and altogether qualified, as was supposed, to effect the great end of British lesson to America, not again to venture upon war with that proud and mighty empire. The regent himself was privy, and as far as so indolent an old voluptuary could be party to, the plan of campaign defeated at Plattsburg. English history is almost silent as to that invasion, of which ■ no account is extant beyond the dry outline of Sir George Provost's official dispatch, written in defeat and dismay the night of his retreat. But that, and doubtless therefore, in order to excuse himself and show that he had done 'all he could to execute his orders, expressly ascribes them to the ministry, pursuant to whose plans fourteen thousand men were sent from Europe for the invasion of New York, (and fourteen thousand more for the in- vasion of Louisiana.) Of the attack at Plattsburg, the commander-in-chief's official report is that "upon the arrival of the rein- forcements from the Garonne, he lost no time in assembling the requisite force, plainly predicating a plan matured in London, for the purpose," he adds, "of carrying into effect his royal highness, the prince regent's commands, which had been conveyed to me by your lordship in your dispatch of the 3d June last :" either merely to close the war by signal and tremendous blows of British vindictive power, or, as is more probable, by the conquest and permanent occupation of large portions of the United States, north, south, and west. Total and glorious every way was their defeat by an undisciplined and halfarmed but martial people, of whom it was long a common mihtary boast and nearly universal English sentiment that a 140 AMERICAN NAVY. [lisi-L single regiment of British troops would out their way from one end of the United States to the other. It is true that in all these triumphs the United States merely defended themselves ; and it may be objected that their undertak- ing by the declaration and their schemes of war was to do more. But just when those schemes were probably to be realised by an- other campaign, England made peace with precipitation. Napoleon's escape from Elba, and triumphant return to Pans, in March, 1815, occasioned the recall to Europe of most of the British troops sent thence to America in 1814; and must have required that recall, .even though Canada and New Brunswick had been lost by it. The hostilities which closed with the battle of "Waterloo in June, 1815, and that crowning victory of the British commander could not have taken place without the troops transported from America. At all events they could not have been reinforced in Canada ; but left to themselves on this continent must have fall- en an easy prey to the numerous American armies that would have marched under ex- perienced leaders wherever a British enemy could be overtaken. Having dwelt with some emphasis on the moral and even religious- influences of the naval victory at Plattsburg, it still would be unjust to take leave of it, being the last time that American naval affairs will be mentioned in this volume, without some further notice likewise, of the belligerent results by which Macdonough's triumph fixed a final impression, not only Ameri- can, but English, European and universal. The ascendency which foreign literature yet maintains in the United States, mis- leads numerous Americans to read with the utmost avidity and credulity, all that comes to us from England in the shape of history, memoir, and otherwise, not to mention the ship loads of trash by every vessel cast on our shores, of at least inappropriate, if not falsified science, law, and religion, with which American seminaries of learning, the press, and all information are contaminated. Accurate ideas of the memorable incidents, illustrating our own history, ancient or re- cent, are not only rare but vague, while Eu- ropean perversion persuades thousands of American minds, that their countrymen are prone to exaggerate with ridiculous misre- presentation, the trivial occurrences of this much abused continent. English publican tions abound, with many American believers in them, that in that contest. Great Britain did not even think of this country, although all the force she could collect, both military and naval, were sent across the Atlantic, and worsted in memorable conflicts with which too many Americans are less fami- liar, than with insignificant, simultaneous European events. Mr, Canning's parliamentary acknow- ledgment of the consternation and convul- sion which shook Great Britain to the cen- tre, when the flag of a single frigate was struck to American prowess, was made after the court martial on Captain Dacres, had ascertained and tacitly confessed the foUy as well as falsehood of the various absurd excuses that were pleaded for Bri- tish defeat; and surely, Mr. Canning's omis- sion of all reference to those paltry pretexts, was more manly, more British, and much wiser than their contemptible suggestion. But when he declared interminable war for naval ascendency, and to restore, the in- vincibility of the British trident, no British squadron had been captured, as not long after his speech, followed on Lake Erie, and again a twelvemonth later on Lake Cham- plain. Both American and British readers may be surprised to learn, as they may rest assured, for it is vouched by all the oflScial dispatcher and undeniable state- ments, that there was a greater loss of Bri- tish lives in the naval conflict on Lake Champlain, than at the famous sea-fight of St. Vincent's, for which the Admiral Jervis was made an Earl, covered with honors, titles and pensions, with the usual profu- sion of British public favor. The captures of the Peacock, the Avon, the Keindeer, the Epervier, the Boxer, the Cyane, the Le- vant and the Penguin, all at different pe- riods, followed Mr. Canning's speech, and to use his own remarkable word, smothered in American victories the spell of British invincibility, on every occasion shivered to atoms. No one, not even any Englishman, since claims superiority for an English over an American ship of war. No country or individual in any part of the world be- lieves in that exploded notion since the war of 1812, throughout the whole of which, from its outset till some time after the ratified treaty of peace could be made known, British naval disasters continued to fall like the reports of minute guns from the ocean, in the midst of the gloom, 'consternation and convulsion, which Canning so eloquently described, and feel- ingly confessed. And that most impressive English orator of his day told no more than the truth. So late as during the year in which the war was declared, in 1812, a well- known English work, to which Mr. Canning contributed, and who may therefore be the author of what is now quoted from the Quarterly Review, held the following im- perious language respecting the marine, destined, both naval and commercial, to su- persede that of Great Britain. " We will not stop to degrade the British navy by condescending to enter into any comparison of the high order, the discipline and comfort of an English man-of-war and an American frigate. We disdain any such comparison. No, let us rather renew with increased tenacity, and exact, from America BRITISH NAVY. Chap-. VI.] in particular, what in our opinion ought never to have heen dropped, our demand of the acknoTvledgment of his Majesty's sove- reignty in our own seas by the salute of the flag and topsails. We have already stated that the government has no desire for the services of American seamen in the British navy, and we believe that our officers feel as little desire to he troubled with them." Such authoritative vaporing would be ridiculous, even in England, now. The thoughtless, happy and undoubting boast of invincibility, with which every Bri- tish seaman till then heaved the capstan, and every workman in the dock and ship- yard cheered his labor, has given way, together with the dry arithmetical calcula- tions, by which their superiors at first at- tempted to explain their disasters, to the general British apprehension, the universal American confidence, and the common European, even Asiatic and African, belief, that the American is the better seaman. Let America, however, beware of the over- weening confidence which betrayed the Bri- tish marine to its at least temporary over- throw. The navy of England has been a great gainer by the war of 1812, which taught the considerate of that country the necessity of radical reforms in both its moral and material condition. Seamen, no longer im- pressed, are better treated, clothed, fed, paid, pensioned, rewarded, and altogether cared for, than before their disastrous les- sons of that war. Gunnery, in which they were, pei'haps more than in anything else, inferior to the Americans, has been greatly improved. _ The modern art of gunnery is an Ameri- can invention. The rifle, the pistol, the cannon and the mortar, are managed by Americans with a dextrous destruction unknown and unattempted' till of late by any other nation. When an English ship engaged a French, Spanish ^or Dutch ship of war, the aim was not. the huU or deck, to destroy the men, but the spars, masts and rigging, by wounding them to dis- able the vessel. So, in battles ashore, the bayonet or artillery were more relied on by European armies than the musket, of which the volleys were mostly harmless. The deadly aim of. gunnery, great and small, was exclusively American. But now the British practice by imitation of that pecu- liar American excellence is much more fre- quent, laudable and perfected than the Ame- rican. The discipline and government of a British ship have become more American than they were. Nevertheless, the naturally superior aptitude, docility, sobriety, intelli- gence and self-possession of American ma- riners, since the war of 1812, are shown by their engrossing all the extensive sail packet trade between the United States and Eng- land, which tiU that time was exclusively ■English and extremely limited. With the 141 statement of these advantages, however, lei us mix no unmeaning or misleading boast. Comparatively much nearer in numbers to the British marine, -both commercial and naval, than in 1812, the American navy is not now so superior as it then was in all but numbers to that of Great Britain. A respectable British historian, in his Annals of the Reign of George the Third, Dr. Aiken,"mentions the British naval de- feats as " unusual to the British navy, the source of as much mortification to one party as of triumph to the other." But it is from another source than either wary history or undivulged official orders that we become possessed of the most striking and mor- tifying proof of that timorous shrink- ing from conflict with American vessels of war, which was undoubtedly authorized" by the admiralty and practised by the navy. Accounts frequently reached us of the shyness of British naval officers to en- gage Americans ; and there was throughout the whole war palpable want of that enter- prise and hardihood which had been claimed as the common and the superior attributes of the much boasted and dreaded British tar. A memoir of Admiral Durham, pub- lished by his nephew Captain Murray, in 1846, makes the important disclosure which is here quoted from that book. " The only circumstance duriiig his com- mand that gave him (Admiral Durham) some disappointment, was the following : "Having received information that 'a large American frigate was cruising about the islands, he dispatched an eighteen-gun brig, commanded by a Captain Stewart, to St. Thomas, where a thirty-eight-gun frigate and two brigs were stationed, requesting the officers commanding them to look-out, at Mona passage, in case she should pass that way, and immediately made sail him- self for the other passage to leeward of Antigua. " Captain Stewart found the English fri- gate and the brigs at St. Thomas, and deli- vered his dispatches. " The frigate sailed, fell in witl^ the Ame- rican and did not engage her, but joined the admiral with the intelligence that she had left the islands. "Admiral Durham inquired what reason he had for not engaging her ; upon which he showed a memorandum, by which cap- tains were allowed to use their discretion in engaging large American frigates. The admiral said, ' You had two brigs with you, you should have used them.' The-captain replied, ' they were not under my orders.' This was quite unknovni to the admiral." From thisf disclosure it is at last indubi- tably manifested that the British govern- ment, after two years of nearly uninterr rupted naval defeat, sent their vessels of war to sea with almost the identical orders with which the American government sent 142 ADMIRALTY ORDER. theirs at first: so total was the change from British confidence to apprehension. Captain Hull's orders from the Secretary of the Navy were, in July, 1812 : " If you should fall in with an enemy's vessel, you will be guided in your proceeding" by your own judgment, bearing in mind, however, that you are not voluntarily to encounter a force superior to your own." In 1814, the captain of theBritish frigate pleaded " ame- morandum, by which captains were allowed- to use their discretion in engaging the large American frigates." Going to sea in dis- regard of timid orders. Captain Hull sought and vanquished the Guerriere. The British captain, whose dishonored name is con- cealed in Admiral Durham's memoir, with a frigate and two brigs shrunk from en- countering the frigate Constitution, as ap- pears by Captain Stewart's account of that occurrence in his letter to the navy depart- ment: "We also chased a frigate through the Mona passage, which escaped us by the wind changing in her favor, leaving us becalmed. The animation displayed by the officers and crew at so near a prospect of adding another laurel constiiutionally to the naval wreath, leaves no doubt of the honorable result, had we been fortunate enough to bring her to action." On board the American frigate even jocular confi- dence prevailed, while the English frigate fled, to take refuge under the admiralty memorandum, which disarmed every vessel but a few line-of-battle ships, whenever they fell in with enemies whose superiority was officially given in orders to the once daunt- less mariners of England. When it was believed by the American officers that their government was about to lay up their frigates, from not unreasonable fear of their inevitable capture in the un- tried and dreadful issue of conflict with conquerors of aU the navies in the world, Bainbridge and Stewart hastened to Wash- ington to entreat permission to go to sea ; and, when Hull, Morris, Read, Morgan and the others on board the Constitution, from her mast heads made out the Guerriere, there was not a sailor on board who did not desire battle. But when, after thirty odd years of secret naval apprehension and admiralty concealed orders, the British navy and admi- ralty come to be shriven, it is discovered, by confession, that a frigate with two brigs were afraid to engage a frigate, and for that act of sheer timidity, to give it no harder name, the commanding officer was allowed to excuse himself by a standing order of the admiralty not to engage an American fri- gate. If such were the orders to officers, what must have been the dread of the com- mon seamen to encounter the once despised, impressed, and in every way maltreated Americans? The retribution was complete. The Prince Regent himself supplied the material with which to conclude this chap- [1814. ter. Childishly fond as that crapulous old man was of shows and pantomimes, he ordered a grand spectacle, at the cost of a hundred thousand dollars, by naval mum- mery on the little artificial water called the Serpentine River, in St. James's Park, near his own and his father's palaces, to cele- brate peace and the centennial anniversary of the accession of the House of Brunsvrick to the British throne, on the 1st of August, 1814. Fireworks, temples, pagodas, bridges, mock fights, and other such gratifications for the populace, were displayed during the festival, which lasted several days. The principal foolery was a battle between two British and two American frigates ; inap- propriate and untoward contrivance to amuse and inspirit the English at that time, when the overthrow of Napoleon did not atone for their naval reverses. The official report of the affair in the Courier was, that " The naval display commenced by an ac- tion between two British and two American frigates. The first broadside was hardly fired, when ample testimony was borne to the propriety of choosing such a spectacle for the gratification of Englishmen. No sooner was the first shot heard, than the general anxiety for the honor of our trident was so great that the shops and booths poured out their myriads, who rushed upon the shores of the Serpentine to cheer our brave tars with their presence, and share the honor ,of the naval flag. The Yankee frigates lay at anchor," &c. Of course they were beaten. " The union-jack was hoisted over the stars and stripes of Jonathan ; and thus ended the first part of the engagement ; and so much a matter of course was the result, that the spectators did not allow their exultation to exhibit itself even by a single cheer." very different reasons were given by another London description of that spectacle for the absence of cheers for victory by British over American ships of war. The official ministerial account of these royal contrivances to heave up the spirit of the people, as it were with a capstan, was con- tradicted thus in other London accounts of it." "People no longer applaud at the theatres songs in honor of their gallant tars, hearing with indifference or disgust sentiments once listened to with pride. An attempt at a the- atre to applaud one of these sentiments is overpowered by a hiss : a person in the boxes latterly exclaimed, ' That character is for- feited. At the Prince Regent's late grand fala, a mock battle was represented on the erpentine River, between an American and British frigate, when, after a hard struggle, the American struck her flags. ' They had better let that alone,' cried the populace. Such anecdotes," added the English commentator, "are omens, like the raven's croak, perched on the ruins of some magnificent pile, that the pillar of Eng- ENGLISH NAVAL DISTRESS. Chap. VI.] — < land's glory, and foundation of her JJower, is mouldering at the base." "Rule Britannia," croaked Cobbett, " has ceased to be the rab- ble's delight ; the heroes in blue and buff hang their diminished heads." All mari- time Europe looked to America with hope, and to England with fear, for relief from her ocean despotism, while industrial Great -Britain began to count the cost of an Eng- lish waj'in Tain prolonged for territorial conquest, which was forcing American manufactures as the war of the Revolution precipitated colonial independence. On the 25th August, 1814, while the British army were burning Washington, departed this life in London a once much applauded, but already forgotten author of io less than twelve hundred songs, dedi- cated to the glory of the British seaman, Charles Dibdin; vritb whose demise, cer- tainly, much of British maritime glory also departed. Its decline by American discom- fitures may not be irreparable. On the contrary, it is much improved in the school of misfortune. But vast will be the-renown of the first British ofBcer, who, in fair and equal fight, compels an American ship of war to strike her flag: and terrible the re- sponsibility of "the American who hauls it down, since all the moral superiority has been transferred from England to America. British journals breathed loud groans and fears of American sea depredations. Ameri- can sloops-of-war built after the war began, (whose cruises will be subjects of fature de- scriptions, ) fiUed the British and Continental journals with their own" exaggerated ac- counts of really formidable American naval incursions and destructiveness. The admi- ralty secretary, Croker, found it necessa- ry to print public assurances, that three frigates and fourteen smaller war vessels had been ordered to cruise in the British Channel, to protect that close sea of British dominion, where once every flag was to be vailed to it, from American craft, described as of peculiar build, extremely difficult of capture, or similar construction. Lloyds' lists of prizes, and the prices of insurance, fearfiiUy told the story of American nauti- cal enterprise and superiority. The admi- - raltyhad recourse to prosecutions instituted ■ with loud public denunciations against ship- masters sailing without convoy, to which breach of law, of positive orders and com- mon prudence, it was said, were asoribable, the multiplied increasing vexatious, ruinous and inexpressible losses of British com- merce by American cruisers. Lloyds' list of the 23d September, 1814, published forty recent captures, some of great value. In the London Statesman, of the 29th Septem- ber, 1814, an underwriter suggested, "to obviate the ruinous and daily spreading devastations of the American privateers," that a class of vessels like them should be built, to be commanded by merchant cap- 143 tains. So inefficient had the mighty marine of Great Britain become, that England wanted an aquatic militia to supersede it. The rates of their ships of war were altered and reduced, so as to representthem as carry- ing fewer cannons than they did, in order, as was said, to put them on a footing with Ame- rican frigates and sloops-of-war ; which gave rise to a witticism, spread throughout the whole British marine, by a language com- mon to both nations, more withering than broadsides, as verified by the cruises of the Wasp, Peacock and Jlomet, that American sloops-of-war could and would take British at any rate. Ridicule reinforced degrada- tion of the British navy, whose ' chivalry so entirely disappeared from the great deep it so recently ruled, that English Gazettes published, without shame, that the ship New Castle of fifty-eight guns, and the Acasta of fifty, were cruising in company in pursuit of the Constitution. Incredible exploits of the American privateers, some of their commanders publishing on the British coast proclamations of extensive blockades to burlesque those proclaimed by British admirals of ours, sanguinary defeats and captures by our privateers of their ships of war, some of them of great force, (as vnll be shovm in my account of. the privateer war,) induced comparisons between the American private armed vessels and the national ships of England, much to the let- ter's disadvantage. The paltry and pirati- cal depredations of ennobled admirals, with fleets of ships-of-the-line, were contrasted with the more extensive injuries inflicted on British commerce by little private cruisers of eight or ten guns, with none of the parade or pretension of regular service ; and in no respect was the contrast more striking than between the generosity, humanity and gen- tlemanly deportment of the privateersmen, and the brutal rapacity of some of the titled veterans of British sea-warfare. Free-trade and sailors' rights were watch-words current and charming in every vessel and every sea- port of every country, the device of a new and self-erected order of chivalry, springing self-armedfrom the sea,hailed with universal admiration by the maritime nations of Eu- rope, smarting with recollections of British wrongs, and envious as all men are of over- weening power. . In vain the London Morn- ing Chronicle reiterated the trite absurdity that the astonishing American victories were asoribable to British deserters. Why, was the natural reply, do British seamen fight so much harder, and with so much deadlier fire in American vessels than their own? But, rejoined the British press, they fought, being deserters, in dread of execu- tion if taken. Must then, was the retort, the brave British tar have a halter on his neck, and dread of the gaUows in view to make him fight? American ingenuity, stimulated ., by war, added what has been called sea- 144 ENGLISH PREJUDICE. [1814. cavalry to fleets. On the "Slet November, 1814, the floating battery or armed steam-fri- gate Fulton, first experiment of vrhat is now so common, was moved from her wharf on the East river, and towed to Fulton's works on the North river by the first steam-boat, the Car of Neptune, at the rate of between three and four miles an hour, which he hoped might be increased to five miles, be- cause the power equalled that of a hundred horses. At the same time, as, before mentioned, European disinclination to English domi- nation, kept pace with American successful resistance to it, and we had allies in the manufacturing interest of England, coun- teracting the army, navy, clergy, aristocrat cy, crown and other English promoters of war. Proofs multiplied every day, that in a war between that country and this, Great Britain suffers more injury than she inflicts : that American injuries by British blows, are superficial and temporary; but Eng- lish injuries by American blows, perma^ nent and incurable. The United States could dispense with foreign commerce. Their food is superabundant, and their manufactures were forced by war with England. Two of the cardinal infirmities of man- kind are ignorance and fear; and it is hardly conceivable how profoundly and stupidly perverse has always been the Bri- tish ignorance of America.' One of the greatest and best informed American ad- mirers of England, John Adams, wrote, in 1784, from the Hague, to Joseph Keed, then in London, " There seems to be an utter in- capacity in England of comprehending the truth respecting America. They ^o on from generation to generation believing every false and discrediting every true aeoount. Nothing is necessary, after a thousand ex- periences of their being deceived, but the trouble of inventing a hew chimera to obtain afresh their confidence." To which letter Eeed, from London,' answering Adams, said, "They seem to labor under the insuperable curse of men profiting by no experience iij everything which respects prejudices against America. I find myself much disappointed and deceived in mV opinion of their conciliatory spirit." Such was the judgment then of well-disposed and well-associated American gentlemen, from intercourse, not with vulgar British, but gentlemen and statesmen, whose hopes of British amity were grievously disappointed. Paradoxical and revolting as the sentiment may seem, there have been, there yet live, Americans, who have represented their coun- try in England, and been vanquished there to social admiration by the splendid hospital- ities of JEnglish private life, becoming warm admirers of British power and national pre- eminence, who have come back to America convinced that nothing less than war, and victories achieved by Americans over the English, will ever teach them to under- stand or respect their republican ofispring. But may not the hope be indulged, that by the present well-balanced state of naval power, numbers and physical superiority still British, but the moral and memorable recent ascendency all American, the hostili- ties of that struggle will prevent any other war between the United States and Great Britain, Chap. VIL] FOET ERIE. 145 CHAPTBE Vn. SIEGE AND ASSAULT OF, AND SORTIE FROM, FORT ERIE — IZARD'S MARCH FROM CHAMPLAIN TO THE NIAGARA— CLOSE OF THE CAMPAIGN. AyiER the duplicate American victories near the Great Falls, the residue of the Canadian campaign was a bright tissue of American triumphs, in frequent con- .flicts on the Niagara and at Lake Cham- plain, the British in every engagement much superior in numbers ; their tone gradually sinking, while ours rose; theirs .to diffidence, ours to confidence of suc- cess ; before the end of autumn, as es- tablished by land as water; invaluable result of American valor organized by dis- cipline, the best, if not only, assurance of desirable and permanent peace. Thence- forth the American standard and cause were uniformly ascendant ; and the solitary check .by the capture of Washington, under such contrasting victories everywhere else, to- gether with the barbarous warfare carried on, and the still more atrocious proclaimed .by authority of Great Britain, tending, not to dismay, but to excite and unite the whole United States of America. Our losses of the 25th July, at Bridge- . water, did not prove so serious as were apprehended, many who strayed away un- .der cover of night, having rejoined their columns, the British forces being greater sufferers than ours ; and General Ripley .need not have abandoned his position at Chippewa. Monday, the 1st of August, Commodore .Chauncey, partially recovered from illness, was carried on board his new ship, the Superior, and sailed frdm Saokett's Harbor with a fleet of ten sail to contend against a .superior British fleet for the control of Lake . Ontario ; but then without service to Brown's army, cooped up in Fort Erie, nearly forty miles beyond the Lake. Two British brigs, .however, and a schooner of Yeo's squad- ron were, blockaded, at Fort Niagara, by the Jefferson, the Sylph, and the Oneida of .Chauncey's fleet, under Captain Ridgley, commanding the Jefferson. The Prince Regent, another British vessel, mounting fourteen guns, was'run ashore, and burned to prevent her capture ; and Chauncey, .with the rest of .his shipping, blockaded Yeo at Kingston. Colonel Mitchell com- I manded at Sackett's Harbor, reinforced for thirty days by\ General Martin, with 1,500 New York militia. Not till a whole week after being worsted at Bridgewater was Drummond able to two miles east of Fort Erie, with a wood between the fort and his encampnient, finding the fort too strong for assault, and determined to besiege it. Next day, 4th of August, he made an unsuccessful attempt on the American magazines, which Brown had transferred from'Schlosser to Buffalo, providently guarded by Major Morgan, with part of the first rifle regiment, taken from Fort Erie for that purpose. Early on the morning of the 4tli, Colonel Tucker, with twelve hundred men in twenty-three boats, undertaking to destroy or capture the magazines at Buffalo, was defeated by Major Morgan with two hundred and forty rifle- men, killing and wounding some of the enemy, and putting the rest to flight. Mor- gan had advantages of situation, which he improved by superior vigilance, intrepidity, and coolness so much, that Colonel Tuck- er's party was reprimanded in general orders for his failure. The effects of not only American courage, but of the formidable exertion of it by su- perior fire, was disclosed on this occasion, less in Tucker's defes^t-than the explana^ tioh which General Drummond's reproach betrayed. His orders of the 5th of August, at the camp before. Port Erie, expressed " the indignation excited by discovering that the failure of an expedition, the success of which, by destroying the enemy's means of subsistence on that- side, would have com- pelled his force to surrender, or, by risking a battle on the plain on this side, encoun- ter certain defeat, was attributable to the misbehavior of the troops employed. It is the duty of officers to punish the men they command who misbehave in face of the enemy by death on the spot. From the reports of officers and the general's own ob- servation, men couch, dui^, and lie down when advancing under fire." The American rifle had made deadly impressions to pro- duce the evasion of soldiers and confession of their chief, thus proclaimed" at -the head of every British regiment. On the 12th of August, by one of the casualties to which life, civil and military, is subject, Morgan was killed, like Major Holmes about the same time, in an unlucky skirmish ; on which day our arms under- went a naval reverse where one of our first naval exploits took place. Captain Dobbs, of the royal navy, with his gig and some move forward, on the 3d of August, when batteaux, conveyed over land from the Ni- he stationed about four thousand troops | agara river to Lake Erie, surprised by night -10 - 146 STOKMINO OF FORT ERIE. and captured two more of Perry'^ squadron, the schooners Ohio and Somers, moored close to Eort Erie to' prevent water approach to it. Mistaken for provision boats with supplies from Buffalo for the fort, they were suffered to drift on the hawsers of the Ame- rican schooners, which they cut, boarded and seized, each mounting three long twelve pounders, and manned by thirty-five men, without a shot fired from either of the Ame- rican schooners, or from a third,-the Porcu- pine, anchored close by, who cut her cables and escaped, or from the fort ; although the British boarders proclaimed themselves by firing a number of muskets and pistols, and other commotion, yet were suffered to drift to Black Rock without molestation, when it was easy to subdue them. Without dis- paraging the gallantry of the assailants in this enterprise, their success was much owing to the negligent supineness of our people. During several days Drummond was busy in preparations to take Fort Erie, which Gaines was equally active putting in order for vigorous defence. Both sides were re- inforced. Ripley was with Gaines, with the remnants of Ripley's and Scott's brigades, and General Porter with additional volun- teers from New York and Pennsylvania. At sunrise on the 13th of August, Drum- mond's arrangements being completed, the cannonade began by a severe bombardment, reverberated from the fort with equal ani- mation, and some loss on bothsides. About sunset, on the evening of the 14th, a Bri- tish shell burst in the magazine of the bat- tery commanded by Captain Williams, and blew up the magazine with tremendous ex- plosion, doing, however, no damage. The enemy, supposing from the noise that it must be very injurious, raised exulting shouts, which Williams not only sent back in louder cheers, but accompanied by repeated discharges from his battery. StiU the British commander, encouraged by that supposed diminution of ammunition, and by Dobbs' capture of the schooners, and having, as he thought, made sufficient impression other- wise by his bombardment, resolved to storm the fort that night. General Gaines, a vigi- , lant and spirited officer, inferring the proba- bility of the design from the same cause, was on the alert, and kept one-third of his men at their posts the whole of a dark, wet night in that humid, unhealthy region. At two o'clock in the morning of the 15th of September, the British troops, in three co- lumns of some fifteen hundred each, moved in obscurity and silence to the assault. Their watchword was Sleel. General Drum- mond' s written orders of attack recommend- ed a free use of the bayonet against the merely fifteen hundred men fit for duty, and they much dispirited, whom he estimated to his troops as the American garrison. Colonel Drummond, executing that severe | .[1814. order, was often heard by General Gaines, his officers and men, shouting, in the midnight conflict, with profane brutality, to give the damned Yankees no quarter. Lieutenant McDonough, entreating quar- ter, was refused it by Drummond, and murdered defending his life with a hand- spike in a desperate encounter. Lieuten- ant Fontaine, another young officer, taken prisoner by the Indians, rejoiced that he fortunately fell into hands less sanguinary than the English. These revolting factsj officially authenticated, belong to the re- cord, of history, certifying to American idolatry how providential and indispen- sable was the armed repulsion, overthrow and punishment of British masters, who would have been monsters of tyranny un- resisted, instead of being subdued into re- spectful amity. General Gaines' position on the margin of the lake, where the river Nia,gara emp- ties into it, a horizontal plain a few feet above the water, was strengthened by breastworks in front, entrenchments and batteries. The small unfinished Fort Erie was defended by Captain Williams, sup- ported by Major Trimble's infantry; the front batteries by Captains Biddle and Fanning, the left by a redoubt of which Captain Towson had charge, all the artil- lery commanded by Major Hindman. Lieu- tenant-Colonel Aspinwall was at the head of the 9th,- 11th and 22d regiments of in- fantry, from a few weeks' admirable ser- vice become the veteran brigade of Scott. General Ripley commanded his own bri- fade, the 2l8t and 23d regiments. Genersil 'orter, with his brigade of New York and Pennsylvania volunteers, occupied the cen- tre. Colonel Fischer, of De Watteville'-s regiment, led one of the British columns ; Colonel Drummond a second, Lieutenant- Colonel Scott the third. The first point assaulted was defended by Major Wood of the engineers, volunteering to head the 21st regiment of infantry, and by Captain Tow- son. Wading breast deep through the wa- ter, the British column advanced in the dark within ten feet of the American line again and again, but was constantly re- pulsed. The left, attacked by Scott, was defended by Major M'Ree, with the 9th regiment, under Captain Foster, and New York and Pennsylvania volunteers, under Captains Boughton and Harding. Colonel Drummond, with his column and the sea- men under Captain Dobbs, assaulted the centre with a daring courage,- of which hu- manity was no part. With scaling ladders he led his sanguinary followers up the' parapet of the old fort, but was driven back with great carnage. Again twice mount- ing after being thrice repelled, iiey moved round by the ditch in total darkness, and once more mounting with scaling ladders, overpowered and killed with pikes and bayo- Chap. VII.] .nets Williams and McDonongh, with Several men, severely wounded Lieutenant Wat- .mough, and carried the bastion, of which for more than an hour they held possession, defeating reiterated efforts of our people to Ndislodge them. There it was that McDo- .nough, overcome, entreating quarter in .vain, and desperately defending his life .with a handspike, was murdered by Drum- ,mond, who himself was shot in the breast ■hy a soldier, and put to death with no quar- :.ier expiring on his.lips ^s he fell. Repulsed on the left, master of the fort .in the centre, !and strenuously contending for foothold on ■the right, the enemy for a long time rnain- (tained the battle fiercely raging. General Gaines, while striving to regain the bastion, ordered reinforcements also to the right, which were promptly sent by Generals Eipley and Porter, both of whom were .constantly active and sagacious to face every danger and supply every want. The victory was in no small measure ascribable to the infantry covering the artillery and protecting them at their guns. While Ma- jors Hindman and Trimble, Captains Foster and Byrdsall, repeatedly failed by many devices of dauntless courage to recover the Jjastion, of which the enemy kept possession for more than an hour, and the conflict on ■the right was still undetermined, an acci- dent fixed tiie fate of the night as and nearly .where a similar occurrence brought it on. Some cartridges deposited in a stone build- ing- occupied by the Americans near the .bastion , held by the British, exploded with -terrific uproar, which struck the latter with .panic. In vain their surviving oficers as- sured their men that it was an' a,ccident, .net a mine, and endeavored to rally -them to renewed contest. Captain Biddle, at that .crisis, by General Gaines' direction, wound- -ed as the captain was by a shell contusion, enfiladed with his piece the exterior plain and glacis, while Captain Fanning from his battery dealt execution upon the enemy, who all fled, towards dawn, in complete disorder and dismay, leaving Colonels Drummond and Scott with 222 dead, 174 . wounded, 186 prisoners, and a great many more kUled and wounded fallen into the water not enumerated, altogether a loss of .962 men, while that of the Americans was only 84. Disparity of not one to ten attested not only the superior gunnery, but riveted a conviction, grown strong in both armies and both countries, that disciplined valor, which saves much bloodshed, was the only need and indubitable warranty of American -Buccess. Foiled in his first attack on Tow- son's battery, supported by the 25th in- fantry, again repulsed by Ripley and Wood, attempting to tiirn the western batteries, and though for a while in possession of an exterior central bastion, at length driven from every point in panic and confusion, with the lossuof a fourth of their fo.rce, the GBNER.AL IZARD. W enemy by this defeat suffer-ed a lesson of lasting impression, which was not disguised in the official dispatches of Colonel Fischer, General Drummond and Governor Prevost Gsines' official accounts were the first tidings of victory to counteract the disastrous rout of Bladensburg and fall of Washington, for which -a third triumph on the Niagara was some consolation; welcomed as Qie fore- mnher of still greater in that quarter, con- fidently anticipated, but never realized by the march of General Izard to the rescue of General Brown's division. The efiect of Gaines' victory was to inspire the neighbor- ing militia with such confidence instead of the panic formerly prevalent among them, that thousands were -willing to volunteer for service at Fort Erie, where the- aid of that portion of the war faculties was soon after manifested in Brown's sortie, the suc- cess of which was largely attributable to militia volunteers. General Gaines, Cap- tains Biddle, Fanning, Byrdsall, and Lieu- tenant Hall, were brevetted for their con- duct at Fort Erie the 15th August. More regiments being added to the Bri- tish force on the Niagara, and the Secre- tary of War's inclination for attacking Kingston remaining unchanged, about the middle of July, 1814, General Izard was ordered from Lake Champlain, with four thousand men, to Sackett's Harbor. His own admiration of what he called Brown's heroic efiforts, and the Secretary's natural desire to succor them, induced an alterna- tive plan for Izard ; if he should find at Sackett's Harbor Kingston unassailable, then he was to land his division on the western shore of Ontario, and co-operate with Brown against Drummond. On the first of May, 1814, Izard, elder of the junior major-generals, an officer of great promise, withdrawn by the Secretary of War from the court martial for Wilkin- son's trial, was ordered to Plattsburg; and on the 4th of that month assumed command of the north military district, which had proved fatal to Dearborn, Wilkinson, and Hampton; and injurious to Chandler, Win- der, Boyd, and the secretary himself. Izard was one of the very few Americans whose only vocation had been war, for which he was educated in Europe, and served long in America. In the meridian of life, with many excellent military qualifications, however, he wanted the adaptation or pli^ ancy indispensable to unavoidable circumr stances. Brave, ambitious, and honorable, European education, manners, habits, and ideas unfitted him, if not for the situation he was called upon to fill, at any rate for the part, at the time, he ''had to perform. An wd soldier in theory and garrison ser- vice, scientific and well-informed, rigid in discipline, and laudably stricter with offi- cers than privates, he despised militia vo- lunteers, political popularity, and more than 148 confessing, he boasted that Gen. Brown was better qualified than he to command the irre- gular levies of which an American ai^ny is the composite order. If war had lasted long enough to organize large armies of regular soldiers, under veteran officers, Izard might have proved a superior leader. But for the conjuncture he was plaoed'in, his education 'was a disadvantage ; and he incurred more odium, particularly in the malediction of General Armstrong, than General Izard de- served. Discord, the military distemper among our northern commanders, by which Wilkinson, Hampton, and Armstrong^suffer- ed, affected Izard, Armstrong, and Brown, whose dislike of each other not only dete- riorated their measures, but renders it diffi- cult to describe them with impartiality and justice. Assuming the command of the division of the right of the north district on Lake Champlain, General Izard found what he represented to the Secretary of War a deplorable state of almost total inefficiency ; forces extremely few in number, not "paid for a long arrearage, many officers absent on furlough, those present-mostly incapable, men undisciplined, unclothed, altogether unfit for service. If Brown had been al- lotted to that station, unaccustomed to the perfection of military organization, and willing to make the best of things, he pro-, bably would have found, instead of reason for complaint, motive for greater activity: for his and Jackson's raw and motley re- cruits were worse when led to victory in Canada and Louisiana. Ignorant officers, and vagabond privates, diseases, desertion, the common disorders of camp are not more inevitable embarrassments to an American general than the superadded want of unity, often the timidity, and penury of his govern- ment. Izard's first review could not produce, he complained, an aggregate force of more than two thousand effectives, and those raw, ill clad, and worse disciplined ; ithe dragoons and riflemen deserting for want of pay. When the troops were paid, he regretted their receipt of so much money at one time, and would rejoice when it was all spent. -"Yes," said the secretary, "our armies are very great when estimated for pay, but very small in the field." The number of soldiers taken to serve in the navy was considerable. The clothing was of very bad quality ; some of the men literally naked; the artillery was all light pieces ; the funds in the quar- termaster-general's hands very low, at one time not more than one thousand dollars ; the state of things, acknowledged by Arm- strong to Izard, was truly degrading and reproachful ; and without discipline, order, and economy, he pronounced an army a nuisance. The enlistments were many of them for only one year, the climate fright- ful, the mortality prodigious; of 160 re- cruits, 26 deserted on their march from Greenbush to Plattsburg. Raw officers in | JZ^ARD'S ARMY. [1814. charge of raw recruits, were exhibitions in even the old regiments exciting ridicule as well as disgust. Duels among the officers were extremely frequent, and desertion by the privates, caused by blows unlawfully inflicted by inferior officers; time wasted in courts martial; from the St. Lawrence to the ocean open disregard of the law pro- hibiting intercourse with the enemy, des- tined for whom the road to St. Regis was covered with droves of cattle and the river with rafts ; the high roads insufficient for the supplies of cattle pouring into Canada, like herds of buffaloes making paths for themselves through the woods ; without which supplies the British forces would suffer from famine, or their government be at enormous expense to maintain them. Many of the officers from the eastward. General Izard assured the Secretary of War, sent in their resignations on the ap^ pearance of active service ; and last, by no means the least grievance to a gentleman of Carolina, when recruited regiments from the east did come, many of their men were negroes, to the great annoyance of the offi- cers and soldiers, who, refused to do duty with them. This bitter decoction of Izard's grievances, Armstrong aggravated by add- ing to the ingredients ; while Brown, with fewer and worse appointed levies, pursued his way to victory and glory. This contrast is not intended to disparage educated, oir overvalue self-made, officers. But without conforming to the inevitable imperfections of American hostilities, the most accom- plished-officers will rarely succeed to carry them on. There is genius for circum- stances, which war, however scientific and methodical, requires more than either edu- cation or experience. By midsummer, ^zard's division amount- ed to seven thousand, and more, of regular soldiers, as well officered, drilled, and pre- pared for action, as any portion of the American army; the officers, generally, eager for distinction. The regiment of light artillery, two squadrons of dragoons, a battalion of the first rifle regiment, and sixteen nominal regiments of infantry, the fourth, fifth, sixth, tenth, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, twenty- ninth, thirtieth, thirty-first, thirty-third, thir- ty-fourth, thirty-seventh, and forty-fifth, were disposed into threebrigades, command- ed by- Brigadier-Generals Macomb, Smith, and JBissell, with Adjutant-General Gum- ming, Inspector-General Pinkney, and Ma- jor Totten as engineer.. High expectations were entertained by the Executive, the country, and the army generally, of General Izard and his division ; all of which were disappointed. Reserved, exclusive, and high tempered, the general, more respected than liked, failing to accomplish the important objects assigned to him, eclipsed by Brown, on his left, and- Macomb, on his right, in Chap. VII.] IZARD'S MARCH. 149 signal yictories, was compared with them to his great disfavor. . On the 11th of June, the Secretary of War advised General Izard of the plan of campaign, which sent Cro- ghan ,:tiS the northwest, and Brown into Canada, on the Niagara. When Brovm's first success, by the battle of Chippewa, and his subsequent embarrassments became public. General Izard, on the 19th July, looking with uneasiness to that -quarter, inquired whether he ought not to move to the St. Lawrence and threaten the rear of Kingston. On the 27th of July, the Secre- tary, between the affairs at Chippewa and Bridgewater^ excited, gratified, yet uneasy at Brown's predicament, suggested to Izard, without ordering him, to try some enter- prise menacing Montreal, or some other place higher up the St. Lawrence, a demon- stration or attack on Kingston, or a junc- tion with General Gaines. On the 12th of August, Izard was ordered, if the enemy carried his force from Montreal to King- ston, instead of the proposed attack there, to substitute the safer movement of expedi- tiously marching four thousand men to Sackett's Harbor, proceeding to the head of the lake, putting himself in communication with the division of the left (Brown) and throwing his whole force on Drummond's rear. . By that time large reinforcements from Europe were known to be in Canada ; Gene- ral Izard^s belief was no doubt well found- ed that forces superior to his were imme- diately in his front ; and the hostile incursion to Washington was so nf ar its execution, that the Secretary of War, anxious for Brown, and incredulous to the last of any march upon Washington, was nevertheless much engaged in arrangements to prevent or repel it. Brown was a favorite with the Secretary — Izard considered him a pet. His own force become respectable ; his po- sition, as he thought, tenable ; his opportu- nity foi: distinction, very promising ; he re- volted at being withdrawn from such a thea- tre, to be marched hundreds of miles to res- cue his inferior from a predicament of his own making. "Three hundred miles," as he said, " d vol d'oiseau." Four \undred miles of what Napoleon in Poland called the new element of mud, of wilderness, and fatigue ; with jsuperior British forces in front and flank; to harass, intercept, pefhaps defeat and capture him. Re- tirement from a field of glory for a pil- grimage which no expedition, he chose to think, would enable him to perform' in time to be of any service ; and that service, even if effected, to relieve his inferior, in a strait, caused by his own, rashness, were a task wjiich Izard undertook with avowed reluctance -and undissembled . ill-humor. Although his movement to the west to suc- cor Brown was Izard's own suggestion, shortly before, he. obeyed,' disclaiming all responsibility for what he predicted must be the fatal consequences, only promising to execute his orders as well as he knew how.' On the 29th of August, with the dragoons, light artillery, fourth, fifth, tenth, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and forty-fifth regiments of in- fantry, about four thousand effectives, Gene- ral Izard began his recalcitrant and procras- tinating march towards Sackett's Harbor, with Brigadier-Generals Smith and Bissell ; leaving General Macomb with about three, thousand men — about twenty-five hundred of them fit for duty — at Plattsbilrg. Ordered, from the theatre of anticipated renown; confident that the enemy would attack, and believing that he would be defeated, even one of serener temper might lose his equa- nimity when the quarrel that ensued be- came acrimonious and inveterate between Izard, Armstrong, and Brown; though Brown took little part in it, and never quar- reled with Armstrong. The latter, unfortu- nate in so many of his generals and plans, accused Izard of want of spirit. Fear of responsibility may have disturbed him ; but no personal apprehension caused the tardy compliance by which he submitted to a pro- voking order, his non-execution of which in time to b^ of any avail, afforded his lieutenant Macomb and his inferior in rank. Brown, opportunity of distinction, which they improved to their own great advaii- tage,and General Izard's lasting mortifica- tion. Taking advice of a, council of war as to the best way to go, all his superior ofEcers were unanimously of opinion that the longest was the right way. To the Se- cretary's great annoyance, going that way, the general travelled but fifteen miles a day, which the Secretary condemned as unmilitary. But the roads were bad, the weather worse, and it was Izard's endeavor, he said, not to exhaust, his men by fatigue or exposure. On the 13th of September, from Sackett's Harbor he advised Brown of his arrival there, and intention to proceed to the head of the lake to place himself in the ' rear of the British forces in Brown's front. On the 10th of September, from Erie, having, though wounded, resumed command there. Brown wrote to Izard, im- ploring help. His total effective force did not then much exceed two thousand, .while that of the enemy was four thousand. "I will not conceal from you," said Brown, " that the fate of this army is very doubtful, unless speedy relief is afforded." Next day Brown again assured Izard, that, should he pass rapidly there, it would be in his power to carry everything in the peninsula. On the 16th of September, Izard's army reached Sackett's Harbor, where, that day, -he had the mortification to learn Macomb's glo- rious defeat of Prevost, prefaced by Mao- ' donpough's still more glorious victory, on the lake. At the same time, the. murmur of 150 SORTIE FROM FORT ERIE. public sentiment censured his procrastma^ tiori, and ascribed to his inferior the over- throw of g, large British' force by the few re- cruits and invalids' which Izard was accused df having left with Macomb. On the 17th df September, one of the violent equinoctial storms of that teihpestuous region began, with torrents of rain, and it was inlpossi- ble to embark the troops. In the evening df the 19th, they were taken on board Chaun- cey's squadron, to the number of three thousand. On thfe 29th of September the troops Sailed from Sackett's Harbor, and next day were disembarked at the mouth of Genesee river, still far from Buffalo or Erie; nor was it till the 24th of Sep-' tember that wagons and horses, for the transportation of their camp equipage and provisions, could be procured in that thinly peopled quarter. Through excessively bad roads, and continual heavy rains, they marched to Batavia, nearly all the officers on foot : and there underwent the further mortification of learning that Brown, by his sortie of the 17th, had delivered him- self from all need of Izard's help to defend him, then wanted only to enable them to- gether to capture" Drummond — a consum- mation universally and coiifidently antici- pated at "Washington and everywhere ; which would have told in American aiAials arid repute like Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga, which brought France to alii a'nce with the United States; or the sur- render of Cornwallis at Yorktown, which produced the trea^ of Independence. . Leaving General Izard at Batavia,, we must return to General Brown, at Fort Erie, whi- ther, before he went on the 2d of September, he wrote on the 31st August, gratefully to Armstrong, offensively to Izard, and man- fully for himself, thanking the Secretary for having ordered Izard to his relief; but a,dding, " what I hear of General Izard's Ao- htts, manners and intentions is so unsatisfac- tory, that I hope nothing from him. Colonel Snelling,. his most intimate and confidential friend, warns us against placing any confi- dence in his support, knowing his aver- sion to the service given him, and his uniform intention not to perform it. We must, therefore, if saved, do the business ourselves." From the time Brown nobly devoted him- self to fall or conquer with his brave oom- I'ades in the fort, the American and Bri- tish commanders. Brown and Drummond, lender torrents of incessant rain in that insa- lubrious climate, both disabled by wounds for the most active duties, neverthelegs bestowed themselves day and night in con- stant preparations, one to capture, the other to defend, the corner of Canada So long and severelyoontested. As Drummond told his troops, to encourage them to the assault df the 15th of September, Brown had' not [Il8f4v more than fifteen Huridired'regnlar'soldierB, they fatigiied by continual conflicts and in-' clement ■n'eather, and as much dispirited as" such men could be by little hope df effectual relief or ultimate triumph. Capitulation' seemed to be their doom: for though Izard' was promised and even expected tor their succor, yet when heard of, ne was at Sche-" nectady, Sackett's Harbor, or elsewhere far off, marching only fifteen miles a day, and many daysnot at all. General Brovna, there-' fore, from the moment he resumed' com-' mand, went to 'work, as he said, with an anx- ious hypothesis, i/" saved, to do the business' themselves, -without depending on help from" £iny quarter. Another general, however, Peter B. Porter, was' aff indefatigable in his endeavors to raise volunteer militia as he was ardent, steadfast and exemplary in pre- paring them for action, and leading them into, it on all occasions. The British army, under Lieutenant-Ge-- neral Drumihond, -with Major-Generals De' WatteviUe and Stovin, in three infantry brigades of from twelve to fifteen hundred; men each, besides artillery, were encamped' in a field surrounded by "woods, nearly two' miles from their batteries and entrench- ments, in order to keep the working parties detailed for therri out of I'eaTih of the Ame- rican fire. A brigade of infantry attended- the artillerists when at work. Two batte- ries vrere completed, a third *wa6 in rapid progress, all mounted with- heavy'guns, one' of them a 68 poundei*, arid stored with large' quantities of ammunition. During seven' days preceding the sortie, there was a con-; tinual equinoctial storm of rairi, which did not, however, prevent frequent skirmishes and affairs of posts, and favored many de-- sertions from the English camp. For the last three days they were unusually quiet f from which portentous silence, added to all' other indications, no doubt was entertained that their assault would soon be made. From the moment when General Bro-wn assumed- command, he carefully and thoroughly made himself acquainted with the topographical relations between the British covMing par-: ties, their men at work, their batteries and his, and came to the conclusion that by a sudden onslaught he might disturb, if not destroy, their fifty days' labors. Instead of a surprise by night, it was resolved to make the attack at midday, when so bold and hazardous an enterprise would be least guarded against, and might be most effectual. ■The' volunteers and other soldiers of the fort were employed in secretly cutting roads through the wood, which took them unper- ceived close to the enemy, and taught theiit the way to his entrenchments. T^eiiving Colonel Jessup, with the 25th regiment, in charge of Fort Erie, Colonel Brady being posted at Black Rock to giiard that fortifi- cation, soon after noon of the 17th Septem- bet, the meii were para;ded and got ready for Qe.ip: VII.] JES^UP'S ACCOFMT. 151 the attack . The left column destined far Drummond's right were placed under Gene- ral Porter, to penetrate circuitously between the British batteries and camp, thus to sur- p;cise and overpower the one-third at work . before the other two-thirds off duty in camp Cjould come to their help. Of Porter's three columns. Colonel Gibson with two hundred of his rifle regiment, and some Indians, led the advance. Lieut.-Col. Wood, with four hundred infantry, headed by Major, now General Brooke of the 23d, with that and fee first regiment had the right,. supported by ftve hundred militia of the regiments of Co- lonels Dobbin, McBurney a"nd Flemming, which force was to attack-the batteries. A left column of five hundred militia, compris- ing the commands of Colonels Hopkins, Churchill and Crosby, led by Brigadier-Ge- neral Davis, of the militia, was intended to keep off succor from the British camp, while the two preceding columns stormed and de- stroyed the batteries. General Miller; with his men, were stationed in a ravine between the American fort and the British batte- ries. General Ripley was in command of the reserve between the two bastions of the fort, all under cover,, out of view of the enemy. . There were three British batteries in charge at the moment of the King's and De •Watteville's regiments, then on duty. An- nounced by tremendous fire from the fort, the rain falling in torrents, so as to render mipossible the free use of firearms. Porter led his column close up to the enemy's en- trenchments, turned their right without be- ing perceived by their pickets, and soon oarried by storin . battery Number 3, to- gether with a strong blockhouse. Thence -instantly moving on battery Number 2, he there met a stouter resistance. Colo- nel Gibson was killed there ; but after an obstinate combat, our people got possession of it, the second battery. The intrepid Mil- ler, for whom batteries had no terrors, then by Brown's direction seized the moment to pierce the enemy's.entrenchmeuts, between lie two captured batteries. Attacking the third- battery, Davia and Wood fell, but again the enemy was overcome, and abandoned his last battery. In half an hour after the first shot the uiree batteries and two block- houses were taken, the magazine blown up, all the guns rendered useless, and every ob- ject of' the sortie accomplished, with consi- derable loss, indeed, but beyond General Brown's most sanguine expectations. Gen. Eipley was then ordered up to superintend the difScult operation which General Miller had begun, of withdrawing the troops from their conquest, and leading them back to Eort Brie ; an operation which General B'rown, with his staff, personally superin- tended. In the performance of that duty, Eipley, while speaking with Colonel Up- nam,. received a severe wound in the neck. from which he never recovered, though he survived many years, and served at one time in Congress from Louisiana. . As soon as Gen. Drummond heard the fir- ing, leaving Gen. Stovin in charge of the re- serve, he hastened to the scene of action, where he found Gen. De Watteville over- powered, batteries No. 2 and No. 3 in pos- session of the American assailants, and their assaiilt begun on battery Number 1, both blockhouses and the magazine de- stroyed, and the British troops retreating. The coincident exertions of both command- ers. Brown to withdraw his men from, and Drummond with his to recover, the British entrenchments, soon effected it. The Ame- ricans retired with 385 prisoners, many of them ofioers> and a total British loss of killed, wounded, taken and missing which Brown reckoned at a thousand men, near a fourth of their whole number. The wea- ther, the woods, and the unavoidable mix- ture of men in such a combat, together with. its inherent casualties, cost General Brown five hundred and eleven killed, wounded, missing and captured, of whom about two hundred were made prisoners in the obscu- rity of the forest, and mistakes of hostile parties. The rain prevented free use of those arms in which our people excel, the rifle and the inusket. Most of the battle was fought haad to hand, with the bay- onet and sabre. General Porter, who was wounded by a sword thrust in the hand, was at one time surrounded and summoned to surrender, but escaped by presence of mind and -invincible courage.. Thus, said General Brown, with just exultation, one thousand regulars and an equal portion of militia in one hour of close action, blasted the hopes of the enemy, de- stroyed the fruits of fifty days' labor, and diminished his effective force one thousand men at least. _; General Jessup's short account and opi- nion of the sortie from Fort Erie are as follows : "General Brown believed that he must rely entirely upon his own resources ; for though aid was promised him from another quarter, the daily casualties at Fort Erie were such, that it would not, he . thought, reach him in time to save his division. Having obtained a perfect knowledge of the enemy's force and dispositions, he deter- mined to attack him in the trenches as soon as a body of militia and volunteers, then arriving in Buffalo, could be passed over. Major Jessup having three wounds open and his. right arm in a sling, and being, in consequence, unable to perform active duty, . volunteered to join the army at Fort Erie. . On his arrival he found that a council had been assembled, and had just broken up ; and General Bro-vm was evidently much disappointed at the result. In the course of the -evening he expressed himself with 152 - COMPARISONS. great ■warmth in regard to the conduct of some of the officers present at the council ; but he added, in his peculiarly emphatic manner, ' We> must keep our own counsels — the impression must be made that we are done with the affair; but as sure as there is d Ood in heaven, the enemy shall be attacked in his works, and beaten too, so soon as all the volunteers shall have passed over.' " On the 13th and 14th there was heavy cannonading, as well as affairs of pickets ; on the 15th, 16th, and the morning of the 17th there was a good deal of cannonading at intervals, and from about ten o'clock till twelve on the 17th it was incessant. When Major Jessup joined on the 9th, he was placed by General Brown in command of Tort Erie ; on the morning of the 17 th, the general sent for him and informed him that he would attack the enemy at once, and that he should leave him- with the 25th, about one hundred and fifty strong, and the artillery and invalids, to protect the fort and camp, Jind cover the retreat of the army should it be repulsed. The general moved out with the troops about two o'clock P. M., attacked and carried the enemy's batteries and block-houses — captured or destroyed one-third of his whole force: and left him without a single heavy gun or howitzer. We had forty-five officers and several hundred men killed and wounded. "The sortie from Port Brie was by far the most splendid achievement of the campaign, whether we consider the boldness of the conception, the excellence of the plan, or the ability with which it was executed. No event, on the same scale, in the whole range of military history, has ever surpassed it.. To General Brown the whole credit is due ; he advised with, and had the enthusiastic support of. Porter and several of the younger field officers ; but was opposed in his views by his second in command and all whom he could influence." J. The influence of such a victory was even more political than military. The patriotic citizens who followed General Porter into Canada more effectually discredited mi- litia fears, and rebuked militia constitu- tional scruples than human reason could by argument, or rebuke by disgrace. Gen. Drummond at once abandoned his entrench- ments, officially paying Brown the homage of ascribing his success tojSve thousand combatants, when there ,wero but two, to torrents of rain, dreadful weather and roads, by which he felt constrained immediately to withdraw to Chippewa, and even that he was not able to do till the 21st September, three days afler that remarkable discomfi- ture of British fortitude by American alac- rity; tried as their national properties had been, by four contests, in every kind of com- bat, always by superior numbers of British to inferior American numbers, uniformly attested by American triumph, whether at- [1814. tacked or assailants, in fort or by sortie. Lieutenant-Colonel Aspinwall, who lost an arm in that sortie, and has almost ever since been the Ainerican consul at Lon- don; Major Trimble, of the 19th regiment, who was shot through the body, after- wards senator from Ohio in the Congress of the United States; Major Brooke, of the 23d regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel McDon- ald, on whom the command of the-rifle corps devolved on Colonel Gibson's death ; Colonel Upham, who took General Ripley's place when wounded ; Colonel Snelling, Colonel Gardner, now Postmaster at"Washington ; Major Jones, now Adjutant-General; Ma- jor Hall, together ■ with several other - of^ the regular forces, and many of the mi- litia, distinguished themselves on that occar sion. Drummond hastily retreated over French- man's Creek and the Chippewa, destroying the bridges over both those streams to pro- ' tect his flight, besides covering his reduced and dispirited forces with field works beyond the latter stream, but claiming a victory by his despatches. The affair of Fort Erie may be compared with some of Wellington's most celebrated achievements. In a ponderous work of Lord Castlereagh's brother and titu- lar successor, the Marquis of Londonderry, on the peninsular campaigns of the Duke of Wellington, where that noble author, then called Sir Charles Stewart, served as a gal- lant soldier, there is a grandiloquent de- scription of the siege and storming of Ciudad Rodrigo. Amid rhetorical flights of fancy, the author says, "the troops poured forward with the coolness and im- petuosity of which British soldiers alone are capable, and which nothing could success- fully oppose." But Wellington's official account of that four days' siege and final storming, establishes the fact, that the Bri- tish loss at Fort Erie was one hundred and fifty-eight more, than when some of the same British troops, transported from France, assaulted Gen. Gaines in that fort. In the course of a few ho»rs' conflict, officer' to officer, and man to man, the British loss was one hundred and fifty-eight more in Ca- nada than in the four days contest in Spain. And what enhances this comparison is, that Fort Erie surrendered without resistance by its British garrison the 3d July, was put in a posture for such defence by the middle of September. The comparison is much stronger with Brown's sortie than with Gaines's defence. . At the sortie the destruction was, comparatively, much great- er. On another continent, the theatre of Wellington's first renown, twice as many English were destroyed at their attack on Port Erie as at his celebrated assault of Se- ringapatam, including Sepoys and English, and still more at the sortie from Fort Erie. To derogate from American viotorieSj it has been said that they were merely stub- Ghap. VII.] bom defence of positions (and what was Wellington's at Waterloo)? But at Chip- pewa and Bridgewatfer, the daring and irre- sistible charges of Scott were principal fea- tjites, and Hindmari's artillery were al- ways superior to the British. At Chippewa, at Bridgewater, certainly at the sortie from Port Erie, the British may be said to have been in position, and their works be- fore it were carried at mid-day with great slaughter, at the point of the bayonet. Although Jackson's battles are reserred for description in another volume, they maybe invoked to challenge the military annals of any country for a more brilliant or masterly exploit than his night attack of the British in position, leaving five hundred of their best officers and men on the field. In each of the five battles of Chippewa, Bridgewater, the storming of Fort Erie, the sortie from it, and the attack of the enemy on the 23d December, 1814, the EngHsh loss was heavier than at Seringapatam, British and- Sepoys included,- or Ciudad Kodrigo, British and Portuguese included. No me- tdorial at St. Paul's Cathedral, London, liientions Chippewa, Bridgewater, or Fort Brie. But four splendid monuments, erect- ed there by order of Parliament, in honor of four distinguished British generals, kill- ed in America, within little more than two years of the war of 1812, are memora- ble renewals of the history of the first Bri- tish attempt to conquer the United States. In the debate in the House of Commons in November, 1814, on the address to the prince regent, Sir Gilbert Heathcote said, " It appeared to him that we feared the ris- ing power of America, and wished to crush it. We had tried thirty years ago, and had failed when she was nothing like as pow- erful as at present. -In the contest of the last American war, it was boasted here that a battalion of British troops would march across the continent. The flower of our army was sent, and commanded by officers who had served in the German war under Ferdinand. The result was well known. Those troops, as brave as any in the world, were compelled, on two different occasions, to -lay dovvn their arms to the new raised levies in America." Athenian renown, Sallust remarks, is due rather to excellent writers than great deeds; whereas Borne did not abound with writers to describe the actions of her heroes. Attractive written illustrations of modern British achievements overshadow even in America those of American soldiers, jrhose admirable exploits in the campaigns of 1814 have had no competent narrator of events of which the truth "should be our ■national pride, property and security. BlTi!',- ^ SaUust adds to that remark, the early Eorlians were men of business, who preferred doing to telling of, it, and left to others ■ the task of doscriptioni so it is IZARD JOINS BKOWN. 153- with this country'.' Such works as Lord Londonderry's, or other British chroni- clers, engross American attention, and any attempt to do justice, by statements of facts, and by fair comparisons, have prejudices to encounter, not only in Europe, but America, more unconquerable than the army and niavy'of Great Britain. On the 27th of September, General Brown, after seeking General Izard in vain by a messenger dispatched to Eighteen-mile Creek and Genesee river, met him by ap- pointment at Batavia, to concert measures for further operations. Drummond's force was reduced to three thousand disheartened men, and there was little difficulty to cap- ture it. By this time Armstrong had been expelled from the war . department, which was undertaken by Monroe, who, on the 27th of September, directed Izard to take command of his and Brown's united forces, for whom reinforcements of militia were called for ; and Izard was stimulated to ac- tion by assurances of full confidence that he would justify the high opinion the go- vernment cherished of his gallantry and confidence in his success. On the 1st of October, Izard moved from Batavia, through the wilderness and swamp which led to- ward Levristown, where he arrived on the &th ; Generals Brown and Porter, extreme- ly desirous of his co-operation over the Niagara, waited on hun at Lewistown that evening. That censorious, often de- famatory, but not always unjust sentinel of public- servants, whether in the field or the cabinet, the press, had begun to assail Ge- neral Izard for the procrastination of his march from Plattsburg, the insufficiency of- feree he left for its defence, and his indis- position either to succor Brown or to co- operate with him at all. Chafed by these censures, Izard's temper was inflamed,, and, perhaps, disturbed by the loudly ap- plauded successes of Macomb and Brown, in which he had no share. After an abortive effort to cross on the 8th of Oc-, tober from Cayuga creek, and land in the face of the enemy's batteries at Chippe- wa, which was deemed impracticable for- want of the requisite transportation, marchr ing thence to Black Rock, Izard took his divi- sion into Canada on the 10th and 11th of Octo- ber, where they landed near Fort Erie. The 17th regiment of infantry, just arrived from' the west, Porteir's volunteers, and Brown's division united with Izard's, amounting al- together to six thousand excellent troops-, were superior to any ten thousand Bri- tish that could be brought against them. A commander who had been eighteen years in service, risen from a lieutenancy to be majoivgeneral, but had never established his promising reputation by any signial action, led them^ forth on the 13th October, as the whole army ardently desired, and the coun- try confidently expeoted, -to close the gloifc 154 OiNADA ABANDONED. ous campaign" on tlie Niagara by some exploit worthy of its constant career. On the 14th of October the army was en- camped before the British entrenchments at Chippewa, the very spot of American distinction, enthusiasm and success. At Washington, and everywhere, the belief was universal that Izard would capture Drummond, of which considerate and en- lightened officers in Izard's army felt sure. On the 15th October, Towson's and Archer's batteries were advanced through the open plain, in full view of the enemy's much heavier batteries, cannonaded them, and si- lenced one, demonstrating, as General Izard declared, to the most inexperienced eye. the vast superiority of our artillerists. On the 19th October, General Izard had proof of the superiority of his infantry, as well as artillery, over the disheartened ene- my he unfortunately failed, by any general and decided engagement, to overcome. On fee 18th, nine hundred men of his second brigade, commanded by General Bissell, the 5th infantry under Colonel Pinkney, a bat- talion of the 14th under Major Barnard, whose modest intrepidity and good conduct elevated him afterwards to the Senate of the United States from Pennsylvania, the 15th under Major Grindage, the 16th under Colonel Pearce, with rifle companies com- manded by Captains Irvine and Dorman, and a small body of dragoons, were sent to Cook's mill, twelve miles north of Chip- pewa, to capture some flour there. Next day the Marquis of Tweedale, vrith a select corps of twelve hundred men from the British en- trenchments, attacked BisseU, who defeated and put them to precipitate flight, in great confusion, driven to their fastnesses, after losing several killed, wounded, and prison- ers. Daniel Bissell, one of the precious few American soldiers raised from the ranks to a; general's station, was on that occasion the antagonist of the noble marquis, who represented the army of Great Britain. Another jremarkaible person distinguished among the American officers there was Bri- gade-Major Prestmam, who, after the war, took holy orders; and,, in an Episcopal chyrch at Newcastle, Delarware, that worthy gentleman humbly and respectably officiat- ed as pastor of a small congregation. It is difficult, if possible, to justify Gen. Izard's prudery, or affectation of prudence, A virtue, like all others, injurious by excess. Taking twenty days to get from Plattsburg afloat on Lake Ontario, when it might have been done in ten ; then causing his army to fee landed, not in Canada, anywhere Izard ehose, as Commodore Ohauncey offered his fleet to land them, but choosing the north of Genesee river in New York, where they must unavoidably be detained for trans- portation ; not reaching the Canadian shore, at last, till the 11th October, six weeks after be left Plattsburg J and then,, instead of [1814;, planting his standard e^st of Drummond, taking station west, and when united with Brown, disappointing the unanimous and constant wish for an immediate attack of an enemy, who, though entrenched, was. not more than half Izard's number, and. much dispirited — all this delay and ex- treme discretion were, if not injudicious,, at least untoward and insufferable. In vain Izard pleaded that he had repeatedly offered Drummond battle, and the ap- proach of winter, severity ,of weather, dis- eases of camp, exposure, useless effusion, of blood, and the wisdom of preserving the troops for another year's campaign. If General Izard had by many battles estab- lished his cha,racter, such conduct would, have been less objectionable. But as an officer untried, known only by a few, he was unable to make head against the mili- tary and popular current, then-irresistibly strong for action. On the 21st October, General Izard broke up his encampment near Chippewa, and marched to Black Rock to prepare winter quarters. Next day the Secretary of War wrote to him that it would be a happy event, if practicable, to demolish the army before him. The good effect of it would be felt throughout the whole northern and. western frontier, along the coast, and in Europe. But Izard was resolved on retreat and winter quarters. On the first of No^ vember, the last, Bissell's gaUant brigade,; was withdrawn from Canada. On the fifth,, Major Hindman evacuated, by Gen. Izard's orders. Fort Erie, which Major Totten blew up, and thenceforth not a vestige of Ameri- can soldiery, except ruins, remained in Ca- nada. Although the President approved of what General Izard had done, yet, shortly after, he tendered his resignation which,, however, was not accepted, and suggested the appointment of Gen. Brown to command the campaign of next year: "Certainly," said General Izard, "a brave, intelligent, and active officer; and when a portion of the forces is composed of irregular troops, better qualified than I to make them useful in the public service." Indisposition or inability to command irregular troops'! raw levies, and the kind of army, which, not peculiar to, must always be most prevalent in, this country, is a fatal infirmity here — a disadvantage everywhere. General Izard's invincible repugnance to them lost him public confidence. Still kindly sustained by Monroe, who appointed him governor of the territory of Arkansas, Izard closed, in the comparative solitude of Little Rock, among the sands of that frontier, a career begun with the advantage* of European education, and the enjoymerii of fashionable society, improved by exten- sive reading, observation, and intelligence. If he had captured Drummond, as with his army Brown would have done, in all pro- Gfeip.VII.] iffhtl LASE flMts;- i'SS Vability rzifd" might Have closed hltr career ■with'a re|iutati6n for -which, no doubt, he 'W'as anxibus tb lay down Kis life. ■ The Albany Argus, the principal repubB- (/anpaperW NewY-ork, in terms of censure, Hot the leM severe for their forbearance, denounced "^he taxdy and indecisive mea- sures of General Izard, and his sudden iHrograde motement after he had forced a passage over the- Chippewa, highly "disap- poiiiting public Vxpectati on, and for -frhich m is amenable tdsgoverhtoenfe" ■ For the- third tfine, at that .critical mo- ment,' Chauncey's ■■:,squadron afforded an tfrcuse, if not causei\for frustrating public ^pectation. Yeo Mying got a superior fbrce afloat, ChailnceyHook refuge in Sack- gtt's Harbor, weakly foryfied and garrisoned, as General Izard urged, with unbecoming disdain, by crowds of disorganized and un- armed militia, of more disadvantage than Service. "These people," Said he, "maybe -valued by General Bro-vvn\ to whom they A,te personally known, and ajmong whom he IS popular." But Yeo's command of the waters defeated, in G^eneral Izard's appre- hension, all operation by land'jn that quar- ter. For -Drummond pould mil back on Burlington Heights, and every step in Izard's pursuit of him would' ctfet Izard off by the large reinforcements the en'^my could in tvrenty-four hours throw upon lis flank and rear. \ Although Commodore ChaunceVs ab- sence from the lake, and" remaiHffig at Sackett's Harbor, were more than onoe ex- tremely inopportune and prejudicial t^^the military operations on its bojrders, and "his language to explain it to General Brown was much and deservedly censured, ther^ were reasons for his confinement which he' might have urged -with much more propriety tfian his captious plea of naval dignity. During the whole month of July, 1814, he ■Was ill and unable to go abroad : so much BO that Decatur waS designated to take his ^lace. Many of the mechanics shipbuild- ing there were also disabled by illness. When At last Chsjuncey sailed on the first of Au- gust, it was necessary to carry him on board Kis ship, where the better air of the high lake and the hope of action, and excitement 6{ discipline, restored his health ; and while ' ascendant, the activity of his squadron was all that could be required. . With it Chaun- 6ej not only blockaded Yeo for six weeks in Kingston, but by reducing the number and armament of his vessels,- and even the number of men, to a precise equality with the British vessels in that port ready for action, by sail- ing close into the port, with colors flying, as is customary ongomg tobattle, and by every Other challenge that could vrith propriety be offered to his v^ary antagonist, Ghauneey in- -vited'Yeo to battle. Which he steadily de- eliiied; perhaps by order of his superiors, &r'ft -wka said that he- was mortified- at be- ing'-'obliked' to "d^eBneJ-lbiittle -with an equal force, -which his captains dsttouhcedi as^ a- disgraceful and dangerous liovelty in -the glorious nival annals of Gr^atiJSritain, ever' since thein great commonwealth, seeking" Dutch, Fr^ch, Spanish, Swedish, Dan- ish, and aUv other adversaries, under al-- most any disad-rantage, and atthattime, with inferior Biritigh force, blockading many French and Diijch vessels of war in several- ports of Europei Chauncey's fleet Was dis- ciplined by him\on Lake Ontario to a per- fection of manoe\ivre and gunnery never surpassed, seldoni.equalled, by any ships at- sea. The stormy iud perilous lake naviga- tion triexl their seamanship by the severest' lessons of na-dgatioV. Prepared and anx- ious to contend on equal or inferior terms for"" mastery with theBritish, during many Week8= the American commodore sought every op- portunity of trial. lA with such courage,- conduct, crews and discHiline he could have* controlled the lake earl/^ July, as was ex- pected, or in October, it lis more than pro^ bable that British discomfiture by land and .water, upon and around Lake Ontario,- would have been as complel^ as it was upon' and around Champlaim \ Returning to Kingston for toe last time, the 29th September, after landingi Gen. Izard's- di-vision at Genesee on the 2Srd, Chauncey found the British squadron preparing to sail, with their new 112 gunsMp, tlfe St. Law- rence, manned by eleven hundred\meh, that one -vessel by" he'rself more than a match for all the American squadron. On the 5th of October that Leviathan of the lafe being ready' to take command of it, Comiiodore Chauncey was obliged to retire to Sa'ekett'g Harbor, with an admirable but useless na- val force: laid.upiu a hamlet of the fojrest, 'ipnly an inducement to the enemy to attack apd destroy both the harbor- and the fleet, the miserable ha>mlet in which it took ex^ tr^aely imperfect shelter, being scarcely defensible. For, after; two years of war,- thatNhead quarters of our- military ani. navalV operations on the Canadian border was S8 ill fortified that, until General: Brown'\ arrival there- with two thousand regular troops, it was, if not at the mercy,, at any rate in danger of a British attack, which waSk hourly and fearfully expected. In the rudAapprenticeship to American art of- waT,_noV only was Sacketf s Harbor feebly but sq^ incorrectly fortified that ^it enteiprising enemy might Kve probably taken it. Fortunately American progress, in arms had taught our enemyforbearance.. On the 15th October Commodore Yeo put forth on the lake -with his immense fiag-ship, one of the largest in the -world, but never at^ tempted- Sackett's Harbor.. At that timef Drummond's reverses- on the Niagara and Provost's on the Saranac, had confirlned Bri-^ tish caution, by reducing and disheafrtening their nuiaerau&troops-in Canada.- Coiamo- 15ff M' ARTHUR'S EXPEDITION. dore ChauQijfey's sliips were moored across the harbor for its protection, and neither Gren. Kempt'Si.. brigade, nor any other force the enemy coyld then bring against it, showed any Inclination to attempt it, after General Brown's, arrival there. • His un- known name had become a tower of strength, in twelve months after its an- nouncement from -the woods, at Sackett's Harbor, then commkited to his approved and celebrated generalship. Chauncey's fleet, in July expectel| to help Brown's division to Burlington 'HeightB, in Octo- ber was beholden to th\i brave survivors of that then contemned aSventure, to help save the fleet from capture.\ Kingston and Sackett's Harbor were remaWtable testimo- nials of English and American necessities and superfluities. While scaiteity of wood in England deprived Kingston \f ship tim- ber, not only Chauncey's ships, bVit the town of Sackett's Harbor, were built togMher from superabundant forests. And, siJou after Chauncey, at immense expense an^ labor, with wonderful dispatch raised another huge ship from the green trees, that vast struc- ture, together with his whole fleet, the\r0' digious line-of-battle-ship of Yeo's squadn with all the rest of it, were doomed. Ami rican and English altogether, to rot on tl shores of Ontario in the sunshine of peace. [1814. On the 22d October, 1814, an expedition from Detroit into Upper Canada, consisting of some seven hundred mounted gunmen, ^nd a company of rangers, and some In- dians, led by Brigadier-General Duncan ]^ Arthur, of the regular army, marched for Burlington Heights, thence to join General Brown. Finding the waters impassable in places, and the Canadian authorities on the alert, \General McArthur, after routing a body o'^-five hundred Canadian militia at Malconiti's Mills, killing several' and cap- turing nJore than a hundred, deemed it ne- cessary to*, retrace his steps, which he did, without ii^erruption, to Detroit. Subsist- ence being then scarce and dear in Cana- da, the desSuction of several mills and considerable (Quantities of forage and pro- visions at theWillages of Dover and Port Talbot, was theNphiefeffect of this excursion ; which the British loudly denounced as ruth- less devastation W a horde of mounted ruf- fians from Kentuoky, reducing settlements to ashes, the cotfaitry to indiscriminate plunder, and leavinV the miserable inhabit- ants to perish withyiunger and cold. A party of the 103d raeiment, of the 19th light dragoons, and scEne Indian warriors, were dispatched to repel and chastise Mc- Arthur, but did not come in contact with CHAPTER Vm. BATTLE OF BLADENSBURG AND CAPTURE, OF WASHINGTON. THEonGHOUT the waters and shores of the Chesapeake Admiral Cockburn reign- ed supreme, ubiquitous and irresistible, from Capes Charles and Henry to Havre-de- Grace. War authorizes mischievous, cruel, perhaps wanton injurjr, contributions ex- acted, devastations committed. But the burglaries, larcenies, nnoeudiarism and mere marauding perpen-ated by Admiral Cockburn from his 74 gun ship, the Albion, Commodore Barrie, fro; same force, the Dragon, operating officers in frig; and other public vessels Virgrnia and Maryland w4re as odious and ignoble, though less bloldy or horrible than the inhuman atrocitiep of the British savages in the west. Slavas in large num- bers, large quantities of toHacco, furniture, and "Other private property, protected by the laws of war, and seldom taken, even if destroyed, by land troops, wire seized upon by the seafaring warriors with a piratical rapacity, which execrable plunder would have been condemned, if knawn, in Eng- his ship of the nd all their co- les, sloops-of-war n the shores of land ; for wh^n the Earl of Donoughmore, in the House Of Lords, in November, 1814, taxed the ministry with some of these de- spicable enormities, the Earl of Liverpool denied all knowledge, much less approval of them. American impotency and British impunity were flagrant in the Chesapeake before the naval tfOmmander-in-ohief, Ad- miral Cochrane was officially instructed to give formal notice t(^ our government of in- human hostilities ; mid there was in the amphibious irruptioni of the vaunted Brit- ish navy a mixture of irolicksome, reckless destruction, with avaricwus piracy, far, more licentious and disgraceflil than Lafitte's il- legalities from Barratam, for whose alli- ance at that haunt of contraband and de- predation the British naw soon after ap- plied. Cockburn was the very beau idial of a jovial, indefatigable, rapacious freebooter, employed soon after his AmVican misde- meanors as the marine jailor of Napoleon, and spending, if I am not mistaken, much of the after part of his life in the dignified enjoyment of social intimacy with King Chap. VIII.] BARNEY'S FLOTILLA. 157 George the Fourth. It was impracticable to guard against his fleating incursions on the shores of the Chesaj eake ; to divine when or where they would iccur, prepare to repel them, bj" any meani retaUate or pumsh them. Norfolk, well fortified by a veteran of the regular army, Jeneral Moses Porter, ' and garrisoned by ^ irginia mountaineers, Ndth a few regulars, I altimore, Washington and Alexandria, citit i soon doomed to as- sau^, not for some t me attempted, or sup- posea^they ever wovi Id be, the predatory and pn?e making annpyances of the enemy •in the Ckesapeake, ware limited to isolated villages, ppor farm hottses, and, other inde- fensible oNeots takeq or destroyed. De- sljruction was the punishment proclaimed and executedVor resistance. The house and barn were bur\ed of whoever fired a shot or drew a sworiiuin selfldefeuce. Many re- spectable persona, in aomfortable circum- stances, were reduced lo poverty by these depredations ; heacJs of families kept conti- nually on militia dirty, pad no time to at- tend to their crops. Mjapoor were especial suflferers. With shores soundented by creeks and bays, the whole force of a state under arms would have been unMual to cope with such overwhelming aggressSrs. There were, therefore, loud cries of the public voice for some floating naval armament, to move about upon the waters and che&the other- wise resistless mariners. I \ For that purpose a flbtilla ofSbarges, mounting heavy guns, and manned bVsome six hundred mostly watermen, was^re- pared at Baltimore, undeijcommand of tain Joshua Barney, a boM and experience seaman and enterprising privateersman, gay, dressy and gallant apecimen of the pe ouliaritiea of ocean life, active and das! as Cockbum, and his effi(fient opponent/ivith very inferior means disputing the MaAland waters with Barrie, oulwhom the /uty of capturing Barney was pi rticularly devolved. In the latter'part of ^ .pril, 181#, moving abroad upon the bay,a id rivery as far as the mouth of the Poto nac. Tie /luded and disconcerted a vastly si perior^ritish force in ships of the line, frigatsfe, schooners, sloops and boats, pursi ing md in vain en- deavoring to overcome Baraey, who, on the first, eighth, fifteenth a ay twenty-sixth of June, and on many itifier days, almost every day encountered ithem with various success, and the destru* tion of vessels and men on both sides, m least diverting the British from predatcfry Itncursions ashore. Meantime, however/ CocKburn landed from his ships, and with marines and seamen penetrated severafl parts pf Virgima, where General Taylor jw^as woulded, and nsfrrow- ly escaped, ana General Hungerford was chased fromyplace to place, the same gen- tleman wImt the year berore contested Mr. BSyley's/^at in the JEoJse of Eepresenta- tivfes. ^amey was obliged to take shelter ,Jjg55aiBf mercenary more than a pulse. , I Admiral Jt .Buperintenj jffieial egregious c opinion been isfarance that Wash- |r. In July, 1813, jst volume of this rals Warn the^iUse and sounded the le^t iustio capital, vrith pualic sentiment but parUd by the of the press. ( Sail- WaahliigLOii U^ The Po- ke, with heavy ships in ons at that time, they lUgh to ascertain that a Igression might lay the ruins, or at least un- ribu|ion. Oookburn's long irs and confluents of , famjiarized him with their and imbued him erican resistance, as civilized war, and gton was a sudden of which plunder •eance was the im [1814. the American navy OTer that of Great Britain, began the latter's ultimate "and probably not qistant- deposition from the etapire of the bcean. The British army bo^ off much\ of that undisputed, ex- ceeoing Englisn attachment which, till Welmgton's advent, belonged almost ex- clusiT^jR' to the British navy, of which the Amerioan navy iook away still more, and steam, «ai all maritime Europe will do th.e rest. On the\14th j -ugust Cochrane's fleet, entering th\ Ches ipeake through the pinie forests, lowlands t nd barrens of that sultry, sandy region,Wer s inmiediately joined by Cockbum, wiflj three ships of the iine,j several frigatek jloops-of-war, and gui^ brigs, so that noyjess than twenty BntiA pennants floated nu>m the mast-heads of ^e "ch sailed up the ISay. ''nes, one hundred ne- d disciplined/and a 'ery were than added and, marang alto- fouAthousaad troops : all but the black sla ves, vmo w^e stolen in America, transport d fronrijlv^ope, not for any permanent or rationaJS^onquest, but the avowed purpose of merer'winton devas- tation. With ordeit to dJattclg, they dis- obeyed that barbarous coBWaandvjnly when ^hat they were in duty^uud to^nihilate jght be turned to mi|f account wf disobe- ient avarice. AdmVal Malcolm, Admiral lerWards comi]^mded .vy was destroyed at he fleet in the Ch^a- apier, now an Et der Admiral CocS noble shipping wl Seven hundred mi n groes, lately armed division of marine fjrtilj to General Ross' gether an army of i odrington, who hen the Turkish Navarino, captair^of geake, and Capjiain sh admiral, ^rved rane on carried River, wFrjijie»--are -arrrrod— on-^^ St. WTence,'\added, "our flee\ onyme At- tic coast \f America appM^^to have ated great ^^mi, and^oJje ccmsiderable mischief by a 'wsiia^^op^ som^oltat ai/i- bimious charact«r\S,JJliose modest terms giitly questioned mfflimphibious fiepreda- tiins on )>& shp^s >Qf\the Chesapeake, wpich a ]^itisj^fficer,>^e\gf their "perpe- tors, de^emied_as-pevh^lp«' the atroci- ties w;hio.|^in a barbaraHS^ge^arke\ the ivasiotiK _-^^ T^^i/^shooking sjKpCcl1^''!^!^fflfis 'Sngli narrative atteps'that neitiSter nran, womai chrld, nor sl^fe staid, bu^ll fled on the ap preach of fjj^ fnrpiiHa.hp inilpprl 1iii sure, and ,: tingham ■ enemy, unexamfl sion, ena Thus lading at their plea- Benedict to Not- of hindrance, the perplexed by such xching fn out a shi pljised a: _ _ nd in^mprehensible permis- I for Me night at Nottingham, surrouifflling t\emaKves with unusual pre- caution againsStffe attack they supposed could .not be lonjflfleforred. Next day they marciTed ten niilK further, to Upper Mar l- bor(M»gn, still in'nursuit of iiarnev. but so mudb nearer yaUiington ; not, hnwever, without muchJouBt, increased hesitation, aiid General Ikiss' ftrong roluotance, over- come at last by Cocltburn, instigator of the movement bpyond th|t point. 'The general long paused before hetwould consent to fol- low even the flotilla ai^y further, inclining jBARNEY'S FLOTILLA BURNED. Chap. VI1I.1 \ . . 1. — to return to the shippings in the Potomac. " There'yseemed," says th^British narrator, " to "be spmething like hesitation as to tlie course tmbe pursued, whe^er to follow the gun-boatg. or return to the^shipping. But at last the\former proceediag was resolved upon, and \the column set -forward about eight o'clo^ in the direction of Marlbo- rough, anotfe^er village about |ten miles be- yond Nottingham, marching^ through the heart of thicy^forests well covered from the rays of the su^." " During our progress the same caution was observe'd which we had practiced yeVterday. Nor was it alto- gether unnecessaW, several bodies of the enemy's horse occasionally showifig them- selves ; and vrhat appeared to be \the rear guard of a column 0| infantry, evacuating Slarlborough as our ac^vance entered.' There was, however, little oftno skirmishing, and we were allowed to remain in that village 161 all night without ma ,~- xne biograpiier of Admiral Cockburn ■ claims for him exclusive credit, whilst a land s officer. Col. Evans, deems;'it impossible that a ; seaman could have thoiight of preparing i campaign for the guidance of a general " se- ; cond only in successful etperience and repu- Station to the Duke of AVelliugton." But the loflScialletterof Gen.Kosi says: "ToRear-Ad; Imiral Cockburn, who suggested the attack o VWashington, and who ace ompanied the arm_ \ confess the greatest ob igations for his cor- liial co-operation and ac vice," which seems ^leoisive as to the authoi ship of the scheme, fend with regard to the 3xecution of it, the following statement of I!olonel Evans him- lelf is as explicit as to he influence of the idmiral in reassuring and urging on the irmy at a moment evid ently of great irre- lolution. " The colun n having diverged ;ome miles from the rii er towards the in- ;erior, intimation, however, was brought in that the force colleeting in front was eery strongly posted, land considerably fmore numerous than had been anticipated- Doubts then may have arisen as to the course most eligible to pi irsue ; whethi t to persist in the offensive, or to abandon,. febat intention ; and a portion of the mornin t, it is quite true, elapsed ii discussing these as to the unprepared state of the enemy, &c., his presence might have the effect of inclining the scale in favor of a forward movement, so earnestly desired. Under this impression, two individuals of the staff proceeded to the river side, some few miles off, where the admiral then was ; and hav- ing submitted to him their views and wishes on the subject, proposed that he should mount a led horse, they had for the purpose brought with them, in order to facilitate his getting to the bivouac, to tender to the major-general his services and presence on the occasion. This, with his characteristic zeal, he agreed to j the offer was accepted by the major-general, and as the advance subsequently took place, it is perfectly fair to conclude that the presence of therear- admiral may not have been, as in fact it was not, without a favorable bias." Thus, Cockburn's knowledge of the coun- try, and contempt for its capacity of resist- ance, led Ross on, from step to step, em- boldened all the way by almost absolute /non-resistance, till at length the first salute of American panic enabled the admiral to take the general to "Washington. "But," says the English nan-ator, "if we were not harassed, we were at least startled on the march by several heavy explosions. The cause of this we were at first unable to discover ; but we soon learned that they were occasioned by the blowing up of the very squadron of which we were in pursuit ; which Commodore Barnej-, perceiving the impossibility of preserving, prudently destroyed, in order to prevent its falling into our hands. In Marlborough we remained, not only during the night, but till noon on the following day. The hesitation which had caused the loss of a few hours at Nottingham again interposed, and produced a serious delay, which might have been attended with serious conse- quences. At length, however, orders were given to form, and we quitted Marlborough aV'iout two in the afternoon, taking the road to "Washingt on." . ._ .^ . i i ' ,■ '"T'^aiuay*§~HoEiUa was destroyed, not by him. "With nearly all his officers and men, by order of the Secretary of the Navy, he had joined General "Winder, leaving only five men with each boat to blow'it up : and that strange sacrifice, by 'superior orders from "Washington, of a force that might have defied the whole British army, was one of the many acts of inexplicable terror which precluded all hope of saving the capital. The explosion of Barney's flotilla was a salute to induce, invite, almost to iwelcome what the Secretary of "War charac- ranted attempting that which complcjitely. Ijterized as the Cossack rush upon "Washing- overstepped the intentions of, and was wholly ^jtoi,[. At IJarlbprough the British army uncontemplated by, government. "While the jjwas within eighteen miles of it, having '.ecision, however, was pending, it oocurSjed, ,im^ched"~"s6me twenty almost unresisted. ,hat if the rear-admiral were on the spofrtc jTffiy were, it might be "said, between the peat the opinions previously discussed, | [Ataerican army at the woodyard, a short ) necessary on the in an affair of ra- points. But as it becam following day to engage ther more than ordinary iisk, that of forcing a bridge, defended by taree or four times the number of the assailants, and by the fire of twenty-four pieces of cannon, a little time for reflection will not, perhaps, be deemed to have been unreasonably spent. The point for final consideration was this. "Whether or not the aspect of affairs war- 162 !" NAPOLEON BANISHED. distance south of jthe British and the capi- tal. Ross' scrupjes, daily combated by Cockburn, yieldedl to the force of circum- stances. Victory,': fame, plunder, promo- tion, titles, houor^, disgrace if he retired after having advanced so far and so well, combined to quell ^e judicious scruples of a brave young genial, accustomed to obey but not to lead, who^iad never before borne the responsibility of a military enterprise, of which the personaidangers were nothing compared to the public amenability, which was a burden assumed Vith much hesitation. -Mr. QiillilLlll'a aUl'Dl li'um Europe, re" ceived the 26th June, 1814, was preceded by a stream of tureid disquietudes by every arrival, continually perplexing the solitary confidence of the seat of government. At a cabinet council, ori the 7th June, the Pre- sident called on tha Secretary of War for a report of the regular troops and militia in the fifth military dietrict, of which Wash- ington was part. Tne total was but two thousand one hundAsd and fifty-four en- listed men, stationed kt Norfolk, Baltimore, St. Mary's and Fort ^arburton, or Wash- ington, six miles belc w Alexandria, on the Potomac ; and one com pany of marines at the city of Washington. The whole enlisted army of the United S ates, on the 1st July, 1814, amounted to noVmore than thirty-one thousand five hundred and three regular sol- diers, twraty-seveu thousand and ten effect-, ives. Five hundred! recruited in North Carolina by Lieutenant-Colonel Clinch, en- camped for drill and \discipline at Green- leaf's Point, one of th^ alluvial flats of the city of Washington, Wiere marched to the northern frontier, on tne 15th June, 1814: a force that might hava'saved from capture a city, slumbering in false security, where the Secretary of War rel|uked all apprehen- sion of its danger as idle dreams. Two days after the cabinet council, on the 9th June, 1814, thej royal French brig- of-war, Olivier (Olive Branch), arrived at New York, under the ^hite flag and cock- ades of the departed l|ourbons, for more than twenty years driven almost from the earth, unknown on the waters, now sending dispatches to their minister at Washington, that the child and chdmpion of French liberty^eSfflfey and empire, was over- thMj«f^^|^i^*he>*'UniteH States, without any counteracting power, mfluenee or sym- pathy in the vrorld, left single-handed to make head against- the 'gigantic means, vengeance and aggi-andizlment of Great Britain. The royal FrencI\brig-of-war sa- luted Castle Williams, at Mew York, with twenty-one guns, which wene returned by eighteen; and at the cannon's mouth the American Republic^ cojiifessgd, the rostora- tivJa«of "■ l^iiig i>J diviifeVigfi, proclaiming ttt^iLuxi'i^c. lii.f long'exM, lifi'. had never c'ifsed to riiigriT''^'*"' '' ■' ■ ■.■.^■■^' ■■-':, Th« executive gov'!rnment of .the 'United [1814. States had been extremely and fortunately, if not providently and wisely, abstemious not only of alliance but even amity with the immense Emperor of the French, whose prodigious /lictatorship broke down by his abdication, sat Fontainbleau, the 6th April, after the allied conquerors entered Paris, the 31st March, 1814, and seduced some of his marshals. The heart of all people is with horqes: and that of the American as well as tlie French nation was with the child and champion of equality, though he rampled uppn liberty, by marvellous acts of gi'eatnessi and renown impressing his image on ponular admiration and personal regard. 'I'he! American sensation of his downfall was disappointment to the war par- ty, delight to the peace party. When con- quest and tresfaon, civil and military, found their way intd the French capital, an old soldier, Marsh^ Scrurier, then governor of the Hospital of Invalids, hastily collected the flags suspeiided from its glorioiis dome, trophies of innumerable victories, commit- ted them to the flames and threw their ashes into the Seine, ttlis nephew and sole male heir, the FrenchXminister at Washington, was the only one \i all the foreign ministers of Napoleon whonl Louis the Eighteenth did not displace. Hi^ Secretary of Legation, George Caraman, 9on of the Duke of Cara- man, who adhered \to the dethroned Bour- bons in all their hard fortunes, on the 13th June, 1814, by M. SWurier's direction, pub- lished in the Natioukl Intelligencer, a call on all French suhjecpin the United States to repair to their coiisuls, and " give ad- hesion to the gre^t revolution, by which the white cockade w^s thenceforth the rallying sign of all friends of the throne and their country." | A semi-official Article in the National In- telligencer of the iSth June, 1814, announced that "Bonaparte had been put down, not by the Bourbons, but the revolutionary party which put him up! On the friends of liber- ty, in whatever coantry, he had no claims, but was an object of their jealousy and mis- trust. Weak at sea, his policy was the rights of neutral nations. Every power felt and abhorred the Usurpations of England. To the United Statel he never was an object of alarm, who so keenly felt his depreda- tions, that much hesitation was experienced as to the course to p^irsue. It would have been folly to go to w4r with a, power which had not a ship atsea.\ We pursued a course Ifrora which, whatever may be the alarm jwhich now agitates weak nerves, the hap- piest results ai-e to "Be anticipated." In |these cautious terras JlVidison's administra- ion vindicated their mVdium policy, steer- iag warily between imputed French influ- ence and English enmity .\ On the 29th June, 1814, the " delivery of Eviiope from the yoke of military despotism wasVcelebrated in the plockaded, aud almost besieged by English CkAP. vnr.] DETASTATION ANNOUNCED. 163 enemieSj'city "of New York, by one of the ear- liest representatives of the TJnited States in France, a bold statesman, orator and founder of American- government, Gouverneur Mor- ris, a stately and imposing personage, vrhose powdered hair, wooden leg, and com- manding manners, figured both in Europe aad America. .His discourse, of much pub- lic sensation, affirming kings' divine right, began, " 'Tis done ; the long agony is over, Prance reposes, in the arms of her legiti- mate prince:" repose on the. subjugation of Trance and oveVthrowof Napoleon, which liberated the tovvcering power of Great Bri- tain, and was stVained by Castlereagh to vindictive and inhuman hostilities against •the United States. English misapprehension ; is natural, inv'eter4te and intractable, that for America betweten England and France, hot to be English i'^ to be French. But so strong is the feeling of kindred in American filiation, the colonial! veneration of offspring foT patristic supreniacy, that American im- partiality between English and French is condemned as uundtural by Americans as well as English. Alarmed by every gust from the East, after the conquest of France, Madison, disconcerted, beheld tjie world at ?eace, and Great Britain at the head of it. et, from that overVhelming pacification British grandeur began its decline, sinking under exertions, debt^, taxes and triumphs, , such as freedom, commerce and credit only could extort from factitious power ; and from that jeopardy these United States have been ever since ascending, in power, charac- ter, resources and "hi^'toned nationality.'' "Bf ead of French despotism was Madison's sentiment ; though his uuwarlike nature was disturbed by a crisis, unexpected and fear- ful cast on his administration, without funds, commerce, a small army, scarcelv any navy. Jiuropean iSvoiiitions oi em- pires disheartened his adherents, and rous- ed his opponents to sdcond the English clamor that Madison,' the tool of Bona- parte, must be deposeij like him, some American Elba be his exile, the conquer- ed portion of New En^and annexed to Canada, of~which it was j part, the French fraudulent possession of Louisiana restored to Spain, to whom it belonged,- and these terms of peace dictated in the metropolis of the United States, as the legitimate re- storations of Europe had b^en in the capital of revolutionary France, first the ally^ then imitator and finally instigator of rebel- lious, unnatural America, i Under the rank growt^i of universal menace, apprehensions and forebodings sprang up, the specific and exotic terror that the metropolitan wilderness was in perU: affright more strange and unwel- (jpme than that by which Wellington strives to convince England that ^team exposes ^London to French capture, targe mifitary . eVli'arkations for America ^, from Spain, France, Ireland, England ; the great captain Wellington, or his greatest lieutenant. Lord Hill, said to be coming to command them ; increased naval squadrons ; an American seaman, Adn»ral Sir Isaac Coffin, to take charge of theiBritish fleet on Lake Ontario ; armies and navies shooting like baleful meteors across the Atlantic in rapid transit from the Old IWorld, restored to ancient li- mits by kingdpms and legitimate principles to reform, recplonize, and refetter the new.- Transcendaht contempt for this country, coupled with i malicious vengeance to be inflicted for h(f8tilities commenced byorder of the French'usurper, and naval triumphs to be obliterated in blood, were the dogs of war let loose from Europe on America. Admiral Warijjn told our American minis- ter, Levitt Hartis, in London, that the orders of Admiral Cochrane were very differeht- from his ; and 3.814 was to far exceed 1813/. in hostilities. % Cochrane, therefore, pre- faced the sack of Washington by official announcement! to our government from his Britannic Majesty's ship Tonriant, in the Patuxent, withfn a day's march, and almost within cannon jsound of Washington ; that,, contrary, as his official letter stated, jf it did not boast, t6 the usages of civilized war, all the assailable places on the coast were to be. laid waste, which inhuman threat was brought firth in fraud, the 18th. o^ August, the daly^ before the British army landed at Benedict. For Cochrane's official letter was not sfent ashore froii his ship till ten days after '^ts date on the 28th, then » the envelope of another letter from admiral Codriiigton to Captain Gordon, to W mentioned jhereafter. When landed, tfie letter was nfet sent by a :flag of truce, or by any regular method of communi- cation, but merely given to an idle person' who happened! to be on the Patuxeiit shore, from wl^m, through various acci- dental channel^, it found its way not tUl the 31st -of August, to the department of State, a week af$r the outrage it announced - was perpetrated, and ten days after the perpetrators returned fropi burning Wash- ington had re-fembarked on board Coch- rane's fleet at Benedict. By such a fraud was that barbaifous notice brought to its address. 1 ' Beleagured, nienaced, perhaps terrified, but unsubdued akid constant in his meek fortitude. President Madison' ispnvened his cabinet for lugqbrious consultation how to save the seat of government. The Ame- rican Congress,! driveBL--&bm captured Philadelphia to lYorktownuj, Nfi-w,. York, Charleston and Savannah gasrisoned by British troops, , ijevolu^ion precedents of present dang^rs,"jKM:o6!d^flgmselTss on.j^e recollection .oif-Madison; M,o'ni'oejand,-:^uii^ strong, who liad lexperiienc.ea. wSsEit_,;sve now again *&ie apprehei^ed^-gDjjfiJjj^ aiid hon'Or/.;ffie:'fi8^ti#5^V-§^l^.f^,?fljiff 1S4- PREPARATIONS. ractear in. danger of the hoofs and torches of ruthless enenlies,' scorning the laws of war and hatiAg the liberties of America. Serene, however alarmed, the President ad- journed the cabinet on the 4th of July, 1814, t6 meet him again at dinner, as was his wont, in the freedom of conviviality to resume de- liberation. The resolves of that" cabinet council were, at least in theory, cbmmen- siirate with the emergency : the creation of a metropolitan military district, the tenth, to consist of the city, northern Virginia, and Maryland; a requisition for ninety three thousand five hundred militia to be held ready; fifteen thousand of them, if necessary, to be forthwith mustered into service, and embodied with about one thou- sitJid regulars, the thirty-sixth and thirty- eighth regimeUts of infantry; Barney's flbtilla men, a company of marines, two troops of cavalry, at Carlisle, not yet horsed, a; sprinkling of artillerists at Baltimore, itnnapolis, and Fort Washington, scattered oyer an area of fifty or sixty miles. There Were no funds ; though the city banks prof- fered a few hundred thousand dollars of their depreciated, and in a very few days unconvertible paper, as with the fall of "Washington all banks south of New Eng- land, stopped payments in coin. There were no rifles ;' not flints enough-; American gun- powder was inferior "to English ; there was n6t a cannon mounted for defence of the seat of government ; not a regular soldier there ; not a fortress breastwork or mili- tary fortification of any kind within twelve miles. The neighboring militia of Maryland iand Virginia were worn down by disastrous^ aS,d mortifying service, routed, and dishear^ [1814r^ many, nor the, active few turned out or even, prepared for it;- nearly all remained at home, and the whole demonstration ap- peared only in the papers that published it. Of the five thousand required at once from Pennsylvania, not one could be ordered out, owing to remediless defect in the law of that State. From General Winder's de- lay in giving notice to the Executive of Virginia, it was only five days before-. Washington fell, that the two thousand . of that State were summoned, too late for being iuustered. Of the Marylandere only two of the six thousand ever appeared; most of them volunteers from Baltimore, who did not reach Bladensburg till, much, jaded and disorganized, the day before their defeat, with a few hundred from Anr napolis, who arrived less than a half an hour before the battle began, fatigued by a forced march of twelve miles in excessive heat, that morning, hurried to the top of a high hill, a mile beyond the front rank, there to flank Barney, and as he officially reported in a few minutes, to his great mortification, making no resistance, but giving a fire or two and retreating. The officer selected to command the new military district was General Winder, late- ly exchanged and returned from Quebec, where he had been kept a prisoner after his unlucky, if not discreditable capture in June, 1813. Being a relative of -Levin Winder, the Governor of Maryland, federal governor of a federal State, Mr. Madison and Mr. Monroe deemed it politic to con- aliate opposition.bs;flf>.pQin.tJixg,hiHi_tQ thajt. responsible and arduous' command, rathgr^ than General Moses Porter, a veteran sol- en^d; The proportion of regular troops, all dier commanding at Norfolk, who was pre- of them mere recruits, never tried in fire, was^ like that of coin to paper in^he wretched ciiirenoy, so small an infusion of precious metal, that there was scarcely any sub- stance to rely upon. These were disad- vantages of a contest with enemies wing- ed with ubiquitous shipping, by which a ■ few thousand soldiers, speedily trans- ported from place to place, could strike with the force of superior numbers wher- ever least expected, and retire before new levies could be collected to meet them ; for such incursive naval armaments are as formidable, as they are unfit for permanent conquests. General Armstrong, the war Secretary, an old soldier well informed in the prac- tice and science of war, was not wanting toprompt compliance with the resolutions of the council of the, first of Jujy. On the anniversary day of that month find year, ^ as if the 4th of July would consecrate the call and organize the force,^n tie midst of the national festivities his ord^ i^su for the nearly one hundred thousan^taili- tia to be ready, and the fifteen thousand to be soon embodied. But neither the passive ferred by General Armstrong, and "who would not have been deterred, like Winder,, frftm— <^'try>niTir^h£,jiTfiff -ft^ 'liSCb'sTofEis neighbors and friends in battle with tlie vagabond mercenaries of the English army, which General Winder felt as a cruel ne- cessity to be humanely avoided, if possible. On the 27th of June, 1814, General Winder arrived at Washington with General Wil- kinson, accidentally his companion, es- tranged from the President and Secretary of War, who urged that the total unprepared- ness of the capital, the &lat of its capture, the depreciation of American character abroad, and aggravation of American divi- sions at home, would induce the enemy to attempt it, and suggested a camp of obser- vation and practice ;. three or four thousand men encamped near the city, which Win- der likewise desired ; but the Secretary of War objecjied^o, because he considered mi- litia only' available on sudden emergencies, and-iiie expense of their being encamped till needed, would be an onerous charge on an empty treasury. Winder's was an ar- duous perplexity and harassing task ; to arm and- wttify a military district with- Chap. VIII.] out magazines or troops, controUei^y a cabinet of older soldiers tlian himgHf, not coincident in their own opinionij^wliom it ■would be disrespectful in him toi?oiitradict, and almost insubordinate toliSVerrule ; to lead undisciplined neighbg^ io battle, in whose martial prowess heMuld not confide, of whose blood he was ipinianely sparing, overlooked by severalj^uperiors, and dis- tracted by a host of advisers. William Pinkney described^f&neral Winder in the disgraceful comuuScement of the rout at Bladensburg as /'inanifesting the courage that became a'^soldier and a gentleman." But in addit^fe to that courage, which no one deniedMpeneral Winder, there were "wanting t^p ''strenuous fortitude and self- possessi(^,°confidence in himself and in his "troopSj^if led to victory or death by a comnrfSTder unscrupulous of. tjlflodshed f or eithaR ;G«tief afi¥ffl§'©S%f ^K'S&^f'&fy 6f •tWr^l'dest, if not only soldier in the ad- ministration, who had served long and with distinction, overruled in his choice of a General to command the new military dis- trict, was furthernigre reduced to jEnere_4d- visory authority by writtehT direotiSn Sram the-'PtmSSSi, as 'eaa^y altBrTStETof A^- .gurni-ffiat-ffie •Secretary -of '■War*s6|yld giTO^^nof>^k;it Marlborougli ; ;ind, IS Coekburn aflerXards confessed, at fWashin^tun, Uio b;ilan?»iy\vas at laststruck, not likf that of the GaiilNi Rome, by the sword, but by ]>o'jty. " I'he^vernment," said he, "will ranjom their iitHJic build- inga and homes; aind we shall be »uriched by contribution :" .which sordid calculation uarrieS the final resolve to march on. Washington. " A i general of brigade un- der Lord, Welling ton," says the English narrative, "^enei il Ross had, no doubt, learned the a^t if war in an excellent school: but only /to obey, with no more responsibility that a colonel commanding a battalion. Butt at the head of an inde- pendent army, upon\his determination de- pend, he feels, not only the success, but the lives and safety of tl* troops. This difi- dence General Rpss exSwitea in the loss, first, of three hojirs in Nottingham, and, again, of eight at Marlboro'^i- The truth is, that the cajiiiii'e of WasJi^aton was not the orii-iiiial end of the ex^icdWlm. To de- stroy the flotilla -s+as the scde object of the disembarkation, and, hut for the iiistigor- tions of Admiral Cuclchuni, who aSgompa- nied th'e army, ' the capital of tbe^^emy would probably li^ve escaped its visitafionl It was he who, on. the retreat of the flotilla from Nottingham,' urged the necessity of a pursuit; and it was he who also sur/r/ested the attack on "Washington, and, finally, j;rroS?76dr?n General Ross iomeniure so far frrmv'^^ -shipping. V Stpong evidence-rthis, bom'e by an armjr nffi nar »a.ga^H-lf hia J imi 1 i - of- the, laartiai, genius of general -himsehF, in his ff sucoesB,- already quot- ed, says, "To Rje ar- Admiral - Coekburn, who suggested tM attack on Washington, and accompanied (the army, I confess the greatej^tobligatioi^for his cordial co-opera/^ -^mf'imii advice." Ihe rear-admiral's official dispatch states, tli it the flotilla was a pre- text, while the ult mate destination of the combined force was Washington, only should )V 6e yojmrf "iviat the attempt might be made Trlth any jn- ^j/cct of success. A'ull- ity of resistance, panic-struck retreat be- fore them witliout a plow struck, and thirst of plunder more than fame, carried forward the invaders to thi fall of Wa kee^^feflja^eir Tm n-w-^ ||i.ncl,ijnfltUagg1r toHVashington to see whether The timidity of "Winder's army, keepiiJ aloof from that if Ross, avoiding colUBion ■when in sight oi it, retreating almost with- out a shot, thro' dng no impediment inits way, invited agg 'ession, while the fatal saj eidfice of the do imed flotilla sounded IT the orderig. " ^ — -'—''- thgjreyievrj a most alarm- as pi-evalent', unquestioffa- Bitulation lOT the Jisinal as that day's Ameriearif' emboldened Brito' disaster and retrograde were, however, to inexperienced citiien soldiers, impression- able, thinking for hemselves, and tumultu- ous in the utterani e of their own opinions of what ought anc ought not to be done, freemen with home i hard by, thoughts, and undisciplined repi blican emotions, next -day, -Tuesday, the I 3d, vvas a still and much more eventful eve to the fatal morrow of battle. " far . ^- ffi'^^^ary 6 OTmg J jbgre ne^resToBnt ."-fivfewSf'TOe troops, disturbed by contra- ', §:dictory rumors and agitated by noisy pre- kconceptions, whether me British, whose : ^umbers were multipliep by apprehensions J to twelve thousand, would attack Winder's I army, or Annapolis, Alexandria or Wash- iington, or return to their shipping ; all ■was wild conjecture and disorderly disquiet. the BiiltiiHOTe vriagof tha arn^iy^d arrived. j^brfatSuH'^Wlo^fe^Gen .Winder f etirm- ed 'from a dayspettt'iB reconnoitering ; foif it as one of his mi-lfortunes that the cavfilry iUd light troops, all unjjracticed, could not got near enough to the enemy to recbn- liter, who with piore experience kept sh&r|^^Si|iMQtem,. , out 'to, 'frre.v^t. .ap- proach-. General '^'inder found General Smith and Gommod(?re Barney in battle ar- ray, awaiting an' atlaok, which,, Major Pe- ter, from the advance, reported a's pi'oba- ■ble by six thousand men. So confident was General Smith in Ims three thousand com- batants, their positiim and disposition; tliat he feared the British would not risk an" ac- tion. Winder, wita more experience and less confidence, apprehending an attack after night, when liis men would be dei- prived of their superiority in artillery, con- founded, if not cut ti pieces by veteran as- sailants, ordered ari evening retreat to Washington. In the\ judginent of experi- enced military men, ihat retreat saved the little army from total defeat, -(vith great loss, and AYashington from capture more san- guinary, tragical andjfatal than even its deplorable fate next day. If put to flight, and many of them tS death that night, there would have boeii scarcely any Ame- rican force left to act on even^ihe prudence of the British. " On th| 23d," says the En- glish narrator, "we fefi in with a strong body of the enemy, to "deceive whom we wheeled off from the msiin road and took the direction of Alexandria. The bait took completely ; for this party was in fact the -1^8 AMERICAN FOECES. [1814. advanced gnardof the main army. Think- ing that Alexandria, an(y not Washington, was threatened, the abandoned a strong p< seized on -ithe main troqps by a heedles; town, and diETcoverei iime^ enongh to oi .mencan general 'ition which he had 'road, harassed his inarch toTijard that his mistake' only in of fila- densj)uig .-a very /ew minntes Jaefore we^_obstacle in their t^ yiai.every step, the Se- came in sight." ' / cref^^'of WSs^loi HBg'contemptuous in- The retreat that evening, an(^he manner . qf it, like - tire Jsecoil from the enemy the dayT)e'fore,"'and destrubtion*f the flotilla, was extremely detrimentayto our.troftps. -; The retreat, almost a fligh/ was hasty andl .^rrified. Abontfive o'cloii, P.M., Mr. John Jjaw's report to the conmittee of jnyesti- . gation was t"*^ Af6erTiav^^r8BtS!6€d'B(ftne, time in order of.batt^^ve were ordered to, lietreatto' '^"'' ^ , Jmd although oun, , inarch on the retreat yras extremely rapi^,'' not 001^^,^)0 Jhis. bj .,y,et orders were occasionally given to ■ iiie' itfe-Afseveii o^'dck captains '.of oompanjles to hurry on their men. The fliarch,^erefore, literally be- . .came , a run -of eigh# miles." After ,tlyee or ^ur days of exti^me fa- tigue and disappointment, without a gun , fijed with^any eagBCt^^ot a man killed or wonaded on eitMr side, harassed,' morti- fied and_,prepared|br defeat; Wji^j£ f |n.Tmv ^iicamped, .ae|£_j|e navy ya1iP|''''aany of , tnem'going hom^^;..llrL'ii;'ii»lBaghbedsfon«i- lies for rest.and f jodT'^^Sj^^gB'O^'Wbth- iD^_ GeneraT Winder, comprelely jaded o: a iBForrowed horses redo to the President'^ with whom he had a brief conference, Ces^arily despondent, then called on .SeeretarxM,Sai-,Ah0it^,fouii4^ihfitU: i!g,£JiLrfi of fearsj^o distiiK^impression everprevail- ed that'wBsMhgti £ would beTEe eiid or BtjcdcnsburgHigg ean of the enterprise. To the multitedittotts' lijiressions ofa&rmthat such might be th ir design, while giving instruction to "Wi ider to guard against the possibility of : ;, by harassing and im- peding their marc i, andi.thjiO'WWg-ievery implacable disgust c signatcd their fedel to do anything theyl Jimore ; followed, at Colonel Sterrett'.s . red of the men of lechanics and high- en of BaltimoiSj^ organized ajid dS Major PinkneyMK Llranario^Sdlfey lies of artillery, all brigade, thus some _„__ _ - - ' m-*"^ dark. . Cciinniodore Tingey\;ommander of the navy yard, and Colonel 'Wparton, of the marines, the general found tnere without a single man in the barracks, and with them con- certed additional prenarations for destroy- ing the bridges over the Potomac, the ves- sels and armament at\the navy yard ; for destruction by ourselvas to prevent it by .the enemy was the chiaf care, though the general still thought tlmt Annapolis was .Koss's object. Although fiie British frigates in the Potomac had thenVpassed the kettle bottoms, and General Winder always pro- nounced Fort Wa3hiTi;:^toi\ untenable, yet he deemed the naval advance up the Poto- mac a mere depionstrationl to draw ofF his attention from Annapolis,! whence Balti- more and Washin;i;ton would'be both equally 'assailable from a central position, safe for the shipping and unapproachable Ijv us. In that cunvictiiin the Secretary of War concurred, although he intiB(iateil that their might be a transitory rush, what he called a "Cossack hurrah" upon- AVashingtoii ; where, however, till the dust of the invader's feet was seen from Bladcnsburg,amid a cloud ereduUty through his spectacles, would say, " ha ve they arti lery ? Ko. Have they cavalry? JSTo. TlAn don't teU an old sol- dier that any regalar army will or can come. We are morf frightened than hurt, or like to be. What do they want, what can they get in thii slieep walk, as, to the its inhabitants, he de- 1 city. If they want ust go to Baltimore, e sultry evening of the 22d of August, GenJStansbury's brigade of fourteen hundred drifted militia reached Bladensburg from Balf sunset next evening, ' fine regiment, five hui property, substantial : spirited young gentlen showy regM;^iibalff,*Wel1 einb"nfld.vnlmi7eprH. witj) ' Jrofe Attorn e v jjei s), battalioflJof ofi flemen .and two oompai attached to Stansbury'sll twenty-one hundred man in arms. Gene- ral Young's Virginia brigade, four hundred ^,,^- and fifty men from Alekandria and its en-. ■ 'ron.«i, on the Maryland side of the Sftt*- , ,, -, , ., .,., , -^g^i -™r™- - Wash- ington, and The"enemy|pursuing rapidly, was directed by General Winder to cross the river if compelled to.reti-eat, and on the morning of the 24th was about doing so pursuant to another similar order from Ge- neral Winder, when sti]|3ped by a counter- mand from- General Aijmstrons;. also dated the 24th, to remain oil, the Maryland side till further orders, wh^h never came, bo that this brigade, well (disposed, their com- mander thought, for Qonflict, remained a OT^^^oTR^SwHSnoTi adfi^^ffeSWS^fOTaer e d 'g. .OgB -^y mde r^ tQ crnfe the j;ijr.e^.Mndinin h^fritrea^To^Trtntganery Miurt^lL^e. ColfHialBeaff seight hultfred militia arrived at Bladensburg froin'A'nnnpolis, just half an ho'ffflipfWSLhebamd" " " " ' six or eight hundred froi arms or equipm(>nts, the night before, but net owing to delay, tir.-.t in oi and then in stu]iidly c^ flints distributed to thet was I'iigliig. The Americans had thug.; more than seven thousanm men in or nea »Col. Mirior^s I AirpfSSif without ched Washington br got into actiouiii ■ering them arms, ^nting slowly tho while the battle. ...-L-.-— QHAP.Vm.] Wicl'^^ iMERIOAX DISTRACTION. 160 posr ition, tUA^ the British not more than four thousand, of whom less than fifteen hun- dred began, and not exceeding three thou- sand gained the hattle,driYing the Maryland- era in the twinkling of an eye from their commanding ground. After thea,.ggftretar y of State returned fr(^Winae?*^fep^WaBliiflpon:hefode out to Stansbury's encampment, and thence' again back to Washington. Soon after his .departure, the advance pickets on the Marl- borough road gave the alarm by firing, and .roused the wearied brigade from .■sleep to be -hastily put under arms. The alarm prov- .ing unfounded, they were dismissed to re.'it again, when at two o'clock at night, an ex- press from Winder informed Stansbury of ,hi8 retreat into Washington, over the bridge, which he had ordered tp be burned, direct- ing " Stansbury alone to 'fight the enemy, if -they came by Bladensburg, though which .way they would come, if at all, was wholly ^ uncertain. Colonel Moni'oe had shortly be- ' -fore informed General Stansbury of General^ Winder's alarming disappearance from his camp at Battalion Old Fields, the universal apprehension that he must have fallen into the hands of the enemy, and the election by which General Smith had been chosen to, command in Winder's stead. With two •thousand weary and sleepy raw militia, or- .dered to fight the whole British army, vari- •ously reported at from six to twelve thousand .Wellington veterans, Stansbury called a nocturnal and hasty council of war, at -wJiich Major Pinkney, Crilonels Sterrett, -Ragan and Shutz were unanimously of opin- ion with their general, that Stansbury's^ position was wholly untenable by so few; inexperienced men, worn down with fa-, V jtigue and hunger : and that their own safety J required their retiring beyond theBladens-. 'brought about more by the extreme folly of was destroying the way by which the Bri- tish mi;j:lit attack him, and compelling them til attack Stansbury alone, separated seve- ral mUes from Winder, not only without union, Dujiwithout- any plan, concert or method oifa'ction.' — - ,,„-,--, '■■ Thus five preliraTiiary days of that disas- ttous dec^^ron have been inipe rfectl ytold, iWlich' it IS tmpos'sibl? fo-'dsffCfTTiP ' galis- factorily, eithor to the persons implicated in EUL-h obnoxious ami confuted transac- tions, or the narrator who studies rectitude. .'Stimulated by hopes of plunder and con- quest, and hxirried by the exigency of an (excursion extremely hazardous, but invited by , AnTgrican di^_denpe andinactionplEhe BitHsTi riipirlTf mofeff^fSfward, the military eorhmander rBlnctant and aii3iouB,*"wlliire BTwed by the bold vice-admiral. The Ame- ^oan general wag distracted by counsellors, froitt |irTV8tM in 4>l}fi, jai^kfloup 4o..the com- Hta'ndcr-in-cMof,and his' divided cabinet,_the President jirolSESily desirous of a general engageftrent, as due to ilational honor and theiin^tirtance of tKe stake, which Gene- awl Witidwr, General AMnstrong and Golo- fcel Monrctg dissuHded a's too venturesome. jfoyitTpaSTof the army at iBladensburg, ianBfB&r jpart five" inile^ 'off at 'the ifavy yard, ana others 'stilt fiSrth'er off; ja'ded, "diSTfB'.lKB'ued aAiJgi(i&bilitated by hunger, la.ipitudc, and all o'tner physical as well as moral incapacity for strenuous conflict, the rout that ensued was the natural sequel of such unpromising antecedents. Evevything seemed done to orgaui:ie defeat, every pre- paration made to yield, no spirit shown or arrangements to conquer. '.Mjie truth is," says the British narrative, if we 'may 'be taught by that enemy, "that the capture was -burg bridge. Having done so, and falle: .back about a mile towards Washington,] the American government, and their absurd confidence that it would not be attempted. while tired citizens under arms, coveredlithan by any other course. Had the emerg- with dust- and sweat, and confounded by,' incessant alerts, counter-orders and counter- marches, and ignorant how to cook, hardly ^ how to eat, their victuals in a camp, many of _them gentlemen of large possessions and luxurious living, accustomed to regular re- pose and choice refreshments, were stariji., mg by the road side, breay'asting^^^h|4salt beef and musty floui^a'seo6riao?dfef''t!ame from General Windeif to encounter and with- ^ncy been contemplated, and in a proper Snanner provided against : or had any skill %nd courage been displayed in retarding^ the progress of our troops, the design, if formed at all, would have been either aban- doned immediately, or must have ended in iiie total , destruction of the invaders."—^ These ^SfScious confessions are a volume of proof to which more must be superadded, that in one of those blighting panics in stand the enemy at Bladensburg ; where- upon another council of war, by the same epidemics, tK political cap!Sar6rthe'tJnited retiring stiU nearer toward Wa.shington and Winder, when a third order peremptorily ' commanded him to give battle at Bladens- burg j^tli^ diseQuragmg,,ak:naIs for which were 'ffife expTosions' and oouflagratiou of the two bridges near the'navy-yaerd, '^ufli- J)ly and visibly apprising everyone in- the only fragment ofy'public building that ^Stansbury's camp, that General AVinderJ escaped, not the torom for that was applied which all mankind are subject, like mortal capital officers, was held, who again resolved that' 'Hfe,te§''MB%aptured by an enemy almost as it was impossible; and Stansbury was about much alarmed for his safety as the victims . of his audacity- and their own i nfatuation. '■" iJuring the'fhrrd'knd lasfsession of the War Congress, specially convened in the pestilential heats of September, 1814, ex- celled from the haUf-finished splendor of flieir eapitol, and ootnpelled to a.ssemble in 170 INQUIRY BY CONGRESS. [181^ to it, but fortunately escaped the otherwise general conflagration — there in distemper - and ill temper to marshal parties for acri- monious c ontes t more odious thaa^jKafc f are^ the disgraceKTbatHe^oF UKJenshurg anScapture of the diBOonsolate^etropolis, ■were the absorbing, aliiiost exclusive topic. Fought every hour of every day and nightj- by hundreds of partisans and Sciolist t«c- tieians, the issue of all such contruversios ■was demonstrative how impossible it was to lose, how simple and easy to gain the day. To this hour, that national disgrace is still the subject there of angry and irre- concilable party and personal recrimination. The President, who survived to Ijp a siriue of general reVereiiee?-was then'a drifellii beneath contempt, till victory elsewheae and pe^cfe crowned his administration wi^i revived and enduring favor. The sarcastic ■ReCTftt,fl.Ty ftf Wag, n.g iji^tm.aa tjMr!;;^"!"^'^ withdrew to their ships, accused of trea^ BB^ was driven away bv what Ee*calied aVllIage nrebf-antl iroir "Blriifered even to fesign at ■WdShinpSh, btit advised by the R-eWeSl^ -and'foTced by iJop'alar"liidigna.ti«U','to ' fty'tj' Baltimore to do it. OWfWSt Winder wa| re p ro bat e d as a ledendist and^^jjM^ brava men were stigmatized as cS'w^.rds; eaSi de| tachment of the arifiy accused lie bffiSr of onisbehaVior; and the blasting catastrophe Uias left till now, l^J^-jSucb-IBeWfSble iwounds of vanity ana'B'name, that, when (gleaning from survivors, from simultaneous larecoUections, official documents, public jour- *Iials and all other sources of authentic j-belief, it is still .^iffimi{»,if,?iot impuasible, to fiod an impartial person or proof, or set- tle on the tru^,, -. Sven that eternal 'cause of American inisintelligi'iico, presidential aspirations, the other also sempiternal jea- lousy between north and south, conspirej and private; in which two particulars, i was, some of us thought, improved by mod fication, and then adopted. The Sneaky -Mr. Cheves, of course, placed Col. Job at the head of the committee, by whio .brave man, averse to censure and proi/e t universal kindnesg, was put where th ministration mucn desired suwi a one']/ whom were associated some of tha moe respectable members of both parties, "\Vi. liam Lowndes, Richard Stockton, S-Iorris f Miller, Charles Goldsborough, Phflip Bai hour and Israel Pickens. On the l^h of Oc Mr. Webster and William Cox werrfsubstitu ed for Stockton and lliUer, absept on leavi The committee soon found thp judgmer could not be passed in such a ciyse ; and afte two months' investigation, during whicl every prominent actor in ihi sorry afliaii except the chief magistrate, Avho could m be subjected to interrogation, was calle on to plead his own cause — on the 29t of November, 181i, a discreet report wa made of all the many contradictory stati ments, committed to a committee of th whole House and orderaB for consideratio the third Monday of Deaembor. Col. .Johi son declared that the committee, with gres labor, had collected all the facts in relatio to the military movement, but expressed n opinion on it, leavina it to all to judge fc themselves, what ouiht to have been doni Mr. Webster, as oryf of the committee, ai knowledging the gileat labor of the repor pronounced it a mere chronicle, answerin no one of the purposes for which the con mittee was appointed. S'l far from clea ing up the causes of our failure, it covere up a most disgraceful transaction, in a mas of prolixity andfletail. Although the enem landed within/fifty miles of Washiugtoi and 1200 of Vneir armv overcame all ti to aj^,i;raTate a remembrance of homes da-j force collected there, after two months' n^ Btroyed and reputations disparaged; forj tice no opinian was expressed of these ci Monroe was then the prominent candidate) icumstances./ The report did not explai to succeed JIadison, and Armstrong's noivf ,thern adherents began to claim his luiicr northern right to that overvalued succes' sion ; so that angry publications, even while I write, still emit contradictory statements, which it is impossible to reconcile and diffi- m Congiifess. For the House could no moi cult to explain. ^^ Jlscuss than the committee pronounce U)ii vCongress" could not •aspeftSm ffiTe -Erti" Within a week after our session benan, a sol- dier. Covered with wounds and restinp; on crutches, '.All. liichani JI. Johnson, moved, on the 23d oC Sept., 1814, for a aeleot com- mittee, modifvS*^ his motion next day, for' iaquirin^j; into t:HSt,ai-;ns of the bucb'ss of the enemy in Uia re^xift enterprise iiu;uinst this metropolis and the THjghboring town of Alexandria, and into the jHaiinei- in^nhirh the public builcliii;;a Biiil iV;n|i"riy were 'destroyed, and lUe amonnt riVi-"o]', wit, power to send for persons and pajiVs. 'I'll original n solution ,11 nioved (Kb d:i\jiufore called for the calue of the projiert) pMjlio lesplaiued or dwelt upon, but must be C' whether tht navy yard was destroyed 1: order or mere infatuation. While procee^ ing in this strain, he was checked by tl tSpeaker, and the papers were ordered to 1 printed, ■/diich was the last heard of the ausactions innjjica^ug so many marki perst5fm*|BB, and^u'cn conflicting evideni of occurrences unquestionaWy disgraccf to thwgovermnent and the country. W lier fore, pn Saturday the 4th of February, 1^1 on Coloiiid Johnson's' significant motio witlfout dissent or a word said, it was 1 folded that the order of the day on tl eriort should bo postponed indetinitel L/ke repudiated I'ontinental money, sufi't qA to expire in tke.l iaji ds of the s oldieiflL Revolution, tlip fallTit' Washington w iiitti)'f¥! Two days a§;er the intelligence of J^cksonis triumph, -^feneral Brown arrived in Washington, to confer with theXSecretary of WaA Monroe, how to carry tHe war, ifiider the\auspioes of Brovra and -Jackson, thi-ough Canada to Nova Scotia. Cfcngress voted thanks to Jackson as to Browi, andseats withm their halls to officers for gallantry and goad con- duct displayed in the^ei^ce of their cosntry. An effort, which the instruction of Wash- ington was near accoflfolishing, to remove the seat of governmeni^\some other pla^e, was put a stop to. We"B|gan to^trust-wlth Jackson, that single iamied this country could resist Great Britain, that Eastern dis- affection was less to %e feared, that war, vigorously waged, was me best way to peace, when, on the 14th of Fdjuary, 1815, it broke upon us with superab^dani consolations - from the momentary loss ana lasting dis- grace of Washington. 'JBut tnis sketch, or any history, would shrink fromVuty not to describe, without fear or favor, ijie events of that memorable mishap, to which, how- ever invidious the undertaking, I am the more impelled, because diaries have been __t,;T^5f^t ougjjffitaeMe- irig inUiiary If the murderous Geek- ^.stavulingi. would hare ^ another place for their jjsession than a seat of government entirely onsumed. ^^ Ilio UiljljlaUlB'fljr dtigi que less An English m: says: "The ' Am a liptiui; Je oonse > ices,\ let us, flrSfcjitiate^IKe enemy'i )n in Vn effort to state impartially tli< prencee of a day for which erei-y ari ■emenfiliad been taken to yield to aa ^k not n^ade without miich hesitation , after thfe armies were in sight of eac i •-, which ten minutes' early resistanc ) , have repulsed, and which, ■ with countenance, avoiding any battle 1 1 -would have Vefeated. .• tary account of the affa: loans thus hastily oq Ifccted togethei^ssc^e coinmanded by a BaU- 1 imore lawyer. SVreral very able arj o- 1 lents of this gentleman at the bar, will be i Dund in the reports Vf the decisions of t ie i Supreme Court of tha United States, a id ' irobably might be referred to as ratlier : nore creditable to his lame than the d s- )Osition he made of theVitizens who we-e )laced under his charge. VLet the Engli ih eader imagine Mr. Brough\m or Jlr. Scs r- ett or Mr. Denman called^ipon to d s- harge such military functionV and sure ly . le will have a proper feelingV)f charily rhile he reads the following severe but ] irob.ably merited criticism. ^ -^ ■■■±0 Dring an army. of raw militia men, however excellent thay might be as shots, into a fair field againstjregular troops, could end in nothing but dgfeat. Had they left all clear and permittedjus to advance as far as Nottingham, then broke up the roads and covered them with! trees7 it would have been impossible for us (to go a step beyond. As soon as this was effected, they might have skirmished with i|s in front and kept our attention alive with 'part of their troops, 172 BRITISH VIEWS. posi a-e^jjflfi-a singlejjpi^t ■while flie rest, aoquairitei as they doubtless were, with every inch oti the country, had got into our rear, and bjja similar mode of proceeding exit off our fetreat. Thus we should hare been take! in a snare froia which we could not ifctrioate ourselvefe, and should have been oliiged, in all proBfe- bility,to surrender at discretion. But tMs obvious and natural plan of defence thi chose to reject, and determined to trust to the fate of a battle^ And here again they Jtft re guilty of a, monstrous error in not ' occmEgj ui eL. jthe i'lJI^ "f JBladensboig with pari oQhgff M" village, if TeBomtel: many jjien befij: biilisfi iti sid(3_;of ijtie, stee er, wc back upon the first line with precipitation threw it into disorder before it had fired a Our tcttftpaja had hardly shown them- 'whe ^^^ TOMJa-of itihayiipc"^^" ^^.y d fled^iSi'Tlie grfeatest confosioii, leaving e two guns upo^ the road in possessii the victors. Instead of pausing till tfe !St of the army got up, the light hriga,d^ encumbering liemselves of their kna^ s*;ks and haversfcks, and extending their raiks so as to show an equal front with the ewmy, pushed on to attack the second line. The AmeRcgjis-slIffSSnrm, and with their whole iilTfTii J . except the two capturM guns, first checked the ardor of the assail- ants by a heavy fite, and then in theirturn advanced to recover their lost ground, dri\-ing back the British troops to the -Sery thicket on the 4^er's brink, where ^Sf repelled aiU attei^ts to drive them throfl^. it, and following to within a short distance of the cannon's Siouth such parts of the enemy's line as-'i^ve way. In this state the action continaai till the second brigade crossed the bridg^md formed on the right, when the 44th reOTient debouched on the xi.merican left fian»ind completely turned it. In that quart« the battle was won ; the raw militia mei stationed there, once broken, could not be rallied. But on their right the enemy stUfkept their ground with much resolution ; i^r was it till the arrival of the 4th rogimeuMto the charge that they began to waver. TSen, indeed, seeing their left in full flight, ^d the 44th getting in their rear, tlicy li;sttall order and dispersed. The rout was goueilal throughout tlie whole line. The batUe be^.m at one o'clock in the aftornoon ami la,stod till four. The loss (in the part of the English was severe. Out of two-thirds of the army engaL^e.l upwards of 500 were killed and wouiuleil. Colonel Thornton, who commanded the light bri- Chap.- VIII.] gade, Lieutenant-Colonel Wood, command- ing the 85tli :fegimont, auji Major Brown, who led the advanced guftrd, Tvere all se- verely ■wounded, and G e piera-1 .-Sflafli . himself had'ahQrge-. §,bq|^ dpr.lnm[//'?"' TJlj^^^^S^^feTB "ffiS "fenly , accouftfc-of an uiifoftunate'tattle, there would toe no- thing to niake , an American blush for the issue of an ill-planned but well-oonteSted action, in which his, countrymen -were de- feated, and many fled in disorder, but others fought so bravely, that, upon the. whole, thiSla^Si Wunhiiiffm^Kni fiis wh ite mare, or mule^ ollowed by a biacfc loal. neit dSv . (illtltled t6 pronounce judgraent, he did so, when heard to say, " Many of your men foijght welL^pugh ""Tllr^ il]0i«it^'' " . aa(8^ ES^feietiitmg^FbTo"o 31ieat_pn r the iatal 24tii ot August , evenieai _._ - — r- — >- ' J-i V *^ ' J' j S »y }-JKi-JB MARCH TO ^LADENSBURG.^ mr ing from scouts, the enemy's approd still perplexed to would" come by 2 ' yard, the vessels, stores, provisions, and costly armamenjts collected there. At, or neard the house of the chap- Iain, Dr. Huntlr, these gloomy measures of self-destructfin were in agitation and action too, whan all pangs of suspense were at length Vrelieved by certain tid- ings that Ross Was advancing by Bla- densburg, whithet Winder forthwith di- rected his troopsland proceeded himself, but left Barney vtth five hundred of the best fighting men! to blow up the bridge,, which then it was Scaroely necessary to de- stroy. About thatUime, first the Secretary.; of the Treasury, thii the Secretary of War, came up. Mr. Canwjbell, considering it an . exigency where pe: lousy -should not jduty, suggested to iresenoe and ad-vice the field might- 1 m ormnf;, jf; General WM(Ier^is)ml![it!lii*'_ a BMadison assented'; messenger with aj note to General Arm- |- Bladensburg, where Madison's first orde ' was to revoke his first permission to Arm trong to be an actor, and reduce him to jbe a merely disgusted ' spectator of the figf t, the President telling " his'Secretary that ha had come to another de- termination, and thlt the military function- aries should be left lojthe discharge of their own duties on their oivn responsibilities Bladensburg, whicjh immortalized that; most unlucky of Amertcan memorable days, is an insignificant villiigei»of four hundred inhabitants, surroundai by two branches of the Potomac, there d shallow, and fordabL town, -41 _' .!_/ . Baltimoi^Ao Wasting wooden bridge a few yi left as it was for tkj did not know tha^'tJie ■both armies omitting to destroy the bridge- stream. The Anacostft, or eastern branc! of th&Botpmae, narrOTv i to a- sh allow creek^ on the east siide o£#«Tiiite3E#®rflro~ ""' 'lyest "of the_bri^eiln&ae sismgeroujQ^jl^Ki^ faricSB and - l^dfiSS'yya r 'voraffiisTo* defence by [^oS. marl^^m. j and-tberB' was aT^mfffl. br"#5tw6fkjj£jistil¥. thrown- mpr--AftertEe'vg3te8^''iw eney vating alefls and countermarches of Stadp- ^itjj^jjjggarla (^f thg P'^6™"§ ffabl;^"' morniHg, tSy *ere'W^H*flWKyll "07*1156 1 the arc of a circle on a slope near the liver, close to the bridge, covered by artille- ry, with a mill to mask it, and Pinkney's Ijattalion of rifles among the bushes on' the margin of the waters ; all having been dismissed for dinner and employed in prepar- /ing it when sumajaned to form for action. Colonel Jilonroe, indefatigable and anxious, '. -..resolved, as ^^-SS^JH^^U ^^^ l'^'* drito of --Mood to defend -WeTj^ch of ground; Bat less skilful than intrepid, while General Stansbury and Smith, meeting on the field, were settling their relative rank, and before General Winder could arrange the order of J^attle, Colonel Monroe deranged the front yank, by an injudicious alteration, oon- -*^de|mncd by Stansbury, Sterrett, and Pink- ney, scarcely owned by Monroe himself, and which General Armstrong stigmatized as the b-lua4g£. of ^ busy taetijuan ; fur ■ Vhich, however, iri'(Wbita-bl7H3fffre and in- variably kind, Monroe was not much blamed, though that derangement of the front rank was a primary cause of its ex- [1814. posure naked, and cousequentinsfantaneous flight. He removed Sterrett's regiment nearly a quarter' of a mile from where it originally stood, placipg it beljind a n otfi ttfjd which favored Wken^Mj, oui.of supporting diataaeej to CO veiT'tSg^fflftfij^ rojl i t-.ia,4lkis left almost alone in front£wit3i Wp or three eoiHptinies of arBllerists ' an3 . a few of Pinkney's rifle ba ttalion, one company of whom Colonel KT^roe ilso took away from their original station, near the rest. Win- de&»^^Qi, ■"■yajfifi during that unlucky jRa^e, had not tiiii£,.^|t(j^|p|g^^^ pre- vent it ; 'fortRfe'Brifish were "then m^^ight descending the opposite liilltolSIaSlns'S^I ; nor would Stansbury venture to object, be- cause Winder was present. The Baltimore fifth, as "Sterrett's regiment was called, jwhich was^iMiea«Tjp^most^^^^Aii,,i»- *Btead of being letf n^i: the^teSil^ffie ri- |aeinenj^^Mptpotei..batteties,#nd in line i^ritlWlie^raoIe' Trent, we're thrown behind" an orchard to a ridge five hundred yards ofF, completely exposed to the enemy, of whom the orchard intercepted their sight, md rendered entirely useless to the artil- .ery and riflemen, left unprotected by that ifantry regiment from the British assault, ggravating this cardinal error ; numerous elf-constituted contributors of advice, sug- gealeifi of position, an^. i jjuJ^rnfl^dlB JS "v^M:, ~ mmand ; gentlemen of respectability and will ; committees, a whole democracy tfrUBbmmanders, industriously helped to r ipar all singleness of purpose and unity ^ .fli.aetion. ArriviBg-ai?Ae-«bfflMlge .while;- ColoLiel-MOnToe was displacing the corne;: ^teffes of the combat. General Winder met Swreral gentlemen,'''ainting the rest, Mr. Fl^ncis S. Key, not only reoomiaendiag, Kut ^Wta^Tfttere. they thought the" troops lugliFto b'c postedj jtiding to the spqtod^ jtgna tedTfnd confounding the outs e fc A fflher 'Bpliad egyaeye jrese;^ a^ egipegEacle as such, araong" TnrRBIjWBixiSaer McKim, the Baltimore member of Congress, on one of his fast trotting horses — a rich merchant who said that, having voted for war, he could not find it in nis conscience, if not to fight for it, at least to stand by those who did. In the midst of this confused preparation for battle, a body of troops marched into Bladensburg by another road than that by which Boss was coming, snpposed to be his advance, who proved to be Colonel Beall's m4o from Annapolis, after a forced tramp of lixtoen miles that sultry morning, led by a veteran of the Uevolution ; who, among the lamentable vicissitudes of the day, could not prevent his men from deserting au emi- nence, the possession of which was vital to the issue, and where they were posted far above and out of reach of every danger, excessively fatigued, but not too much '' 80 to run away at the gleam of a British musket, in spite of all their brave old Chap. Till.] BRITISH ATTACK. 175 Colonel could say or do to prevail on them to stand fast. Soon after, the British laayonets glittered in the blazing sun, as loaded with thick woollea gray clothing, sixty pounds of am- munition on each man's back, and, sinking ■with fajtigue, Ross' little army slowly de- scended Lowndes hiU in full view, without music or cannon, except three small pieces to which the sailors were harnassed, or cavalry more than fifty or sixty Cossack officers ill mounted on sorry horses, jaded and goaded ai^ng.;. .s^taj^her, however, approaching in the confl^mt, orderly, ^nd commanding attitude imparted by experi- ence in the science of war, and confidence acquired by many victories. Moaroe.were surveying .tbaii aSTrnracefB r ^^_^ _^_ _ rode? hailaiy up to' Winder'^f^^Wie glorious" news that General Izard had totally de- feated Drummond in Canada, killing and taking a thousand men — false tidings which General Winder immediately ordered to be made known to his dispirited, perplexed, and timid militia, whose faint cheer argued that their alacrity was no more to be re- lied on than intelligence which, whetlier really received, or one of the vagrant im- postures of the hour, never appeared. The President, and Attorney-General with hffii, were in danger of bemg captured wMe riding briskly towards Bladensburg, with- out perceiving that the British were so near as to be almost within musket range. tae?ifmet the Secretaries pf"" Stg^ aii'd' jiKFljgfoTe" ffienptle**fi%Ml^»1VrKS| "tO'th^' trOTEg^vSs^^pljUQld 'bY"K!8fficer tMf'BMmen required no-j_"J ^ •• -?«ff be .IffntisTiifjS^fea'naef' hesitated when he saw the American troops formidably posted on the other side of a stream, the depth of which he did not know, with their front covered by artillery, enfilading the bridge, which was, as he supposed, his only way to cross. "On the opposite side of the river," says his oficial account, " the enemy were posted on very commanding heights. Artillery covered the bridge over which the British army had to pass." Cockburn's account, says, "the British troops, almost exhausted with fatigue, and but a small pro- portion having got up, did not hesitate to attack immediately the American force on a rising ground well protected with artillery." The British author of the campaign says, "the main body paused till the advance should reconnoiter the American position of great strength and commanding attitude." During that pause, Ross hesitated, conferred " with his oficers, represented the risk of as- saulting a force so superior, so strongly posted, and so many of them regular troops, as he argued from the uniform of the Balti- more fifth, Pinkney's riflemen, at whose head he paraded,ittaljtig foppery of regimentals, the Washiipl^Rmlrsiy 'aria"fiHemen, of whom Burch's and Stull's companies were with the front line. If the order of battle had not been deranged, and the Americans had stood their ground a very few minutes, that hesitation might have prefaced more; or, if General Winder had not, humanely, per- haps indispensably ordered a retreat when, disconcerted by the almost instantaneous confusion and disorderly flight of the un- covered drafted militia, followed soon by the Baltimore fifth, perhaps preceded by the riflemen. The English General, doubt- ing whether to begin the battle, was asked y^Mip-vms^^ tsf wOT^rtsi^rf -Bs -s: (PiHgiand if we stop now ?" ."If it ' rain imilitia, then," said RosSj " we will go on." « ii(fiitffj"r ^^^^ ^^^ bridge, after thje l^Jt and ciJU1jWTOlliiy|t.;w *h^iflil fea s-,'B!o58 finding' that he would have to pass a defile between.'-' .__ the bridge and a marsh, in front of our bat- tery, displayed in column to the right and < passed some men over the ford higher up the '^ creek, so as in a manner to turn thg. battery, ' , and threateato surroundpffl^jWSarv, timi^i-*" and confounded people^^Xhe'OTdSFJo'^fire our cannon before the'*OT8my' ^^fSsfeed the bridge, was given by Winder, as he'^ thought himself, toe jpon ;.^ bu t he bad to t excited, "'"iffi^SbeBt, anff^iinfeasy tro17ll!gf»w»»!S*»nKbm%3'der.i:C3e^y" __J'WOtT)§en-°feseciited. General S^raS^SSBSfBfffil^abnity of his men was betrayed by an order to a . Captain of the artillery; to whom, as he stationed him near the bridge, he said, " when you retreat, retreat by the George- '. town road :" ominous anticipation, like Armstrong's at the navy yard, where, be- 'fore he went to take command, he said, in the same distrust of raw troops, particularly militia, "with their regulars and our mili- tia we shall be beat." Fears of the brave predominated. The British advance, from twelve to fifteen hundred, began their movement against our twenty-five hundred people, to whom the machinery of subordiT" nation was unknown, and the multitude of ; - commanders was distracting. The first dis- charges from our artillery were eftectual, and the few fires of the riflemen, galling ; the enemy driven back from the bridge, took refuge behind the houses, reposting volleys of rockets to our cannonade — mili- tary meteors streaming through the air — .. which. General Winder riding along the ' line, encouraged his men to disregard, as . less dangerous than alarming ; as they did, *- while those missiles flew over their heads,;', .'., falling beyond them where the President... and his cabinet stood, whom the General ^^ then advised to retire farther back. Emerg- ing from their cover, and urged forward by their officers, the stout British, over- 176 FLIGHT OF STANBUKY'S TROOPS. [1814. loaded, and panting with fatigue, were hastily driven over the bridge, at the losa of a good niany killedii|a||j|&i-owing ofi\ their knapsacks,!!! smalrs^llKis/ or singly ^ pushed up the slope, spreading on botl| sides to outflank our men. The elevations of the rockets, being changed, and they aimed at the faces of the drafted militia, in a few instants they broke and fled in the utmost precipitation and disorder ; the riflemen, also, most of them, retreating. Cieneral "Winder, with some few of the offi- cers, in vain strove to rally and retain the .fugitives ; ordering the Baltimore fifth to '- advance, who gallantly hastened to their support and were in great danger of being BuiTounded, when Gener^^Zinder made tji^.^xneriment of brdeff^^'lih^Bi-'toiiji^ f^rm Uie difficult military evolution oFi » retreating under pressure; indispensable, then, probably, to save them froinbgma surrounded ^- bu^.]n^ei!4«^ydM||jiMl!lHQst of them, took to flight' after th#'3r'afted mi- litia. In a period of time incredibly short, the disorder became total ; the flight uni- versal, irreparable, ungovernable, bearing away, in its toi;i:entof,,esoape, aU .the froni rank, with the ^^artiUery, cava][ry, j^gularS) fee?i!ientg5,§^fir^*»Sj and ^Comi^^jider. Froin that fatal ra^Bation of all his worst fears and want of confidence in his troops. General "Winder's hopes vanished, and his only anii vain : e£^t "wSs rto methodize re- trea^ffor -i^eh he „^ave •»i!epeate4Colonel Laval, a, Frenchinan who commanded two ; osted ir^Praroie whence mey ueveir isstl^bnt to bebortie oS!:th& fc3l*"iu the dg J jig ^, . of fl^t.; "Ail of. a sadden xxur n^g^e^^^iited^ A coiifiised retreat ap- WKSStSSff^Kb' alia os i.|eyetYcorner ' of the battle-groiina? '^Slir'SISy^on^Sa^. drove through the gate near our ravine, crushing down several of our men and horses, nearly tajpng off and breaking my thigh by the blow of a wheel, hurrying away one of my troops without my orders, leaving me alone with Captain Burd and fifty-five dragoons." The regular infantry, when advancing to fight and ready to charge, were earnestly deterred, and told to save themselv"j;s. After a total route of the various frag- mentary corps, some at last stopped at Tenlytown, two miles and, a half beyond ijeorgetown, withput going near Washing- ton, which they left deserted, in its solitude and trepidation. "At Tenhtown," said Gcucral "Winder, " such of them as could he haUri!, gave themselves up to the unooi^- - trolled I'eeliugs which ftitiguo, exhaustion and privation produced, and many hun- dreds, in sjiite of all preeautions and efforts, passeil on and pursued their way, either Imvards home, or in search of re- freshments and quarters." IJone slain, Chap. VIH.] MADISON'S RETREAT. 177 fe-w -wounded, but all struck with terror, the flight from rockets, renewed limbs, wearied by sleepless nights and oounter-marchingi days, and gave strength for disgrace wher| naught was lost but honor and self-possesj sion. II On the straw, in the same tent, takeii from their thrice driven beds of dovni and comfortable homes, among the Baltimore volunteers were William Cooke, Nicholas Brice, William Gilmore, Jonathan Meredith, Richard Dorsey, Richard Magruder and -'''°T°° ifff^iUJlag^j ci'-^WI""". whose lives and Iuab^th^-j^socla,te|iWrj^^l-]t$^^^ sincerely'deplorelthe dire neoeg^jj^fss.- posing in hostilities which he dia not ap- prove, reducing them to the , Ij^vel of the scum of British poor-houses, prisons' and beer-shops. 'John Glenn served as aprivate" in the rk^ks, both at the battles of Bladeus- burg afld Baltimoye. Npie of them, fortu- nately, were killed, and but few wounded. Of these, the present First Comptroller of the Treasury of the United States, Mr. McOul- loch, receiving a musket^baU in the leg, was about to be carried off the field by his com- mander, first Lieutenant William Cooke, an estimable gentleman still living, and Mr. John P. Kennedy, since distinguished by his writings and public services as member of Congress representing Baltimore. While performing that act of kindness to Mr.Mc- CuUoch, both Mr. Cooke and Mr. Kennedy were wounded, and obliged to leave him to his iate when captured. Taken to Bla- densburg, and laid with many other wound- ed in the same room at Ross' tavern, his private station was an ol:gect of inoreduEty to his British supferintendents, surprised,that one SO vveH clad CQui£lJb.e^^gg^mon soldier. " I have been many, many.years,",said,an ^English corporal, "in. the army, all through Spain, part of France, and now brought over here to America. I envy you that wound, one like which, or death, is my only hope of retirement or a pension." — ■ Not far west of Bladensburg, just beyff the line which separates the federal city from the State of Maryland, a short dis- tance off the road from Washington, is a dingle, embosomed in a sunburnt amphi- theatre of trees, secluded, and from asso- ciadipis jjao less than location, dismal shrine, consecrate,di to^human BaoMfiCeSjjto-iheTEa- ity, which, howe.ver^£^ti!aiy-tOfia.Wj4i6fS»t rS«^!^neither'-li^ been-'M^o' suppress, and which in thisS'eotinWj^^f^fflS^^g^aSt, intolerant and ferocious than any other — a spot well-known as the duelling-ground. On that spot, not long before the battle of Bla- desftlMMg. ih e. ^ j^ ^retarv of the Treasury shot his antagoniST^MrS®to!d«BiM!j^jRigh J the body, both members of Congress, in a I party duel. Decatur, surrounded by brother "^ nayal officers, fell there. A senator of the United States, the father of a gallant young man, Captain Mason, lately killed inMesioo, lost his life there, horribly fighting with muskets at pistol distance. Many more ivictims .t(jf tliat vaaity ofTGoiiorS^^h pro- vokes deaffi to Is'cape shame, haw Tsraved it in that cold shade, some of them in quar- rpls produced by thp iattle of Bladensburg, ^ some, perchance, courting death there~who were among the foremost in flight from the mere hiss of a rocket. Such is that wayward, antique virtue venerated as courage ! near whose heathen temple, in the guise of duels, hundreds of votaries fled victims of un- manly timidity. ^ Before our troops broke, while showers of rockets were flying where the President stood, he was requested by General Winder to retire out of their reach, and with his cabinet he withdrew by inglorious but not ^9^»fetfs^l'etoe»|li||h^% everything demonstrated that a field' ofiStattiLe.^as not Madison's theatre of action. Williinson's maligning account imputes to General Arm- strong the assertion that the little man, as the aspersion is couched, said" to the vete- ran whom he would not allow to fight, "Come, General Armstrong, come. Colonel Mg6Mf*m'>WII^Mlm-'neay»m to, the ifSSftateidiBg generaK^woEds wh^iT^ay '~fft'hrt¥r'b"'rn iTniidj|ijthyiHT'''-m"'°T^ gross imputation extorted from them. It is extremely uncommon for conspicuous men, surrounded as the President was, to betray apprehengion, even jS they^eel it. Armstrong, when the troops fled, gave vent to his rdortification in strong terms, address- . ed to the Pi:esident, of disgust at so base and cowardly a flight, and no doubt the Presi- dent, amazed and confounded by the trepi- dation of the troops, retired, as ColoneM Monroe did, disheartened. General Arm-' strong indignant, and Mr. Rush, the youn est and only hoping one of the administri tion, ashamed, soon followed by General: Winder, demoralized by the whole of the front line vnnialnn g in wild disordej:. Jiom jrtlMililflf'fiMi '"■|ffP'f-'-'"^^^'"7'"-"^^"'^-"""-- ^reqTOnuy despMched notes, penciled- on horseback, to his wife, to keep her informed of its vicissitudes. The two months' aborr,,! tive preparation and despondent misma- nagement from the first cabinet council ofe the first of July seemed closing in a fit of despair. More than Winder feared and Armstrong predicted of inexperienced troops was realized in the twinkling of an eye. The day was by no means lost, however. Many a memorable battle has ended well after a bad beginning ; and there was nd cause to despair. As our cannons and their rockets were filling the air with co- ruscations, and shaking the earth with commotion, Barney led his men full trot to a post between Stansbury and Smith, and with Miller's marines the great guns were arranged not far from the duelling-ground ; where a force more inferior in numbers to- I ^ 178 BARNEY AND MILLER. f!l the enemy than theirs was to our front ■when they putrit to flight, for more than an hour rMmLMuijj|djt afflft d and defeated the BritisjiWlF uui' lluut had not tl^eJffee^l hy the desertion of Beall'g militia, the ha- tie of Bladenshurg """'trHhtftf "') ibflit^.^""* 'an Ame ri can v ictox-T i/wra hy enlistea men, Vithoiitme 'inifi vidua! bravery, intelligence or pride of the militia and volunteers, who 60 soon deserted their colors, but sustain- , , ed by the courage of corps, practised to ,4l*\ 'obey their officers. Some five hundred and 'sixty watermen and marines, well armed l with artillei'y and musketi-y, commanded ly determined leaders, with no other sup- ^port than Colonel Beall's militia on a neigh-- boring eminence, were enough, while their 'flank was covered, to retrieve the fortunes cfthe day, whic^jjcmnre^haDLan ^fceld - . m su s iBBS?W nTre^rotfCTit wefgin I fuTr?fSKn!*fre?Bg^he fields, Barney and ^liller, pointing their cannon and reserv- ing their fire, watched Thornton's ap- proach along the road, from which, again and again, they drove him by destructive volleys, strewing the road with British 'dead. wegks afCBifwarue., ^^ fi" rtan jwrrh ■ 7infafenwff"nnrriRRs:rrn pj^ijivf mg '1^fil©K@|j6fi«i'*** from conflagration. Con- /esident's direction to the ofJBS!& to get arms and ammuni- Heral Armstrong directed Colonel Minor to make his men put in order the few guns they had brought with them, and to report himself next morning to Colonel Cai'berry, who would furnish additional arms. All that the regiment could do, therefore, on the eve of the battle, was to go to sleep in the Capitol. While Winder from below, and Ross were hastening to Washington, and Stansbury at Bladens- bur^ passed the night in weary alerts, the Virginia auxiliaries, without muskets, powder, or ball, went to rest in the haU of the House of Representatives, next day to be laid in ashes by a force which 800 well armed and resolute men might have kept from approaching it without inevitable and utter discomfiture. Early next morning, when Colonel Minor sought Colonel Car- berry for arms, he had gone the evening before to sleep at his country seat. After several hours of provoking delay, appealing to General Winder, Colonel Minor was at last able to find Colonel Carberry, who furnished the muskets: but without flints! . Finally, the flints were obtained: but the clerk, who supplied, deemed it part of hia untimely economy and official accounta- bility to count them carefully, as delivered, one by one, as if they were dollars, and be- fore delivering, to count them over again, lest there might be some mistake. The fire of the flint, sung as what warms the American people, never was so slow to kindle. Minor did not get his regiment to the last position of the American troops till the fighting was all over, and nothing but to retreat remained to be done. While the flints wei'e counting the last cannon were fired. One of the retorts to the "S'irginia ac- cusation (if negligence, tardiness, and ineffi- ciency of supplies, was, that their regiment (lid not want to be armed in time, or take I dirt in lh(^ action, but lingered on purpose. Minor's regiment, Brent's :ind Magruder'a district regiments, and such othi^r troops as could be kept tugethcr, altog(^thev not less than two thdu.saud well armed men, with Peter's artillery, remained untcrrified, and, as their commanding-general, Smith, in- Chap. Till.] WASHINGTON EVACUATED. 181 siBted, anxious to meet the enemy where they were, about two miles from Washing- ton. But General Winder deemed it pru- dent to order them to fall back from the position they occupied, and reluctantly left, to another nearer the city, where he con- template"d making a stand. Arrived and ialted tiiere, however, he ordered them p,gain to retire to the Capitol, where they Were finally to await the enemy. There General Armstrong suggested throwing them into the two wings of that stone, strong building, as, at the battle of German town. Colonel Musgrave, with 600 British troops in Chew's stone house, withstood and defeated Washington's whole army, much more numerous and better provided than Koss's. But General Winder, with warmth, -rejected the proposal. His force was too much reduced and dispirited, he urged, for the desperate resistance required against assaults cir i&— come, safS fi'^ ''Tnw*8CffiftO'W{)'tvi'l!WW;'' which unwelcome intimation she coul 1 ill doclinn, But told him that she had noth nj; to eat in the house, and there was McL iod's tavern over the way, whore she siippolBirBe might be accommodated ; but wliich did not ad- mit, like Mrs. Suter'B, of a vie\ ■ of the pub- lic buildings. The general reWied, thorc- fore, that ho preferred her hriluso, because he had some acquaintance with her, men- tioning several familiar circumstances, and inquiring for the old gentleirian who ob- jected to giving something to iat to a poor British solilierin distress ; insisting on sup- per J^im. ^^'^ hmSiiif, ,ft1ii|l..^fivfei'al offinnrs. with whom he sh\.;tiM':eturn after visiting the Treasury. Thus apmpelled by duress, and advised by the w( man servant, when the general left them, o kill, and, cook the the supper wasmtin'iy provided and ready when the party return :a, altogether deTOn officerg. .iacjjiding Gen ;ralB.os%, aff(ibDe in. bC " " " I snaWllW SmJlWlU'tSJjiitil, for which Cockbum, blowJa^go.ut}Afae' "■g j.ciestruct- ive orgies of ~ that" ~ " n ight, "'h^tB the giSj hirotnei, irom whicl i ix ^XjAi i'ifar t h e r ^d evaw victohbWS"*Wlba3!d: "^ ^_ French conquerors dtiqered with lewd womc in the sanctuary of _ Jt. Sophia, whjlo othpr prostitutes sango|)^( ene songs in the Patri- Bong vrooden bridge oVe ■ the Potomac from arch's, chair, j>uri ig their two eveni?^"'''''^^'"''^'"™*'"" j-.^ vr,»„;„;. 6§gu£affiioriof^e dei tfbhedTii tutingtlTe, federal sei ,f"of govetliilin'e" of^e cU^Jpastnjr^dl Tfo§B and'flri much of its wilds dvwL with few inhabitants to be found, cui;fefcwafl,f)j expectation of the squidron in the Poto- mac, of which no tiding came, and Oiuk- burn from the bed of debiiuch, thirsting for more dosti-uction ; the general, having ac- complished nearly all th^ could, and nuich more than should be done, indisposed to further outrage and so/ioitous of retiring with laurels already tarnished, which would be blasted by interception of his retreat, and revenging on his a^^ ■^^" ""' 'they had committed. JB-Sacririce, almost In- Si til iirfpOsWMffi panic, ensued in the J burning, at the same trmp, of both ends of the ! V f^* itish do- beyond u, line oi sentinels between the Treasury and Presi- dent's house ; to the latter of which, on the night of the 24th, and to^ie War Office on JTom Washington tl» jmorning of the 25th, fexcOTsions-were ' *" ^'"" pushed by detachments _sent to destroy them. Further west the 'conquerors never ventured, leaving GeOTgetown undisturbed : its heights supposed to ibe crowned with American troops, Teorg»ifafflBgr'afla"1lnirn- ing for retaliation, when ^lo such ardor was kindled, for no troops weSe there. The only assailant of the British army in A^ashing- ton was a grand nephev? by the mother's side of General Washin]^n, John Lewis. Whether his death, which ensued, was the result of his own fashness or mis- take, was never ascertafiied; for he, too, belonged to the peculiar nation of seamen. His uncle endeavored to tbring him up to better life and death. Bqt roving and un-' tameable, he escaped fromihome to sea, and before the mast volunteerai apprenticeship to its "^wragh . eduoatioiC^^^^Bsed .jbjJp- solent Britons foreibly'fi^^^''hiin'from an American vesselv the descendant of Wash- ington was compelled by blows to shed his proud blood in conflict against his own countrymen. Not many months before the capture of the city named after his great uncle, Lewis made his ^cape, vowing eternal and signal vengeai^ce against the tyrants who had enslaved '^ and scourged him ; against the press-gan^ and his task- masters. On the night of the (Rapture, armed with pistols, and his indignSnt spirit per- haps inflamed by drink, he approiiched the British sentries, whether by mistake or in passion did not appear. Sh^its were ex- changed by him with one or rapre of them; and he fell dead in the strett near Mr. Adams' house, where his body lay till re- moved next morning. With the sultry dawn of the 25th August, Boss arose to aniious and still disappointed Washington to Virginii ; the end held by the British on the e ist to prevent the Americans from returning to attack them, \ the end by the Amerioans on the west to | [hinder the- British fi^fi coming to attack ■ us. The American official report to Con- i - - »^ gross of this immolatiop, was, that the tor- L"'^ nado of the night bOTween the 24th and '^ 2oth, having ruptured the draw, a corporal i in charge of it, pereeiving, as he appre^ hended, a body of the ftnemy about to cross : ~~ "■ _ it firero.t^fijsvest end, burning all the afcimunition and stores deposited there ; while, at the same mo- ment the British set fire to their east end, ' apprehending that American troops wer^ alDout .cioaaing,..-la.^-recapt uje Washi ng- 1 day before., bs;. tha: inhabit&gpi^tcept a few females and two clerg;^g^ii, Ur. Lowi-ie, pastor of the Presb3"tcri!ih chttrejj, and !Mr. Matthews of tlie,Eoman Catholic, B&th still living, the Igiter neaj- eighty years old, who remained" to protpi't ■thair^pji^.p^p]; ^^f wn|-f;h>^p of which tteiil LbHieT^HCTutfourof the twen- After breakfast, a detachment o f troops marched from the Capitol milT7 the W ar UHice, vrhicTi they purned. Thence they returned along i. street to the post- office, tBS*CW^ public building left standing, wlKi^tWfPgamifraiKiW^i^feWB? hasibeen siifoe'li%?ffe8f1!!»b^MSbmestrchea5>est,itiut wtirst^l9e«teiEt;^oe wantt^'^^>ace tn j^finlflj its attractions, of any edifice in Washing- ton. The Pa|gn.t jQffiiig^.ytas thein under tffcTrJos'tofEce roo^irt our cheap' govern- i35ffl*ef ^Ifiimulafea «gervi86lri<»i*Te*fe*ip of the State Department, as still, with a noble building supported from the large income of scientific ingenuity, it« import- ant functions are performed by the Secre- tary of State and Register of the Treasury, in committee with the Superintendent of Patents. Dr. Thornton, then chief of the Patent Office, accompanied the detach- ment to the locked door of the repository, the key having been taken away by another^ clerk watching out of night. Axes and other imiilemonts lof force were used to \ break in, Thornton entreating, remonstrat- ing, and finally prevailing on Major^ superintending the destruction, to _ it till Thornton could see ColonclJones, "then ^.e f . i^- Chap. VHI.^ INTELLIGENCER OFFICEyfUEENLEAF'S POINT. -Vi 189 engaged with Admiral Cookburn in destroyyj' Meanwhile, Captain WairnvTight, by Ad- ing the ofBce of the National Intelligenoeif miral Cockbum's ^reetion, went with an- not far off in Pennsylvania Avenue. Colonel Jones had declared that it was not design- ed to destroy privat 3 property, which Dr. Thornton assured '. lajor Waters, most of that in the patent )f&ce was. -^yiJiCijUii iri iiaip.al S f|j^gt.riirh gTij|. ^f his OWn TOBStTW^ tionTwmcnhe^pOTTO marly strove to snatch from ruin, with a providential gust soon after, saved the seal of government from removal for want of any building in which Congress could assemble, when they met at Washington three weeks afterwards. Hundreds of models of the useful arts pre- served in the office were of no avail to save it ; but music softenejl the rugged breasts of the least musical of civilized aiSi»i«W4tert«^^«eed patents and the musical mstnmient till ms return from Greenleaf '3 Point, where other jectgiwere j)eople L laid i grotesque on, mounted on a switch-tail brood lack foal neighing ifljfflflj ^tnr p of horse- araded terrified .iiiTi ^l(g n»jti lt8Mi^ j^>fc rambles about Washi: white, unourried, loni mare, followed by a after its dam j manship th: the streets, ancFnaTignpn women imploring him pot to destroy their homes. " Never fear,"lsaid he, " you shall be much safer under |my administration than Maj^g^nji." Awai^ that the editors of the NationajS^t« »l !l jf S B8 ( 6 6M fegl * "°° '' ^°°P° ct- aM&Bg ^Sga wB frP . ^^*^ a m^^t^ct thj^^ ex- r-anaa;gniii^].,jn|erft^j>)jg,-y)p^^ tp Rntisb "^ '"^ " of the darhJL^s a; nior editor's'H'OUSS', a i to signify that the pied — " This house the office of the Nati- At that office, Cockl other incendiary act, racteristic brutality ; types were then-fSet for tended to be issued b; denoun'eing'British bar' the people in mass to r; and inflict that punis human enemies as the _ ed to enforce. "Be sure: superintending the desti with Vandal vengeance,| are destroyed, so that t^ no further means of ab they have done." The language applied by the, newspaper to the seni- tional Intelligencer, J^ " I'll punish Madison's ■^ admiral, " as I have T hree thousand dollars' p \-iAU'^AS ' Ie? ia l ' ^e'W windows to beJdie^oyed, tor the most part" however, recovered, and «till in use by a press in North Carolina. the se- Td, ouse was unoccu- let, inquire at al Intelligencer." rn, as at every esided with cha- t aware that.. the proclamation, in- General Winder, jities and rousing y to his standard, ment on such in- neral himself fait said the admiral, ction of the types that all the C's rascals can have sing my name as nearly quoting ederal Ilepublican editor of the Na- -Cph Gales, Esq^', iian, Joe," said'the is master, .Jim." orth of tTpeli.and other detachment if troops, both soldiers and sailors, to complete the destructiph of the navy-yard, andladd to it a rope-yard, far off. The rear-admiral's official re- port is, that Captain" Wainright went to see " that the destructioAiwas complete, when he destroyed whateverCstores and buildings had escaped the flalnes of the preceding night. Two rope-wilks, at a considerable distance from the jprd, were likewise set fire to and consumed. In short, sir, I do not believe a vestiga of public property, or a store of any kinc , which could be con- verted to the use 0: government, escaped destruction ; the bri Iges were likewise de- stroyed. This genera devastation being com- pleted, we marched, on our retura_atning o'clock atnight."|--pcf^°savage enorniiHes, ■ ht ' m>" piraei"es~"ymth s( Idiers are seldom | Vuilty of, requiring the u abridled licentious- 1 Sess of the British sea c ide to make prize of n and destroy everything ( onverfible to public ; ijse, which is everything whatever, did not i Potomac,' a few houses called Greenleaf 's Point, not far from the national Wsenal now there, was an empty,dry well, m which large quan- tities of gunpowder Had been thrown with antiquated arms and munitjons of war, said to be, some of |;hem, remnants of the American revolutioiMremoved with the seat of government to T^ashington. Into that volcano of combustibles an officer, who had burned the rope-walks, when all was done, and there was no more occasion for fiTer^tebedhisJj^d^asMto a safe place of mine iBBtami3^^_S^^^j3 ^, o£.deat}i and muiilation.wade in^ atra^ cruelly, woundifig. iie.i?r^, dred'' of the'_ surB(WBB«iiag'jjdestroyeTSj a concussion like an eariihqu^e,,^^kipg y distant houses, felt in the heart of the ci'ty, ( whence bodies and limbs thro'wn aloft, with smoke, flame, dust and jft-agmentary mate- rials were discernible from the post-office, still and alone rescued from conflagration. The sufferers, begrimed fwith powder and. writhing in torture, were saluted by blas- phemous ribaldry from s6me surviving sail- ors, amused while astouitded at what one of them called his- comrade^ exaltation toward ieaven, " nearer than he could get in any other way." Mutilated cjfficers in gay regi- mentals were carried to the hospital, which General Ross had established in a house near the Capitol; by this shocking calamity urged to hasten his departure — accident and SHteii'of-adveTsityv.i^Jiiph shouk,£j:ea-'tE'^" admiral's iron nerves. Scarcely had itoccurred to interrupt their 190 GENERAL ROSS. [1814, Bearly completed flevastation, -when they .•were overtalfen bj a much more terrific, prptjdential, as it Tere, juijgment on 'their stay, Which, forthiv th precipitated immedi- ataand clandestine nocturnal and aftighted departure, in even 2;reater and more foolish consternation tharj the vanquished Ameri- manded the ordei f( cans deserted Was hington the day before. ' flSI^BBWRng houie^ , The British narn.tive shall tell in vrhat - - ■• wild confusion fl seing from imaginary dangers and suneratitious terrors, the bold invaders, cowering at a storm of tr(j- pical violence, abandoned their conquest without even completing their orders and mission for the destruction of all the public buildings, blit leaving unharmed that in which Congress soon rose with their country to power anld prosperity, the more striking because of momentary degrada- tion. 1 Ross continually- ideplored the tragedy which he said he had tip perform, occasioned, he added, by the Americans burning the Bri- tish capital in Canada. He likewise much lamented the destruction of the Congress aid ly. _ " I am a marified man myself," said he, " vrith several swaet children, and venerate the sanctities of t|ie conjugal and domestic relations." Genefral Ross prevented the destruction of th^ Capitol by gunpowder explosion, at the mtreaty of persons who jsaid. it would inj ire, perhaps destroy, the ,u epunter- Imrlii^i'iue library. "T^lji Ita^liS" -"'f-^ he, "the-toQiaMJpt*^""'^"''- neen-aavfiiirjKf .Tl e.was „__ mental sol- dier as 'K"e "vhiS, an mnabitant of the city, in whose house he Jodged, declared that the sunbeam of a chleerful smile was never Been in the anxiou^ and ashamed, if not remorseful, general'B countenance, while executing the barbarous duty he was or- dered to fulfil. His .countenance was con- stantly shrouded in close sliades of thought, ! am anS" he expressed the deepest regret at the J pffl war itself; "war," said he, " between two \ wal nations so nearly allied by consanguinity and interest." i ngton . while the"atnffiral, iTHis fo barracks, when told that it could not be done without endangering the houses around. He appeared deeply affected I ly the calamitous accident at Greenleaf's Point, and at lea^-ing wounded men behind when be evacuated Washington. From the whole conduct of the Irish general, he seemed to be a kiud-heartedi gentleman, reluctantly fulfilling painful orders, which the Scuts n. flm iral execu tei" " " " " ~ J "ove," 'says the English chronicler, "that our troops were this day kepftas mu ch toget her as possible upon the j count\of the completion of their destructivff laborsAthat this was done. A powerfl^l army oV Americans ali-eady began to show tbemselYes upon soma. height s, at the (£s- tance oybwwtff^SftreiPBiBltejpm the city ; and as flWi*«ifc.«iitjtet*Bi^raits of hrjrr^e, even to tne very suburbs,'f()r the pprpose of watching our motions, it woul^ have been unsafe to permit more stragg^g than was absolu^ly necessary. Tl^ nrHny w jji eh wehadojgm^jjI^tl^ijd^j^^H^^T^ffisJ* deteated.'wi^iOT^^OT^annitiMated :' and begaU lU «tljV^JlJll'U.Ll? iW|tl'lJPP'oiM',_fc^t, from the g^eral. "JW nat alarmed you? Did' 'yyti' tSke us lorfpSivages?" said Cock- burn, roughly, to a lady, who had beeu much ierrified by the Britisp irruption ; and, she not knowing what to |knswer, he added, "I account for your terror by seeing you with newspapers, which delight to make devils of us." Dr. Ewell, enti^eating Jluss to spiirc T^is house, the gcnerall answered, with an amiable embarrassment, "that is the house we had pitched on for myhead-quartors, but I cannot think of trespassing on the repose of a private family, and will order my liag- gago out of the house inuucdiatoly." Yield- ing, however, to Dr. E-\}'cil'a repeated in- stances to stay, he promisoil to try and give as little trouble as possible, luductaiitly taking possession of Mrs, Ewell's bedroom, ho requested her husband'to bring bur home, with assurances of socuritv for all the fami- by a'^onsidcrabjS force from the back settlements, which /lad arrived too late to take part in the action, and the re- port was, that botl} compined, amounted to nearly twelve thou^am^ men." AU tbis, if not the .cuini\.i;-e of fear, was ridiculous' exaggerayon. There was no American army on any heights, at any dis- tance ; the army oyerwirawn the tlieror not it was (heir intei\tion to ateifflr^'iithe lioiAisfa naMSrtiYe contotics, "I (laiiiiot pretend to say, hc| fp,nsn it Tjf.as ngoja bofore they showed themselves; arid soon after, when something like a movement could r C!hap. VIII.] \J ,,X ?2f ,-.'be discerned in their ranks, the sky grew" suddenly dark, and the most treiiieiHluus hurricane, ever remembered by the oldest inhabitant in the place, came on. Of the| prodigious force of the wind, it is impossi-l ble for you to form any conception. Roof^ of houses wore torn off by it, and whiskea " into the air Uke sheets of paper ; while tlig rain which accompanied it, rescmljled the rushing of a mi^^htjr cataract, rather tha^ the dropping of a was as great as if th the last remains of ightning streaming ■gether with the noi. lower. The darkness ; sun had long set, and twilight had come on ccasionally relieve i by flashes of vivid through it, which, tJ)- f the wind and the J* thunder, the crash of falling buildings, and J the tearing of roofs rfs they were stript frot the walls, produced the most appallint effect I ever have, artd probably ever shalll witness. This lasted for nearly two hours without intermissions; during which time,\ many of the houses! spared by us, were blown down, and thiAy of our men, besides several of the inhabitants, buried beneath their ruins. Our column was as completely dispersed, as if it had received a total de- feat ; some of tlfe miin flying for shelter behind walls and building-s, and others fall- ing flat upon the ground to prevent them- selves from being carried away by the tern pest; nay, such was the violence of th wind, that two pieces of dannon which stoO' upon the eminence, were fairly lifted fro: the ground, and bofhe several yards to thi re ar.' ■ ' Tte''^IV was a serious {reality, traces of whose ravages I saw three weeks after wards among the trees, broken and dis- membered, nearly all the way from Bal- timore to Washington. To English ideas of the iirequent weeping of gentle show- 'ers, the magnitude of American falls of rain are in strong contrast, like Niagara, the rivers, forests, weather, and Titan features of this oouutFj', com' configuratiQn..'i Cpoi3i^iie'Q2:Io ck '" ' ' the in the afternoon oft second storm followed that which accom- panied the night beforje the arrival of the enemy. The -musical '.instrument in the Patent Office, the roof, drenched, and the approaches flooded witli wet, became the palladium of Washington. The chimneys of the building partially unroofed, were blown down; the desh-oyers themselves soaked and terrified, stoat hearts qnailln^ and the timid giving w-.ij to superstitious fears, a common infirmity of the bravest men. The po.'jt-oj fice w^Lalelt undist! after a tcufpest without wmch it must have shared the fate of the others, by complete destruction destined for all public buildings of Washington, and Congi-gss been driven to Georj^etuwn or i'"rederick, to sit in some church or court house, if not to Baltimore or Philadelphia, under the', tumultuous in- VT>0. ^ 191 'O fluencos of a lai-nr commercial town. From t he disaster at Ur ecnlcuf' s I'oi ut, and storm soon f oilowinp it, all the general's arrange - ments Vfere besto wed on. departure as soon ~~/if[(;r )oy accrJiint of the oaptxire of Wash- ington was coni]filed, I was kindly furnished with another by a gentleman of Bladens- burg, which is here added. The reader will hardly object to some repetition of circumstance.s njiuch perplexed by contra- dictory statenifiits, especially as the Bla- densburg narrative is by a gentleman with all the reuollecjioDs of the very spot, con- firmed by the important testimony of a. highly rrKpecta^le English officer who was in the battle, to the facts of Ross's hesitation to attack, and Barney's excellent resistance. " Many lif tha facts in the following nar- rative have beeq received from , re- siding near Bladebsburg, Maryland, as being dcrivcil, principally, from accounts commu- nicated verbally By Colonel, now General, Wood, of the Britifh army ; and the residue have been received, from time totime./i'OTO othei- avlhc}ifir scmrqes. " The British arm^, under the command of General Rti.s.a, landed from tlieir shipping in the Patu.ventRivef, near to the village of Benediet, in Charles! county, Maryland, on the 21st August, 1814, and took up the line of marcli for Washington, making from eighteen to twenty miles per day, and en- camping, at night, at whatever point it might happen to reach, without reference to its eligibility for deferice ; and being in an enemy'.-!i country, the jofficers unacquainted with the hicalities surtouudin,g them on the termination of each (day's march, which took place in tlie shac^es of the evening, the troops arriving at bivouac, wearied and over- come with the heat of the weather, the fa- tigues of the march, and the weight of their arms, eighty rounds J of ammunition, pro- visions, knapsacks a^d accoutrements, all if which they were obliged to carry, for the want of a baggage train, apprehensions of the most serious nature were entertained by the oflicers, in which! Colonel Wood was ackno'w lodged to have llargelj' participated^ that they would be surrounded at night by the American army, cut off or cut up, and compelled to surrendof at discretion ; and this is represented to jhave been more es- pecially the case at the termination of the third day's march, whiffli brought the British army to the ' Long Old Fields,' about eight miles from Washing|on, their advanced .guard having previously received a severe check from a battalion of volunteers from the district of Columbia, under the command of Ma-jor I'eter, arid cOn.'sisting of his com- pany of artillery and those of light infantry and riflemen, conimanned by Captains Stull and Davidsiin. The 'apprehensions of the British being increaseclby the circumstance of their army having bein separated into two 192 BLADE-ySBURG NARRATIVE. [1814. dirisions at a paTticuiar fork of the road, by "which it was iHtfendidthat those divisions would . approach ^bjJ different, routes, and agaiifo assemble) • atlthe ^clo.a.e,of Jhe .4ay, where the roads woi^lcl again jcjiri'; and one of those divisions not having arrived at the field of bivouac fori some hours after the expected time. Anp, it was the opinion of Colonel Wood that a comparatively small, Ijut steady and efficient, fur^e would have been able, at that tjme, to have reduced their jaded forces to extremities. They were permitted to bivouac unmolested, and to repose quietly and "-securely, for an entire night, within eight biiles of an army of double their numbei, entiTisted with the guardianship of the i|i|tional\honor and the national metropolis. 1 ^ " On the morning of vthe 24th of August, 1814, the IBritish army look up the line of march from the Long" Did Fields, encum- bered, as before stated, with an oppressive luggage. The Americali general being ig- norant of the route intended by the British army, had, in the evening of the 23d, made every disposition deemed necessary for the defence of the approaches by the bridges over the Eastern Brancn River ; first, by the action of the artillery upder Commodore, Barney ; and that failing,' the ultimate re- sort to blowing up an abutment of one bridge and destroying the other. But the general commanding the British army had too well considered his measures to trust the execution of his determined purpose to the puerile idea of attempting to cross a river of that width and not to be forded, over two narrow bridges entirely command- ed by a heavy weight of artillery, and sub- ject to destruction, at any moment, by a Serjeant's guard. The American general, therefore, totally deceiving liimself, ex- pended the precious time of the morning in arranging the troops in order of battle, on the high banks of Eastern Branch, leav; ino-, as a secondary consideration, the cer- tain and unobstructed route by the way of Bladensburg, and appeared to lie ignorant of the real intentions or actual advances of the British columns until ^bey haa gone far on their way on the road to BlaUonsburg. When the fact bocam(j"known, Everything was bustle and confusion ; the light troops were hastened off, and a part of them met at the first entren.e'hment, on a ^mall rising ground on that^do of Bladensburg nearest to WashingtMlf, the brigade of volunteers and militia/just arriving from Baltimore. At this ejitrenehment was formed the first line of.d'cfenoe, consisting; of the Baltimore ljri'j;ujle and Maryland militia,' and two com- panios id' AVashington volunteers, viz., one company of artillery, under Captain Ben- jamin IjLirch, and a enm|iany of riflemen, armed with nuiskets, under Captain William Doughty; which line was linstily formed, about the time of the appearance of the British column, on the high ground south- east of Bladensbuite. The enemy advanced sloTvly but steadil^ and, as Colonel Wood has stated, the soldiers fainting and falling, and bring left by the way-side, from the .excessive heat of thfc day and their oppres- sive burthens. The) head of their column ,(p arrived at the villake of Bladenabnfg be- tween eleven and twfelve o'clock, and while the troops were ordered to halt for a, mo- mentary relief prepak-atory to further move- ment. General Ross Assembled around him abme of his principal '.officers, arid ascending a hill within the villige, occupied a build- Lng then the residence of Colonel BowieJf*i and from the upper part (jf that building, which completely overlooked the first line of American troops, with' the reserves then in sight. These troops making a formidable iippearance, and supppsed to be quite fresh and ready for battlci and being perfectly aware of the exhausted condition of his own troops, the general and his officers con- sidered that the. event of a conflict could hardly be doubted, and even mooted the question of rAreat,^ which, however, was immediatelj-, decidea to be not only repug- nant to the Character of the British army, but more likely to produce its ruin than a forward movement ; . so, upon further con- sultation, supposing that a large portion of 'the A.merican army was composed of raw militia, and might be frightened by the proximate exhibition of the noisy congreve »tiolr1 rnf;1folQ, -ri^pr] t1lg. n.pplica tinn of the ' in- vincible British bayonet,' h'o'_ tained, that, notwithstanding the gloomy prospects before them, chance might decide in their favor. With this conclusion, having the field of operation in full view, orders for the advance and disposition of the forces were immediately given. The British co- lumn was then put; in motion, and as it advanced down the street in front and full view ofthe American line, the artillery of tti at'"tiTO*'"l()lmmsting of four or five six- ponSiisiS^S^eBed its Are; ■■bnt being' at feret badly directed, the balls passed over the heails of the advancing column until it ar- rived on the bridge 1 between Bladensburg and the .Vmerican line, where several balls did some execution, but caused no interrup- tion to the advaueing column, whose pro- gress across the bridge and fording-place, the water being then (Juitc shallow, although slow, Avas steady and determined, and after crossing, the column!,).)egan to dephiy to the right and left of thiS main road from Bla- densburg to A\'ashinn;ton, in the middle of ■\fWcH was stationed («i^ ofthe six-pounders. After crossing the ei'eck, the enemy were ■within fair mnskct n^nge of the American line, which then openSd its fire upon them, but with (comparatlva) little eft'eet, while the congreve rockets were producing their desired efi'ect in striking terror and dismay into the militia, which, together with the f^ ,x*^' --% Chap. VIII.] i ■ Bteady an3 constant advance and near prox imity of the gleaming bayonet, caused the prooipita,te flight of the Baltimore brigade, leaving tlie tivo companies of Washington voluntoers\before-mentioned to maintain a momentary , stand against sucli fearful odds. An unfortunate mistake having been made in placing the wadding in the gun before the powder, the men were order- ed to depress the muzzle of the piece to get it out, in doing which, under the fire of the enemy, the gun capsized and tumbled into a ditch on the s-ide of the road, and the British being then upon them, the section in charge of the gun were obliged to aban- don it and fly for their lives. Another of " ese pieces of artillery, stationed in an apple orchard near to the piece lost, was operating witli some ^fiwet-OTrthe-adjcMioing euMiy, whose heavy force and near ^foach admonished the officer in comman Captain Buroh, to order an .immediate re- treat, which was instantly obeyed by all except a soldier named Barney Parsonx, (the same man who was removed a few -years ■6 its muzzle, and, covered by tlie smoke/fif the ■' discharge, made good his retrejj^and ypt lives to remember the evenis-'itn which he bore ^3 part likeaiJj«r6patriot and good ~ Boldier". ""^TWrS^firis scene was enacting. Captain Bought}', with his company, was warmly engaged with the right flank of the British army, near the old barn yet stand- ing, which" was on the lef^(j t th ji A.ril'gl'ici'a'n line, TiTrd-the'BlTOsftTt3Tanoi'?^'T)etween his positioh^nd the barn, received his repeated discharges, of which many balls, not strik- ing the enemy, penetrated the sides of the barn, and were afterwards to be seen. But this brave corps, being in turn overpowered, '^ were forced to retreat, which was effected in good order, and terminated the resistance of the first line. The comparative ease with which this line was put to flight inspired the British troops with fresh ardor, and they marched boldly on in solid column, on the main road, and crossing Tjorixecliffe' s jjridge over a run in a ravine [ celebrated as th e B lade nsbnrf; l^ijfjIlinjf-frrniiTjj^, wni-n oH- viiSlc^ng up the gradual ascent of a long hill, where Commodore Barney's force of four hundred and fifty sailors, with two eighteen-pounders and two twelve-pounders and one hundred and twenty marines, un- der Colonel, then Captain, Miller, had just 13 BLADENSjlURG NARRATIVE. 193 arrived by a forced march from the Ea.^tern Branch, and were hastily forming the second line of defence, supjjiorted on the right by a regiment of Maryland militia, under the command of C(donel,"\ViniamI>(intBeaU. ( an officer of the llevolution,) and on the lett by the militia of the District of Columbia and a regiment of regular infantry, composed partly of the tliirt3--sixth and thirty-eighth regimenj^^ r— -■*•- - y-- ■ •"Colonel AVood stated that the British column advanced to within a few hundred yards of Barney's battery before he opened upon them, when it burst forth with the most destructive effect, sweeping the road and staggering the column ; but so deter- miiiecL.were tha^HB^eniwed ■ of Barney's fiattei' and were as 'often sy at lengtIrtlfS'"dama| ley weryobtiggd.ro attack and ila^^^jffl er the cov'er; fi'oi! advance by the road, e advance in the face v eral ti mes, ept from^fie earth, fill :o beda,me so great that d'esist'from the direct to the right and left Biirney's'fire, afforded he ravine parallel to, and at the dis- of four or five hundred yards from, ey's lino, or t^o second line of de- It became 'the duty of Colonel d to lead a portion of the left with rs to turn the right of the American army, and on proceeding towards the right, emerging from i the ravine, they ap- 'roached within striking distance of the tight of the American line, consisting of a regiment of Maryland militia under the command of Coloneli William Dent Beall. a n officer of the olH jMavYlanH line of the Revolution, as betore stai'ecl"*rt'Om' whom they received a shower of musket balls, which the gallant Colonel said he had scarcely known to be, equalled in all the battles in which he participated in the peninsula of Spain. From this discharge Colonel Wood was severely wounded, and being borne to a place of supposed safety, the concussion of a grkpe shot, as he ar- rived there, from one pf Barney's pieces, passing so near the Ctilonel's head as to scrape his whisker, laid him prostrate on the ground. The gallant old veteran Colo- nel Beall, having only aj body of raw mili- tia under his command,! could not induce them to stand the shoc k lof thghayonKt to which the British troops had_been ordered to lling the contest, anil ffie" militia wag iVieaving ^e right anfrear arm e^ TtlTyBarr^ey 's Dattery ootta- Bxposeissi(in. | X lie flpe t bc T B 'g anoTii to malce'trfnrr^rcr^ Fort KttJIeury, while the army effccjM a landing a* North Point, Jlr. Key jrCs de- tained on btfi bombard- ment of Fort SMlenvy. ,iFhe novelty of his situation, a ne?w; vie^ of the powerful means then operatingj^r the reduction of Baltimore to the pjrtver^f the enemy, and the further des^CTation ofv^the American flag, his solicijirfde for the successful resist ance of his (jauntrymen, and nob^ emotions of a patriot'heart thus excited andwarmed, produced; amid the storm and strife by vrhich he was surrounded, a memento wor- tjiy of the man, and honorable to hiS' country; and long will the ' Star-Spanglod; Banner' bo sung to light up in evtry, American bosom the sacred fire of patriotic devotion to the flag of his country. , "So ardent, so accomplished an advocate at the bar of humanity, supported Ijy teii- timonials and evidence so unequivocally proving the exercise of the most generops and delicate offices of humanity towai/ds their wounded companions in arms, yet enjoying the alleviating attentions find cares of generous enemies in a foreign land, could not lie resisted by the cnnimand^r of the British forces, and the distingufthed ambassador experienced the liapp}' termi- nation of his mission, in the simultaneous repulse of the British forces at every'point, the glorious triumph and continued ivaviiig; of the star-spangled banner, the jrclcase of his friend. Doctor Beans, and thei|' happy landing on their native shore. ;' " It appears that the kind and generous attention to Colonel AV^ood by the people of Bladensburg and its vicinity, made so deep an impression upon his feelings, that even at this distant day (li-'48), several of those fami- lies from whom he received persisnal atten- tion have had the strongest evidence of the. continued and unfaltering friendship and gratituifc of tliat gallant and ncfljle-hearted man. Immediately after his return to Eng- land, he opened a oorrespondeaice with the' family of lUchard Tasker Lowndes, Esq., of: Bladensburg, which up to this time has not been broken on his part. lie made a visit to the United States in l-^35, and did not- fail to visit the old battle-ground, collecting walking canes from the spot where-he fell, from Barney's fire, visiting the old willow, tree under whose friendly shades he was laid to revive, and renewing his acquaintance with those kind Americans who had, in the hour of suffering and aMiction, admini.stered to him those kind offices pf humanity that- stop not to relieve even an enemy in distress. He remained several weeks in the village of Bladensburg, making liis friends there .ac- quainted with the strong sens.e of obligation he was under ^o them, made excursions with them to tho neighboring grounds, and pointed out the different positions of the contending a/mies, and related tte opinions and actions of individuals withih; the range of his obsei'vation and the events of that memorable campaign. Gen eralJackson be- ing then yn the Senate, the friends of Colonel Wood, a^ his request, provided him with an approp/iate introduction to that American soldieJ', Avho, on becoming acquainted, with the miUant British soldier, gave hiin a handsome entertainment in company with several of his military and other friends, ' Colonel Wood had formed so favorable opinion of the American people and their 'nstitutions that he invested a part of his fortune in American stocks, and has cort- 196 UNCIVILIZED HOSTILITIES. [1814. tinued, ■with muohfcjeling anj intelligenoe, his correspondence witli iiis Bladensburg friends, in which his amiable lady has sym- patheticallyjoiued, and exiu'essed her plea- sure in the anticipation uf seeing her hus- band's American friends, on their arrival in this country, her husband (now Cxeh^ral Wood) expecting to be ordered to tlie Ca- nada station." ,' -*, Governor-General of.fCanada f n- measures ^f retaliation against the in- habitants of the United States, for the wanton destrdction committed by their army in Upps^' Canada; in /compliance with which request he resorted to seve- rities contrary to the usagei of civilized warfare. But JM'onroe's ans#er of the 6th September, refuted that pretext by a sum- mary of British outrages prior to the burn- ing of Newark, in Canada, which was a merely military act, and disavowed by our government. The '.chancellor of the ex- chequer, in Xovemller, 1814, stated in the House of Commons that the Americans at York not only burned the house of the go- vernor, bfit also everyhouse, even to a shed, ■yhich waswhoUy untrue, and no doubt a mi3ropresem;atian_c^l«ihe Tjtfnriirg- of J»6W- ark, mistaken for York. 'The Governor-Gene- ral of Canada, too^ in hie address to the pro- vincial parliament, the iJ4th January, 1815, asserted that, as a just retriljution, the proud capital at Washington had experienced a fate similar to/that inflicted by -sin Ameri- can force on the seat of government in Up- per Canada. ,' But all th^se excuses were unfounded. •'Nothing was destroyed at York but barracks and public istore-houses, ex- cept builcllngs which thq British them- selves blow up, as was believed, by an in- human_mjBiji£iUUig,todestr6y General Pike and tl«^^Vme4s^£)^"0. BerishQlLJJipre wijth hi m... One pvumc building, calHdthe pa^-liainenThnuse'r^flffeil W!tS'fHtit""'Wl'&'-^g(f^ vernment house, and in which an Ameri- can scalp was part of the decoration of the Speaker's chair, was indeed \burned; but whether by accident, l)y the British them- selves in the explosion they sdt off, or how, did not appear. It was undenialile, how- ever, that the American officei'S set guards with positive orders to prevent plunder and tjre, and thatwdien departing, the provincial Chief Justice Seott addressed t(iein a letter of thanks for their hiiinanc treat^nent of tlie inhabitants and parlieular attention to pro- perty and persons. Nor were complaints of deslruetion ever made till long after, when deemed necessary to answer the British ac- Chap. VIII.] RETALIATION. cused by all the T^jorld of enormities at Washington. Whal vas done liy General McClure's order at fNewark, in December, 1813, besides its imiiediate disavowal, was much more than exp iated by the revengeful devastation of Lewis' own, Manchester, Tus- earora, Bnffalo, Blackrock, and tliat whole regiojcLjJaid. in xuins. . Than Governor-G^jie- ral ofCanada, Prevc st, by his proclamati(ii of (iie 12th Januarr, 1814, declared that punishment' had beep inflicted for the burn- ing of Newark, a fifll measure, he said, of retaliation ; and it vijas not his intention to' pursue further a system of warfare so re- volting, unless futurfe measures of the ene- my should compel ite^ort to it. There is thus every reason to lidlieve that Cochrane's assertion was false of Erevost's having called on him to retaliate CJinadian sufi'erings by : American irregularitjes. Cochrane's of- ficial letter of the 18th August, in all its statements and circumstances, was utterly ■unfounded and fraudulent, and the outrages ■ itofpciallij announced qftcr tJieir perpetration, wholly unjustifiable.! To palliate British devastations at Washington, moreover, docs not excuse their pillage at Alexandria, their ; systematic depredations and piratical career - from the first moment of their appearance in ' the Chesapeake. Tomuuder, sack and burn private houses is as i|nlawful as to destroy public buildings. Najal hostilities, as waged by thA T^''it.i.4j|jH||^^],f|j^dii ^"d'sr.rim,vj,i;;tj> ;--and universaTT^B&^y. Landing in Ame^' rica with their proffigate practices, they spoiled unresisting villages, farms and per- sons, in 1813, to whiilh, in ISl-t, by specific orders from their govi^rnment, were super- ' added the desolation'! of whole districts, ' -■ .""'JPEe'imrnenlateand enthusiastic effect of ■ the ffi11-frdds a ngtv,^element to warfare, the insular security of Bijgland is annulled. There is rfothing so de.spairingl}- shameful to us, or indelibly disgraceful iu the momentary loss of our capital, that is not mitigated by simi- lar misfortunes, atod may not be atoned for by the retaliation it undoubtedly warrants, pne of the firsi and minor retaliations of thi Washingtor^' outrage, was thus men- tifined in the London Times, of the 14th Peceraber, 1814:;: — "A privateer from Sa- vannah had the audacity to land on the Bahamas, and /plunder and burn twenty- seven private li(ouses. The pretence set up by this public-spirited privateer was, that of retaliation for our operations at AVash- ington." , What was there in the privateer's in- cendiarism more audacious than that of the English admiral who gloated over the ruins of Washington? the ashes of which seat of government in its infancy, and almost without private dwellings, when the public edifices were burnt, may keep alive smo- thered cinders to be rekindled for the confla- gration of London with two millions of in- habitants. A few years ago, Mr. Adams having said in Congress that a British ves- sel of war might sail three hundred miles up the Mississippi and burn Natchez, I replied that, so might an American vef sel of war burn London, wliiL-h was said on the authority of one of the most experienced and least sanguine or boastful officers of 198 DUTCH ATTACK OF LONDON. [1814. the American navy. And as some apolon;Y foi- the respectable gentlemen of our goverii- nicnt, whose imfortunate ..exaal^n^^^frnm Washington iTiav^not' hesi taterT^recSTO ■with painful truth, I am tt'inptod to insert lien^ the account from an authoritative En- glish historian, (Clarpndon.) of the succoas- fjii^attack of Lgndun by the liutrh, which, in soniQ uf its luJicrrius find more of its dis- gracoflil partirnlar's.'r^gTOfblcs thff c'a'flfurc of the federal city. "They had good intelligence how loosely all things were left in thr river, and, there; fore, as soon as the tide came to help the they stood full up the river without an consideration of tfie chain, which the ships immediately^ broke to piofcs an passed without the 'least pause. All mi4 ■were so confounded' to see the Dutch floit advance over the chain, which they lookqd upon as a wall of brass, that they knew nj)t what they were to do. The people of Ch ham, which is naturally an army of soami and officers of the navy, who might, aid ought to have secured all tliose ships whKh they had time enough to have done, wfr in distraction, their chief officers hav applied all their boats and lighter vessels to carry away their own goods and hou hold stuff, and gi\en what they left behij^d for lost. But the noise of this, ^d t' flame of the ships that were buja^l madi it easily believed in the city of^Spon, thi the enemy had done all that th^^onceiv they might have di^ne. Nos^as the col fusion there greater thajf^it was in wie Court itself, where thejr who had most ad- -vanoed the war, and'reprnached all thfcc who had been or \y^e thought to be agaifcst it, as men who nad no public spirit, and w>n-e not solicitous for the honor and glfry of the nation, and who had never spokcj of the Dutch but with scorn and conter were now the most dejected men that cmi be imagined, railed very bitterly at those who had advised the king to enter into that war which had alreaily consumed so many gallant men, and would probably ruin the kingdom, and wished that peace as the only hope were made upon any terms. In a word, the distraction and consternation were TO* great in court and city, &c. But there re- mained still such a chagrin in the minds of many as if they would return again, in which they were confirmed when they heard that they wfre '?till upon the coasts, and gave the same alarm now to Essex and Suf- folk as they had to Kent. Then the train bands which hail Ijeon drawn tugcther had continued for one month, whirh was as long as the law rei|uired, and now they re'[uired, or were said to require, to lie re- lieved or dismissed, or that they might r'";eive their }>:iv. There were discontents and emulations upon command, and they who had hsually prdf'sseil that they would willingly serve the king in the otiici'S of corporals or sergeants, whatever eomn/and they formerly had, now disputed a}f the punctilios and would not receive/ orders from any who had formerly been.^n 'infe- , • rior offices. And all these waywardnesses .', were brought to the kino; as matters of the ; highest consequence, who fouAd-diffioulty : eBoagk^wi • do te imiin i ing .peiate-o£ xp^e im- i ■ortance." [. f A military work of great reputsJtion, !■'■ fJoraini's " Summary of the Art of Wiar," says of the expedition to Washington, " The English performed an enterprise i which may be ranged among the most ex- - traordinary, that against the capital of the United States of America. To the grett; astonishment of the world, a handful df seven or eight thousand English were seen:' to descend in the midst of a state of ten! millions of souls, penetrate a considerable! distance, seize tlie capital, and destroy thQ|;^. public establishments there ; results whichf history maybe searched in vain for another example of. We might be tempted to ac- cuse the republican and anti-military habits' of the inhabitants of this, if we had not seea: the militia of Greece, Rome and Switzer-i land, better defend their homes against much more formidable aggressions, and if, ■, in the same yeaj-, a more numerous English expedition had not been totally defeated by' the militia of Louisiana, under the orders l-in(iirnl ^'^^"inn,&Ui-^JM„^-.vn Parliament house heard, without jtossibility of reply, i s explanation, or apology,ifromoneof its most on Washington, the British arms were dis- graced l)y victorious outrage upon thepeace- 'ful seat-^£pa,^jpatigoveimment, upon halls. , of senates and palac86-o£JTi9tiee> byitajjij^tad aj^reprajjated those vulgar prejudices, and that insolent language against the people of America, nf late so prevalent in England, which had rearhed so extravagant a 'height, that men' ros|ieidablc in character and station had s|iiikon in Parliament of the deposition of Mr. Madison as a Jiixtijinhic ohji'rf of n-nr, and had treati^d a gentleman of English extraction and education with a scurrility which they must now be the first to regret, Chap; VIII.] MACKINTOSH. 199 from no better reason khan that we happen- ed to be at war with the great republic over which he presides." ' It was impossible to exptain' the delay betw sen peace with Louis XvIII., in April, but on the miserable po- licy of protracting war for the sake of strik- ing a blow against Am erica. The disgrace oif the local wars, of I alanced success be- tween the BTitish na' marine of America, wa| protracted warfare, ani torious armies upon the That opportunity, fatall] the Congress at Ghent h\d opened in June, it was impossible that wb should have sent mit orders for the attack on, Washington. AVe should have been saved firem that success, a, thousand times more dito'aceful and dis- astrous than the worst defeat, and charge- able on the delay of negotiations. It was a success which made our naval power hate- ful and alarming to all Europe ; which gave the hearts of the American Ipeople to every enemy who might rise against England ; an enterprise which, most exasperated a peo- ple, and least weakened a goiiernment of any recorded in the annals of wan." " For every justifiable purpose of present W&rfaro, it was almost impotent. To every Mse obj«ct of prospective policy, it was hbSi- tile. It was an attack, not against tb'e' strength or the resources Qf a state, b'nt against the national honor and public affec- tions of a people. After tweuty-five/years 6f the fiercest warfare, in which evea^^ great capital of Europe had been Spared, almost respected by enemies, it was reserved for England to violate all that deceit courtesy -iowards the seats of national iJignity which, in the midst of enmity, manifiSsts the respect of. nations for each other, by an expedition deliberately and principally directed against palaces of government, halls of legislation, tribunals of justice, repositories of the mu- niments of property, and of the records pf history — objects, among civilized najions, exempted from the ravages of war,, and se- cured, as far as possible, evto^om its ac- cidental operatiMi, bejja,!4se tney contribute nothing to th§~meb,ns oif hostility, but are consecrated to purposes of peace, and mi- nister to the common and perpetual interest of all human society. It seemed an aggra- vation of this atrocious measure, that minis- ters had attempted to justify the destruction of a distinguished capital, .as a retaliation for some violences of imperious American officers, unauthorized and disavowed by their government, against .some unknown village in Canada. To mate such retalia- tion just, there must always be clear proof of the outrage; in genera^ also, sufficient eyidenc'e that the adverse government re- fused to make due reparation for it, and at least some proportion of thelpunishment to the offence. Here there was .very imperfect evidence of the outrage, no proof of refusal to repair, and demon^ration of the excess- ive and monstrous iniquity of what was falsely called retaliaaon. The value of^4 capital is not to be estimated by its houses, and warehouses, and shops. It consisted chiefly in what coul^ be neither numbered nor weighed. It wsfe not even by t£e ele- gance or grandeur pf its monumeiits that and the new-born it was most dear io a generojffs people. to be redeemed by They looked uponl it with auction and by pouring our vie- pride as the seat of flegislatiori/as the sanc- merican continent, tuary of public justice — offcei^as linked with for us, arose. If the memory of pasjt times-vsometimes still more as connectei| with ;^eir fondest and proudest hopes off greatJ^ess to come. To put all these resp|ctabje feelings of a great people, sanctifiedl by/the illustrious name of Washington, o4 fl/level with half a dozeii • wooden sheds itt|.<*e temporary seat of a provincial govewpnont, was an act of in- tolerable insol^ie, and implied as much contempt for tKe feelings of America as for the common Jensl of mankind." To make^e eiKmy himself tell as much as possiWe of th|se events, let us resume here, from the aij^hor of the British cam- paign, ;«vhat took jAlaoe on the retreat of the oonqv^rors after $ie ruin of Washington, e'f tpeir own reputation and the historical fi ^f,i,r.Ti^.Y P[f ^liaii- g — <- - ■ " ' J ■■ "■' .4 "When the hurricane had blown over, the camp of the Americans appeared to be in as great a state of confusion as our own ; nor could either party recover themselves sufficiently, during the rest of the day, to try thftfortune of a battle. Of this General Ross (Kd not fail to take advantage. He had al^ady attained all that he could hope, and pelrhaps more than he originally ex- pectedrto attain; consequently, to risk ano- ther action would only be to spill blood for no purpose. Whatever might be the issue of.wie contest, he could derive from it no /idvantage. If he were victorious, it would not destroy the necessity which existed of evacuating Washington; if defeated, his ruin was certain. To avoid fighting was, therefore, his object; and perhaps he owed its accomplishment to the fortunate occur- rence of the storm. Be that, however, as it may, a retreat was resolved upon ; and we now only waited for night, to put the resolution into practice. ^ "As soon as these arrangements were com- pleted, and darkness had come on, the third brigade, which was posted in the rear of our army, began its retreat. -Then followed the guns ; afterwards the second, and, last of all, the light brigade, exactly reversing the order which had been maintained during the advance. Instead of an advanced guard, this last now furnished a party to cover the retreat, and the whole procession was closed by the mounted drivers. " It being matter of great importance to- deceive the enemy, and to prevent pursuit, the rear of the column did not ooiit its 200 BRITISH RETREAT. [1814. ground upon the capital till a late hour. During the day an order had been issued that none of the inhabitants should be seen in the streets after eight o'clock; and as fear renders most men obedient, this order ■was punctually attended to. All the horses belonging to different oiEcers had likewise been remoTed to drag the guns; nor was any one allowed to ride, lest a ' neigh, or even the trampling of hoofs, should excite suspicion. The fires were trimmed, and made to blaze bright, and fuel enough left to keep them so for some hours ; and finally, about half past nine o'clock, the troops formed in marching order, and moved off in the most profound silence. Not a word was spoken, nor a single individual permit- 'ted to step one inch out of his place; and thus they passed along the streete perfectly unnoticed, and cleared the town without any alarm being given. You will imagine that our pace was none of the most tardy ; consequently, it was not long before we reached the ground which had been occu- pied by the other brigades. Here we found a second line of fires, blazing in the same manner as those deserted by ourselves, and the same precautions, in every respect, adopted to induce a belief that our army was still quiet. Beyond these, again, we found two or three solitary fires, placed in..'bf battle, rather than living men such order as to resemble those of a chajh of pickets. In short, the deception was so well managed that even we, ourselves, ^ere at first doubtful whether the rest gf the troops had withdrawn. i "By the time *e reached {he eround where yesterday's battle had been fought, the moon rose, and exhibited a spect(iole by no means enlivening. Tlie dead we^e still unburied, and lay about in every direction, completely naked. They had been strroped even of their shirts ; and, having beeirVex- posed in this state to the violent rain the morning, they appeared to be bleached to a most unnatural degree of whiteness. The heat and rain together had likewise af- fected them in a different manner ; and the smell which arose upon the night air was horrible- "In Bladensburg the brigade halted for an hour, while those men who had thrown away their knapsacks endeavored to reco- ver them. During this interval, I strolled up to a house which had been converted into an hospital, and paid a hasty visit to the wounded. I found them in great pain, and some of them deeply affected at the thought of being abandoned by their com- rades, and left to the mercy of their ene- mies. Yet, in their apprehension of evil treatment from the Americans, the event proved that they had done injustice to that people, who were found to possess at least one generous trait in their character, name- ly, that of behaving kindly and attentively to their prisoners. As soon as the strag- glers had returned to their ranks, we again moved on, continuing to march without once stopping to rest during the whole of the night. Of the fatigue of a night march none but those who have experienced it can form the smallest conception. "Oppressed with the most intolerable drowsiness, we were absolutely dozing upon our legs ; and if any check at the head of the column caused a momentarjr delay, the road was instantly covered with men fast asleep. It is generally acknowledged, that no inclination is so difficult to resist, as the inclination to sleep ; but when you are compelled not only to bear up against this, but to struggle also with weariness, and to walk at the same time, it is scarcely possible to hold out long. By seven o'clock in the morning, it was therefore absolutely necessary to pause, because numbers had already fallen behind, and numbers more were ready to follow their example ; when, throwing ourselves upon the ground, almost in the same order in which we had marched, in less than five minutes there was not a single unclosed eye throughout the whole brigade. Pickets were of course stationed, and sentinels placed, to whom no rest was grajjtfed, but except these, the entire army ijBsembled a heap of dead bodies on a field " In this situation we remained till noon,- when we were again roused to continue the retreat. Though the sun was oppressively powerful, we moved on without resting till dark, when, having arrived at our old po- sition near Marlborough, we halted for the night. During this day's march, we were joined by numbers of negro slaves, who im-; plored us to take them along with us, offer- ing to serve either as soldiers or sailors, if we would but give them t£eir liberty ; but as General Ross persisted in protecting pri- vate property of every description, few of ' em were fortunate enough to obtain their wiSltes." AwHtjer English witness adds, what is quoted to^ilipw how exjtremely insignificant that collectioff>£ iiam ltets called a city was, of which the spoilers desiroyied all that was at all city-like. "Of the city of Wasliington, I have pur- [ting any minute de- pssessed no leading posely declined attemp soription, because it features, by which one\ might convey to a person who has not seep it, something like an accurate notion of ;he whole. It is as you are well aware, com oletelyin its infancy, few of the streets being finished, and many not containing more i han three or four houses, at wide jntorva s from each other. Like all othor infant t( wns, it is but little ornamented with fine b lildings," &c. Such was the affair c f Bladensburg, less derogatory in its militarj r than in most other respects, to American .character. Under all the circumstances, it is rather surprising Ch-^V. VIII.] MR. SERURIER. 201 tiiat-80 obstinate a stand was made, as cer- tainly was,. by part ofpur people. " Every nylitaiy man knows,'! says an English re- \ieyf of the affair, "hofrlittle comparatively formidabte,.an imperfectly disciplined body of men, however num^ons, is usually found to be when put to the test." Such was no doubt General Arm8ti|)ng's opinion as he expressed it, and General Winder's appre- hension. History is ^11 of instances in which an enemy comn^anding the sea has made successful inroacfe at Selected points of attack. In the adduce of a column of regular troops there i| something in the steadiness and precisiop, which, before the actual shock, puts irregular levies to fear, if not flight. When takeny ust from the bosom of civil life, and thrown together for battle, ignorant how far they|may rely on their comrades or their leaders, they can seldom be inaccessible to misgivings, which at the critical moment manifest lihemselves in fal- tering, panic, and flight.; The misfortune was that our raw troopa had never been made to feel their foes an(J rouse their blood by an exchange of bloodshed. Hence the admirable judgment, noUess than daring courage of Jackson's pl^i of operations, when, by becoming the assailant on the 23d December, every man wastprepared for the 8th January. "To undertake the duty of a picket, was as dangerous'.' (says the same narrator of the Washington campaign), as to go into action. Parties of American sharpshooters harassed and disturbed the one appointed to that service from the time they took possession of their post till they were relieved, while to light fires at night was impossible, because they seemed but as certain marks for the enemy's gun- men. From sunset till towards dawn we were kept in a constant state of anxiety and agitation. The entire night was spent in watc.hing, or in broken jslumbers, than which nothing is more tryfcg both to the health and spirits of the army. Night and day were we harassed by llanger, against wliich there was no forti&ing ourselves. We never closed our eyes jn peace, for we Tvere sure to be awaken^ before many minutes elapsed, by the splash of a round shot or shell in the mud beside us. With the outposts again there was constant skir- mishing. Every day they were attacked, and compelled to maintain their ground by dint of hard fighting." j At New Orleans all theffear was English, and all the activity AmesVican. Prom the first moment incessant a^d tormenting as- saults, planned and excicuted by a com- mander, who, though noj a Baltimore law- produced the explana ;ion that Mr. Matthews yer, was but a Tennessee planter, less versed' received the — '- "' *■ '^- in the theory and sciencj of warfare than ' TeSWigtr^TO the commander at Bla(^nsburg, and with much less experience of i|iilitary operations. But by his admirable plsin eyery man under f/eds command had been thought into contact with the enemy, soias to remove every feel- in" of American inferiority, and dissipate airoonfidcnce of British superiority. AVhile the tremljling commanders rioted in devastation of pUblic property, which the military leader Speared solicitous,^ more perhaps for the njaintenance of discipline, than respect to iprivate things, to preserve from the pillage of his soldiery, the churches were ijndisturbed, although their destruction wo^ld be no more sacrile- gious than that^of the Capitol and public offices. Mr. Ma^tthews, the aged priest of St. Patrick's R(*oan Catholic Church, and Dr. Lowrie, pa|tor of the Presbyterian, kept their dwellings open near their churches, bravely abiding whatever might betide themseliaes' or their altars. Tha Roman Catholic| Bishop of Kentucky, Dr. Eenwick, generqusly remonstrating against the plunder of a^! farm house, where he hap- pened to be, on fhe advance of the British, after the battle, toward the city, was rudely seized, denying his assurances that he was a clergyman, any sent on foot in custody of four of the n^gro British troops to con- finement with ot^ier prisoners at Bladens- burg. On the retiteat next night, he applied for release to Genieral Ross, halting at Bla- densburg, who liberated him. The bishop requesting a written safe conduct to pro- tect him from recapture on his way to Washington, the general, who, overheated, had thrown off his cpat, snatched it hastily from a chair," and taking the first piece of paper from the pockdt, penciled, the desired passport oh wh^t proved to be a note . to him from Mr. Serurij^r, the French minister in Washington, bespeaking safety for his residence and the Ej:ench embassy during -the-Briiish s.t&y.the^.^ To protect Colonel Tayloe's, the most raegant hottse in Wash- ington, from plunder or burning, Mr. Seru- rier took possession of _it for a few days during the invasioinf {"rom^the roof floated a large sheet on a pole, the white flag of the Bourbons and sign of peace between France and England ; to i^hich .symbol of good will the French minister added an invitation to the British genercfl and admiral to honor him with their comoany at dinner; atten- tion which, if tendered, was declined. The note of the minister ,o the general was soon restored by Mr. Mat thews to Mr. Serurier, with the jocular reniark that his excellency for a Frenchman am [ Bonapartist was very intimate with the japtors of Paris and Washington. " Not more so than you," replied Mr. Serurier " if you got my note from the British g meral ;" which reply received the equivc cal paper from Dr. 'ho W^ fee TfeiJame possessed of what it was thought -best to restore to the French minilter. A few months afterwards, during the hundred days of Napoleon's short lii^d restoration to his 202 imperial throne\an untoward official note from Mr. Seruri^r, addressed fi-om Wash- ington to the imperial, was received' after his elimination, by 'the royal secretary for foreign affairs, who ' superseded .him, and displaced the only foreign minjiSter of the imperial government of Frane^left till then by the royal restoration. My. Serurier, by impulsive declaration of hi^isntiments, lost his place and incurred maSV years of penu- rious disgrace, for viol^ng Talleyrand's rule of diplomacy, neve* to op to-day what can be put off till tfi^morroV; dogma of the sober second thoij^ht more ektolled than deserving. And vrfiile writinAthis para- graph at Washington, in March\ 1848, by another French /alevolution Mr.XSerurier ceases to be a.-French peer, his Abierioan born son to /be the accredited agent of another French dynasty in South An|erica, his American born brother-in-law Pl^geot, to be the jiccredited minister of France in the United States. Always in saluWy commotion, but never in sanguinary revo- lution/this country ] r contemplates the thcoes of the Old World agonized by The retreating British army, worn down with loss of rest and flight, was so much more panic-stricken and disorderly than as described in the account of one of the fugi- tives, that almost any intrepid American force must have overpowered them. Dr. Kent, of the Maryland delegation in Con- gress, whose residence was near Bladens- burg, with his slav^puf.§.uigd and,fiajptur6d several weary stragglers from the column, Returning bootless and discontented, ready to submit with gratitude to any' American rescue of them from the rigors of British thraldom. OnA nf t,^)^jl-f|]p;i^■,JJ^. nlmTfin, nnn fessedby the English narrative as purloined by General Ross, was of that peculiar race of brigh t mulatto girls, respl endent with phy- sical loveliness, sculptured form, beautiful countenance, caressing humility, amorous diffidence and winning grace, who, not- withstanding the want of that silk-flowing hair which is so charming a feature of feniale attraction, and even in spite of the tiodily impurities which mark that race, seem, in the Eastern eloquence of scrip- tural description as if "the dew of their birth is of the womb of the morning." She - became the wife of an English sergeant, a well-favored and respectable man, who had none of the Auicrioau repugnance to Afri- can connection which the fetid degradation of slavery at least contributes to create, but in England is subdued into almost pre- ference of black rather than white. An- o ther of those fugitive slave?,, ch ang e d bondage' for bettSr tbrlune : ' an^ e:xi'i'emery' black negro, shining like polished ebony, with the musical talent common to men de- prived of civil enjoyments and political privileges, for which softer pleasures be- ALBXANDRIA. \ [lkJ4. I — \^ come an alteniative. Taken into a/regi-. mental band, the^jntutored slave les^^d to be a proficient on SOTeral instrumgit8,-and the admiration of aH, for his .,reinarkable figure, which won the B.eart '«f an English Desdemona, as fair and\uddy as her hus- band was dark and colerlessj the sooty bosom, African secretiojje, andv(}ther Ameri- can objections to connubial uhion of the whit« and black blood, having no tbKe with a decent English <\oman, proud of Tk hus- band for whom ^he would in this cous.try have been the .^corn of her own sex and fee aversion of ail. Is this owing to slavery, to prejudio^, to nature— rto what may phi- losophy ascribe the aristocracy of the skin in a detHOcratic country which has no exists cjirrj j j ^ nn n in urif ili nni ntin ni F i THj;l''"f|7 .; The two episodes to the Washingtc«^epio may be soon told. ' Captafn Gordon in the Seahorse frigate, with thp Euryalus, Cap- tain Napier, and some stnaller vessels, on the 17th August, 1814,1 left the British fleet to work a difficult and slow pas- sage, without pilots, up^ the Potomac to Alexandria. They did. not pass Mount Vernon, the residence and burial-place of Washington, or reach '■ Fort Warburton between it and Alexandria, till the 27th August, three days aftqr the fall of, and one after the British ? retirement from, Washington. On the evening of the 27th, after a slight bombardment of that fort, and a powder magazine-m it exploded, the garrison hastily evacuatfed, and next morn- ing the enemy took possession of it; for which the captain commanding was tried by a court jnartial, of which General Scott was president, and cashipr«d. On Sunday, the 29th August, the JBritish squadroH buoyed up the river and anchored at Alex- andria, when the commcu council, ^unpro- vided with means of defence, and-extiemely inimical to Madison's administration, at once surrendered by capitulation, stipulat- ing that the inhabitants should not be mo- lested, nor the town, except public works, destroyed : but merchaiidize of every de- scription, with vessels to- lade it in, includ- ing all removed during the prior ten days; given up. Twenty-one f merchant vessels were accordingly taken, joaded with sixteen thousand barrels of flouf, a thousaud hogs- heads of tobacco, some cojton, and a consider- able quantity of other giiods. After secur- ing this booty before Gordon's purposes of either plunder or devf^tation were fully effected, he was obliged |to retire from Al- exandria, both by an ortier from Admiral Cochrane, and the attacks of Commodores Rodgers, Porter, and P|rry, with a party of Virginia militia under General Hunger- ford, who all harassed hit retreat down the river. J Admiral Cochrane's fetter of the 18th August, 1814, to the Secretary of State, officially announcing thelBritish resolve^^^ Chap. VIII.] BRITISH SQUADRON. 203 uncivilized and inhuman d,evaBt.'ition,''iiot only did not rea ch M r. Monroe till the 31st ton , "Ejiit Waa'^ot s eii|;'T r o'jp'^.-th»^a ,ji)iii-aTs ship in 11 the"12ythia!.ugu§t, and"jli'en irregiji ■lavly transmitted, not I.}' a flarr o'f truce, which -would not. have comportt'il with so atrocious a message; but surreptitiously through the instrumentality ef an irrespon- sible, indeed unknown, American gu-be- twoen, the object of charging whom with it was probably to send another illicit com- munication, an open note, from Codrington, captain of the fleet, orderingGordon to retire from Alexandria. Landed from the admiral's ship in the Patuxent, and there delivered to an American unknown, were a sealeil 'packet to General -Mason, AmeisLcajt com- .•Bii6saa-y,ftf pt Mftg '' &j ! ^'J""i? J fflP B flllJ Icl- ■ter"'o^ tli'Hsffi A"ii^n^tQ- J yl E . Monroe, and :fe]rta,jp^jpodrington's open^iote''f§'*Oa^tain '^ Gfomori ". _Tho countryman, to whjjn^Jljese letters "were~Eantrecr liy some British ottioef on the Patuxent shore, delivered them to an American officer, who dispatched the sealed note to General Mason, and the open "note (to Gordon) to the acting Secretary of War, Monroe.- Some hours before day, on 'the 31st August, General Jlason received the sealed packet in an envelope addressed "to him, which he forthwith caj^^^^^Ir. Monroe, wHo that day after-s^B^roii^Tl the open no\e, thus suspiciously couched : " Iphigenia, ajtli August, 1814. The object of the expedition being accomplished, and the inhabitantsHjf the country, on the banks of the Potomad being alarmed for their property, on accXiint nf ,y}fr|,|U)i^"^'e of the British °4""'^r'*'SSi ^ * ^ "«iil'frois«_ killed a few days afterwards near Baltimore, were\euuvHyi'd in the ad- miral's ship theTnnnaVit, to Halifax, where Ross was buried, andVwheuoe Parker was sent to Europe for intei-^uent, both elevated British officers, slain in violations of tlie laws of war and principled of civilization — &K^.r put to death in the ^ct of burglary. R?l^'''killed soon after one of its perpetra- tions, and attempti ng another. \ ~" The Enj;liijU~ Barrator, trom wfaOSe "pages I havc^SD gopiously borrowed, and wlio. frorn being . thosfeii ^to^jirepave the Mar- quisNof^ Londonderry's' wor"k fni'the press, should be a perSf)H'''*f~crerJif,~' did not leave AAmerica without one of the CQm- mon !^nglish calumnies concerning the "low cunning which," he saj's, "forms so leading 3i trait in the American character as to have become proverbial, and that the de- sire to o\ erreach and deceive is so universal among the people of that nation, is no less -notorious." IIa\inghadno American ex- perience but during the few days of his en- terprises against Washington and New Orleans, the notoriety he mentions must be English, ITko. the pi-overb, " The Ameri- cans," he adds, We "asbtSve as any pen- pie in the wo^d ;" of /then- humanity to the capturi'd and wdunded he speaks with stnmg eulogj-; and the only Ameri- can officer who at Bladensburg fell into British hands, lie characterizes as one "of much gallantry and high sense of honor." The vulgar malevolence of his aspersions must therefore be altogether gratuitous. Ruthless marauders might ba\e supposed that cunning and cruelty would have been returned for their liarbai-ous ravages, vio- lating, as he confessed, " every rule of .modern civilized warfare."' 'We may ask, what should have been tnc conduct of the injured party to such iijvaders when thrown on tlieir charity, after having, by fire a,nd sword, laid waste tliejr country? Should they imitate the Enjjlisl that they had done injustic5<*cfWat"pc£igle, who were found to nesl^s at ,.leaat one generous irai* ■fa5,.<*lSr'clH«^»<5ter,'namely, that n-f bp%jj|iy^l^-nd"l-ir antl attentii^ly to ^" The^y HSfore the fall of "Washington, a day of extreme alar m, on the 23d of ^August, 1814, the Sccretar/ of State wrdt« to the President: "The enemy are advanced six miles on the road lo the woodyard, and our troops retreating; our troops on the march to meet them, but in too small a body to engage. General Winder proposes to retire till he can collecti them in a body. The enemy are in full march for "VVashington, and have the materials pjrepared to destroy the bridge. — Tuesaay, nine o'clock. You , had better removq the records." BefojgJ, "J !eiT«% Mt. .Tn^ift %^ 2n ^he Bepar+faetit of erk, Mr. Stephe n Plett- ' uditor of the "Reastiry, 3 providentially to saye the precious public records of that depart- ment, many of wliich have been since de- posited, and are now kept in, the build- ing of the Pat( nt Office, a. more con- venient and safe place than the State Department. The clerk then in personal charge of most Df those archives, was ■Tos j gii ^ , , .JCl ng , wbo accompanied the go- rCl-lim<'Mlllr6m Philadelphia to AVash- ington, and whosa son succeeding to hie eIeidc6hi]TjjuisJiQl4s.JitaUtet^ - By'tli'oexertions qf those clerks, princi- pally Mr. Pleasanflpn, coarse -linen bags were purchased, enough to contain the papers. The. origin^l^JJ eclaration of Ind^- nendence,W ne*1aniaEBz .or^cB^eSer aifioii. ii 'WtD W nm" r' ~' t—w , ? ■ -.' titaif'^wing letters from the lady, who there, with, a spirit of gentle fortitude, presided: a sciH of hpijjjy drrnnniiittittn Jag^ Nr~ Madison to her sister Mrs. W'ashiugton,' lB(»mt Mount he capital. After of "the written. ts were found in (Vernon, the seat of General Washington, ighteen miles from the fodera! city. Tuesday, Aug. •2.3-7, 1814. DeVr Sister, Sfv husband left me yesterday morhing to join General Winder. — He inquired anxiou.sly whether I had courage orfirmnes.s to remain in the President's hou.-^e until his return ori. the morrow, or succeeding day ; and on my a.'ssurance that I had no fear but for him and the success of our army, he left me, beseeching me to take care*f myself, and of the cpcbinet papers, public and pri- vate. I have since received two dispatches from him, -wTitte'n with a pencil ; the last is alarming^' because he desires I should be ready at a moment's warning to enter my cai-ria^ and leave the city : iSiat the enemy seemed stronger than had been reported, and /fliat it might happen that they would reach the city, with intention to destroy it. 'i " " __j?#gp9J'diagl'y ready ; I haj'.fi j.re.sse (l iSj^STPgwne into trjmJsgjtaJafflTolRf'carmge ; our private property -must bo sacrifices^ as it is impos- sible to procure .:ti'£l|S**!^fo\ its transporta- ion. I am determined Jiot tft go myself until I see Mr. Madison safe, and he' can accompany m'e — as I hearof much hostility towar incumbencies, from thdt of the first Adau on the removal of the isoat of government, in 1800, to tlie District of Columbia. The picture, in 1W14, hung on the west wall of-- the large dining-room^ instead of the cast wall of the small parlor, where it is now. The President promised Mr. Custis that it should be taken care of, and Mrs. Madison deemed it her duty not tp leave such a trophy for the captors. It is (jine of Washington's '^enesses, by Stuart, ia,mped with his su- nority as a pbrti-ait-painter, the head and face strongly resembling the ovio-innl ■jjeP'- ligent as S.tjJ5y;,t_\^iis of alLbut the faoe'o^ma jiicturea^ilie person of Washington was left for another artist, Wiji3tanley,_to,. whoin I'lCsidjut John Adams's son-in-law, Wil- liam~Staith, stood for lllH»e^i»4Habs, pos- ture and manner of this parody ; so that A\'ashingtou's tall, gaunt person, his shajie, air and attitude are much better given by Trumbull's representation of him in the several historical pictures which fill panelsr if[ the rotunda at the Capitol. M^, , ftJiftt*.^'" mmm!£^^ . [reserve s ;rew'td"f() liOTCTf?f?rp sklent's Bjadcns >,fi— JaS-SlJiffiaDden kept distended and- "' arles Carroll, of. an intimate in the Pre- family, entered from the aifair of burg, while the French porter, .Tolm SijDusa, and lnahs.irdeucr, Thomas JI'Gaw^ ware laborin^wiuT'STiaTiJRet to take down th : picture, and remonstrated against Mrs. Jlidison ri.skiug ca]iiure for such an object, ich, Jlr. CairoU urged, ought not to Je- ay hi'r departure. Ilcr letter to her sister, Mrs. AVashington, states that the picture was sccurcil licfore she left the house. iMi- Si iousa, who is highly worthy of credit, thjaks sjie, was gone before it was ( htnc, asTlis r letter espressos tlie acconiplish- inWrTfTTie Irish gardener, to whose aid, in the midst of the work, Mr. Jacob Barker came in, arcording to Siousa's recollection, while he was gone to bring an axe, got the picture down from. .thfi.wajftt and ulaced it, in the bftBthTCr 'ir. Barker ; -vrith -whODafJ Ch;*p. VIII.l a(««- ""WllTle the iadies Of' Ml'l 'Jones and Mr. Carroll's families lingered in Georgetown for Mrs. Madison, she accompanied her husband to the bank of the Potomac, where one small boat was kept ready, of the many others all sunk or removed but that one, to transport the President, Mr. Monroe, Mr. MRS. MADISON'S FLIGHT. 207 lEush, Mr. Mason and Mr. Carroll to the Virginia shore. The boat was too small to carry all at once, so that several trips were necessary, as the shades of night set in upon -them, like departing spirits leaving the world behind, to be ferried over an inevi- table Styx. President, Secretary, Attor- ney and Commissary General seemed con- demned to an immortality of at least eon- tempt and malediction in the world. About that time it must have been, if ever, as Mrs. Madison is clear in her recollection was the case at some time, that Cockburn's proffer reached them of an escort for her to a place of safety ; for it was impossible till nights fall, till when he did not enter the city: imperfect remembrance of which event may give color to General Armstrong's impres- sion, derived from Dr. Thorntfe, that Boss and Cockburn tendered the President a pro- posal for a ransom of the public buildings j two distinct proposals, if any such were made, of which the escort for her was de- clined, and the ransom of the city repulsed with disdain. Mrs. Madison, after seeing her husband overlhe river, drove back, attended by John Graham and nine volunteer cavalry, to her female companions, the families of Mr. Jones and Mr. Carroll, in Georgetown. The President's orders were to pass the night wherever she could find a convenient, safe place, in Virginia, and join him next day at a tavern sixteen miles from Georgetown, which was the appointed place of meeting. Moving slowly onward, tlie road encum- bered with baggage wagons and other hin-. drances, their progress was so tedious thkfr the ladies sometimes left their carriages, and; walked, as the least irksome and dangerous: mode of proceeding, in the midst of tumult, till theyrcachedafternightfallthe residence of Mr. Love, two miles and a-half beyond Georgetown, on the Virginia side of the Po- tomac, where they begged a night's rest. - Mr. Love was abroad with the troops, but soon returned. His lady, indisposed, made the best arrangements practicable for so large an irruption of unexpected inmates, for whom sofas and other substitutes for beds were arranged as well as could be ; and they passed a frightful, miserable night, all disconsolate, several in tears, Mrs. Madison sitting at an open window gaz- ing on the lurid flames and listening to the hoarse murmurs of the smouldering city, while several hundred disorderly militia around the house aggravated the din and begrimed the gloomy scene. Before day- light the next morning, the caravan of af- frighted ladies, in sad procession, took their departure under Mrs. Madison's lead, for the rendezvous appointed with the-JPresi- dent. Consternation was at its uttermost ;. the whole region filled with panic-struck people, terrified scouts roaming about and' spreading alarm that the enemy were com- 208 PLIGHT, ASD PANIC. ing from Washington and Alexandria, and that there 'was safety nowhere. Among the terrific rumors, one predominated that Coch-"" rane's proclamation wa^ executed by Cock- burn, inducing the slavds to revolt," and that thousands of infuriated Aegroes, drunk with liquor and mad with Mnancipationr, were committing excesses wqrse than those at Hampton the year befcte, subjecting the ■whole country to thei* horrid outrages. About noon the air was charged with the two- fold electricity of panic and of a storm, as the ladies pursued their weary and disconsolate retreat. Gen. Young, con^anding a brigade of Virginia militia, in hija official report to the investigating committee of the House of Representatives, says &at they were de- layed on their march to jbin General Win- der, " by an alarm of a donhstic nature, which he was so credulous as td believe, from the respectability of the country people, who came to him for protection ; he halted his brigade and sent out light troops and one troop of cavalry to ascertkin.the fact, which finally proved erroneoui" The terror of Cockburn's formidable erlormities was more conquering than arms. |Gen. Young next day actually stopped Mr|. Madison, insist- ing "that she must not be sjiffered to go with- out an escort. I About the hour when Cockburn's complete destruction was realizing at Washington on theeubj.eet of news^ paper controversy between him and Dr.- - Thornton. Almost the first words Monroe was obliged to utter, asjie rode into the citjj were a severe rgbT^Q^^^ffhtiUvtifefia; Bugga^ ing that the <;itize^^|f9|R^^iB^9[pi}|£^ou^ do -JTOlLit«|(6«pwj«W^«^ia»- iniei»till. after,, thelkittaok on Baltimore, could not convince the com- manders that the upshot of their ephemeral., triumph would not be as they flattered^. themselves and insisted, submission «f th^ country, when its capital fell ; as they ap; gued, incapable of estimating the Americaj^ polity, federative and free of a union not consolidated, hardly centralized, resting on the transcendental basis of sovereign States and local independence. Confident tha^ their seizure of a weak head must paralyzf by sympathetic panic the vigorous limbs^ when they had hardly wounded and only provoked the> whole body to fierce resif^ ance, the defeat of their next attempt which the British official accounts termed demonstration on Baltimore, signal and complete by land and watejr, simultanej ously with that of their naval and mili» tary discomfiture at Plattsburg, was th« beginning of a series of disasters provident tiaJly punishing their iniquitous prolonga- tion of hostilities. Reasons foi attacking Washington and Baltimore were stated iij a London paper to be, pursuant to Cochr CoiP. IX.] Mm«,'8 letter, that!" if any towns are to suf- fpr, they ehould:b* the objects, in order'to crush a large bocry of privateer shipping ^in Baltimore, ancT in Washington to de- stroy a pretty yrpVL supplied arsenal, and th'Qs prevent Congness meeting there again, an oyent much andigenerally wished for by tiie people of Now pfork, Philadelphia andi ■|(he Wasti^rn States.) Let the arsenal and naval storohouses 'he blown up, and no govemm'apt will bekble to get a majority in Congress to votal for their re-ereotion. To the as^mbly of the legislature at Washington, 'the infl\encos of the southern Ifigislsitors may be ascribed:" so argued the London press. ^ On the 6th of September, 1814, the whole fleet, bctweoiL&jicand fi§StS§iftlto''^ vrnr, got under wa^andsTood up t b e'vn'ffiipe ake, with more than five thousand soldiers, ma- rines, black and white, and seamen, to be lauded,as infantry, un'i^or Admirals Coch- rane, Cqgjk.bttiri;i, . Malcolm, ^Jliffi^S*- Captein, noiv Admiral ^^^i^ilSndv jaisB^. Oth(p Jjistin gu J^ gdJpjjjgiiPt ~i^.tiie^iH^_ ^ilrf^jfi^lAmffl^lsPonthe ilm, reaching' the Patapsco, early in the morning of the I2th of September, 1814, they landed at DEATH OF ROSS: ^11 composing an ad- detached under Major Ricliard accompanied jas a volunteer by .one of the I OpSBTbrSffoation, fwo/mSIgBpSiftilfBaJfe-' more, and two other water batteries jaidja- a^t. ~(^x&T9i. Ross, accompanied by Jijtf spiral Cochrane in the van, pfooeeSed •without resistance, abntcfc^fcrar miles, whojh gallantly encountered by two companies of Sterrett's fine regimint, led by Captains jjjevering and Ilowaro, and Captain Ais- quith's rifle compan yance. Heath Robert Ooodloe Har; io'ing^g on whatj^ N9r& iPoint by fortunltely killing General ^08s. Soon overwhelnied by superior nuni- Tser^, our advance was driven back on their main body, the Baltiniore brigade, rather more.than three thousand men, commanded "by General John Strieker, with whom served three companies of Pennsylvania yplunteers under Captaiiis Spangler, Mete-, gar and Dixon, and a eompany of Mary* fciiuj volunteers under Ciptain Quantill, the ■whola. led by iQaloqi^k^^^^^i^S^ McDonald, Long, Fowler, and Amey, ■BPitfePinkney's rifle battalion uiider C;tjitain Dyer, some cavjtlry, commanded by Gulunel Biays, and six four-pounders, manfjged by Captain Montgomery. These tioops werejjHdl JCl»t«4-daj^eiie!Nd»4^trickcr, an^^fteeiT hundred of them, the qltly portion aStadly ''CItfgig eiL f or iBOTer'Than an hour bravely-l; wiffistoOd the British onset. "We were drawing near," says thef English naa^a^ve, "the scene of action, when another officer came at full speed towards us, with horror find dismay in his countenance, and calling aloud for a surgeon. Every man felt within himself that all was not right, though none was "willing to believe the whispers of his own terror. But what at first v.-a could not guess at, because we dreaded it so much, -was soon realized ; for the aid-de-camp had scarcely passed, when the General's horse, without its rider, and with the saddle and housings stained withblnod, came plunging onwards. Xor was much time given for fearful surmise as to the extent of our mis- fortune. In a few minutes we reached the ground where the skirmishing had taken place, and beheld poor Ross laid by the side of the road, under a canopy of blankets, and apparently in the agonies of death. As soon as the firing bej^an, he had ridden to the front, that he might ascertain from whence it originated, and mingling with the skirmishers, was shot in the side by a j-ifleman. The wound was mortal ; he fell into the arms of his aid-de-camp, and lived only long enough to name his wii'o, and to '^mmend his family to the protection of his country. He was removed towards the fltet, and expired b efore_hi_s bear crscoij^ r^^Ti the boat s." tj5 y tEii"death' th'e^eom- mand of the xsntish army devolved on Q^el,^08,kg,.jiiyifia >ygil composed j&^ HMal report of their speedyand clandestiire abandotunent of the attempt on Baltimore^: attributes it to the failure of the naval atr tacb'on Fort McHgnry. But the fact was, that, discouraged by Ross's death, the,- promptitude of Heath's assault, and thigi bravery of Strieker's contest, the enemy- were still more disconcerted when they dis- covered the preparations made by General, Samuel Smith for the defence of Baltimore. During niore thg^aa honr-the battle of North Point" was well co^YesteyByliut YfFeeh hun- ^•' dred pK>the"3»lt!rm)re yoiU niieSr s, against superior numbers ofveteranr^iJ^faOQgs.^ The~ffiiSc^)naueF'of "one -re^iheht, Colonel Amey's, caused some confusion, and forced General Strieker to yield the field of battle. But most of his inexperienced troops, espe- cially the 5th and 27th regiments, (the lat- ter well trained by Lieutenant-Colonel Samuel Moore,) behaved with a spirit to redeem the dishonor^of Bladensburg. The British, who" lost' "mftre than ' officially ' re- ported, co nfessed thirty-ni ne killed .^and two hundred;^ jinS tweB,ty-niTie Ty^)pTifl(;fl , wMlE' 6uTT(Ssjia«^r±w;e^:iule'-ikifleid_ and ""ninndrpd ftnd |tlhi^^ltl3^yi^jllfr^l■7^m1l1(lrr^, nnd fifa_tg,k2jji4_the most distinguished of our slain, James Lowry Donaldson, a city member of the State legislature, who fell ■^^|ly animating the 27th regiment, of Im^^l^e was adjutant, to_ manly eom- Kaf, ' ftiiid". Iflelitenant 'Andre. General Strieker took his first position, maintain- P|d it, and fell back to the second, with 'such spirit that Brooke did not venture to-. l;.f 0-.t>.tv '^^^ p\^f\ 'J12 PORT M'HENET. [I8Ii; pursue. About the time of Strieker's last stand, he -was joinedl by General Winder with iJoneral Douglas' brigade of Virginia militia, and Captain Bard's troop of regu- lar cavalry. The Maryland brigades of Generals Stansbury and Foreman, the sea- men and marines undor Commodore Rod- gers, the Pennsylvania volunteers under' Colonel.'? Coboan and Findley, the Balti- more artillery unde:! Colonel HaiTl.s, and the marine artillery under Captain Stiles, manned the trenches indlbatteries, at which they remained all night (under arms, ready for any assault the enemV might undertalce.i Sleeping on the battle-ground, Colonel!. Broolie next day appr(|ached Baltimore, whose defences he clo.sely^reconnoitered and found bristling vrith canhon fortifying the hills, manned by not Ics^ than twelve thou- sand men, whom ho shoived no disposition to attack, well prepared; and resolved as they were to vindicate Iheir firesides bj"" repulsing, capturing or I destroying their invaders, who escaped bVi nocturnal flight. Arrangements were made to cut off Brooke's retreat by General Winder, wit^ General Douglas's A'irgiliia brigade aifl' some regular troops ; but Brooke preeiji tately made his escape unijler cover of nigql and uncomfortable weather, to the shtf ipig. teavi - B g afay . i > r .wm jie .f a 4nuaujJiw*d4- * A grn.nd but sliy attaoK was made Ity tha fleet on Fort McHenry, >r! the 13th. Formed* in a half circle in fro itjof it, but keeping out of range of its battqrlJBS, bomb and other «^. Jlfessels fired, during tt eighteen hundred bomb it day and night, shells, with multi- rockets, not less Ired and sixty tons ition, with no effect and without much tu~Ses of round shot ii altogether than one hu: of iron engines of dcstiti of intimidation or sucoe: destruction, owing to, tie distance at which the masters of the seaa kept from^ the weU- known gnnneiT of the AmerioanS; Major Arpiistead, of the artilli ry, who cominanded Fort McHenry, with : lis coihrades "fiBfere, were a target for Britifeh practice, for the fort returned but fewj^ shots, when they found that they fell sh'ort of the enemy. Many of the British bouibs weighed two hun- dred and twenty pounds; tlie uproar of wliose reverberations ■A'as as terrific as the spectacle of nig ht canncnad e was imposing. AWiWhT'iu^lhese rmssileB ittfo ffieTort ¥rofri six in the morning tilljthrce in the after- noon, Cochrane moved jome of his vessels nearer, and their shot hliled fire on the de- fendants. But in very! few. moments, 'as soon as Armistcad's gifis repeated. .]piilu{i a distance which brougA thcni into contact with their assailants, theuattcr slipped Lhoir cables, hoi.'^ted their siiilS, and fell biiiK^fi- ypr,,q fhp i-nn|.;i^ of our latgest gu na.mgffi 'b'SI -ffltaSTght, sci^Wrl Ky tStal'dSffkW^Bs'ii' lighted bv th" (lame of thi-ir own artillery a few bomli ycsspIs aitd rocket boats, with a large aqu;idron of ^barges, maimed )iy t welve hundred men, pushed up the coye * beyond Fort THToHenryj-to assail it in the rear, effect_a landing, &,nff#y1lhe;cit3';"^T{h loud cheers moving on, aniTflattering them- \ selves that success awaited their la^t effort, / j ' on which.-±J*e-Briti's1l-a:dBattal ' cohUaeWtty- M^Ia rfliad., — Patigue, want of rest and comfort, n bad weather and oxpo.sure, unprotected by' K'l'' good works from the enemy's fire, without /■ I /^ the excitement of returning it, as they were ^^^ beyond reach of ours, tried the fortitude ^ of the..mixed garrison of Fort McHenry.. Three conrp'Siiies'of^ Balfimore artiUery, commanded by Captains Ben'y, Jndge_Jii:, ixhals gn and L ieutenant Penningtonjparts ofthe thirty-sixl"H~and thirty-eighth re^- ments of United States infantry, under Lieii- tenant-O^mMyaiaart, wil^Mlajor Lane, of the fourrcentn TJmted Stafesrcgiment, serv- ing as a volunteer, composed Major Armi- stead's force in the fort : of whom the clumsy o;uuuery of the British shipping kdlled_but foBJc, amfl|p| g_ Mdi gm^ y^tStf^^- re^ectSble iflWtiBRtnf^'lji/iuleliant tJIaggfe'ft" and ^er- .go a a ^' Q i o BMft-^ wemadan g. ont jii fegpn fry.'- ^wo - American 3hip'-ill!ftjWl'H,"pf!Wu?'ft onlxiard' the frigate Menelaus during the -attack, stated, when afterwards liberated, as told to -idkem by British i^iieers, that the at- tempt was made by eighty boats, carrying •eaA twente-fiye mft^'^tid^ d^^^d , with a'! ^i)y^^ gen"four iSff' five liuiidrea. yThe^'VSMfHrafef'batteries, not onfy Fort mtRenTj but Fbrt Covington, .where Com- modore Rodgers was stetioneiJ* with his sailors, and IJ^Sf^'aBt Ifewcomb of the navy, and the flotilla men from the city bat-; tery, under Lieutenant Webster, as well as that of the Lazaretto, deluged the assailants with such torrents of hot shot, as not merely to repulse, but, with great loss, quickly drive them back to their original anchorage out of reach..T"^^lj^morej^ shaken to its foun- d ationsa by "ese tr'SienS 6ii'8~ jxploirons, stb'odhi'nh W spirir:»^TM-irwas"3mf5^%e striking concussions of that night conflict, that the song of the "Star-spangled Ban- ner" was composed in the admiral' s ship, - ^on after thg ' mOThing att^iik OU Furl r McIIenry began, Brooke led his forces with- in a mile of Baltimore, skilfully follo,wed, however, Ss^ judiciously threatened by Win- j^er. The Kts^ish commander conjBfentrated his force ostensibly for storming the' town (ihat night. .^e nfei:al Smithy perfectly pre^ pared for it, ^SlSSiM^Hn'der-tiim Strieker so Iti TtniiUguoug ly for attekilig Brooke next morning, that, together ■with the night fail- ure on the water fortificatici^s, the British decamped, aliout midnight, wrtk great pre- cipitation, favored by total darkness, heavy rain, and "the exhausteS'f'oonditionyjf the A'i*re^,ans, who, during the three day^and rnights' campaign, had Suffered from iaii^ap; incleme nt weathe r an d want of rest. Tnh. biTRflTYSfes('IS ter addressed to the clei"gyman belonging to the chapel at St. InigoSfe, and the other .residents there, acknowled^ig the robbery from the house and chapeaSdeclaring the ^proceeding unauthorized, ancffiestoring some of the articles taken, " liopii* this justice vrill efface prejudicial sentin&its towards the British:" — rare confessiSi and poor atonement for the common rapine practised by the British navy in the waflprs of the Chesapeake, ff-'s-w? ..*vi*^i¥«9l|i#f»»*.' On the same day, Captain BuraL accom- panied by Colonel John Francis J&rcer, a .respectable gentleman of Maryland, aaidMf. .John Nelson, at the head of Burd'swocjp ..of IJnited States dragoons, surprised byju ■dashing charge and overcame a much su- perior Jiumber of some throe hundred Bri- tish seamen and marines, on the shore near Snowden's, on the Chesapeake Bay. Af- ter ineflfectually discharging their musket-e in thei^ usual way, the seamen, terri- fied by the horses close upon them, dis- persed said fled, and would have been all taken, bkt that the riding-master of the troop, a Scotsman named Craig, who was a deserter *om the British, became fri;;htened and oallai out to retreat, which Captain Burd, whto was wi.iunded, in vain strove to prevent. ..JCraig's fear was that, if taken, he would fce executed as a deserter, and his voice witmthe troop proved irresistible by its cf]mmaMder, whose conduct on the oc- casion waafexceedingly gallant. Mr. Mer- cer chargS with his riding-whip in his hand. In jfcese frequent little contests the military spifct of the country was educated, while the pSatical mischief of the enemy roused it e^rywhere to indignant resist- ance. To thK hour, all along the shores of the ChesapcEKe to the ocean, British bar- barity continues to be borne in mind, and among that iprtion of the people then charged by poKtical opponents with British attachments, the memory of their brutali- ties is fresh, ^wy one of whom there re- mains the least tradition of omission to resist them, an^ much more, of affording them aid or sucaw, is despised to the third generation. Theap.sentiments grow stronger negxer, the oceanjand the primitive people of Aecomae,¥ipgpiian hytState allegiance, Marylande.rs .. in locality, were remarkable for streiiuous wa^tee, while represented in Congress,:in 1814,^hy Tbomas W. Bajjey, whoj^ son, of the ! ^ime name, gg,^:. repre- sents, that district., otomac, built, in 170,|>., .Among the voluiiteers fromPennsylva- t:i„-.i__.i ^:a_j j^^^ repairing in maipse^^jSaid great- num- bers to be organized, s^rimed, equipped, and dis^lined for the rescue of Baltimore, was Mr. James Buckanan, the present (1848) Secretary of Si^te of the United States. Like Mr. Harpe^, a federalist, con- demning the war, Mr. Bu^anan was among the young men of LancasoEr, w^herehe.lived, to volunteer to fight for itl and as a private dragoon in the troop ofCafeain, afterwards Judge, Henry Shippen, Sastened to the scene of action. Without commissions or orders, those citizens of a neighbor State flocked to the post of danger,j|nd organized themselves into regiments imh the ardor which has often surpassed ^listed, and more orderly embodiment, chose their own officers, and throughout tlieir bmef service faced clanger with a constancy ^ich nei- *ther discipline nor pay can alwaysVroduce. The present Secretary of State diounted guard, at one time, a stalwart slLtinel, with naked sabre in his hand, at th\ door of General Smith. As before stated in the BladensburgWar- rative, that fine national anthem, "^he 214. STAil^SP ANGLED BANNER. [ISl*. ^Star-Spangled Banner/' -was a stroke of lyrical genius, by another federal gentle- man, from the Baltimore conflict. Among the British prisoners at Bladensburg was a vSergeant Hutchinson, of the sap'JDers and miners, an intelligent young man^ grateful for the kindnpss and attention •which ho and his -wounded companions recdfvod when left behind at Rosa's departure from Wash- ington. A respectable physician of Marl- borough, Dr. Eeans,^ with some'of his ser- vants, having captured some Knglish strag- glers on the retreat of the Britihh army ; when informed i)f it, a detachmeiit was sent several European courts, in successful di- plomatic intercourse and uncommon' p^- sonal familiarity with many of the monarclis and great numbers of elevslteid ]perso;' public intelligence and influ- ence, then did not exist : though there were ocoasionaf fabrications of that kind, one of wMeh- ^ublish ed in a Boston journal, re- por{ft^-om Baitimore, that therevras "a contest there between the civil and miHtary powers ; the former are for a capiti^ting embassy, but the military men wfll not consent." A London paper, of the 17th June, stated that "the grand expedition preparing at Bourdeaux for AmSrica, un- der- the gallant Lord Hill, is d^tined for the Chesapeake direct. Our litfle army in Canad^wiU, at the same instant,''be directed to makiJ a movement in the direction of the Susquehanna ; and both armies -will, there- fore, in all probability, meetafWashingtbii, Philadelphia, or Baltimore." The seat of the Americap governmentt,-but more par- ticularly Baltimore, is to. to the immediatfe object of attack. In the^pplomatic circled >t is also rumored that our naval and mili- ary commanders on th0 American station have no power to ooncrale any armistice or suspension of ai-ms. , Tfiey carry with them certain terms, whielA.-will be offered to tKe American governmeiSt at the point of th^e Ijayonet. The terras, of course, are no't made public ; but tlrere is reason to belie-re that America will-^Be left' in a much worsb situation, as a naviil and colnmercial power, than she was at' fflie comme'ncemcnt of the war." Thus infatuated were London and Boston, when- Baltimore repelled the me- naces, contriVSnees, and expectations, re- garded, no dGn)-it, with unmanly fear by some of the'Mifliabitants of the AlKmtic sea- ports, couiaenanced by disafi'i'ition, but indignantly and strenuously repelled by nearly th^'whole Union, and crushed for- ever in Jne newest, weakest, and \ least Amoricaaiz(^d part of it — Louisiana. ».The ^ViidilW' BfltiSh "ai-my^ from CanndaJ'V'aa dhasi'dlrom Plattsburg at the same raomfent ' hat the ai-my from France was driven frish ! Jaltilnore, and the third and greater di^-^i- n)n, striking at New Orleans, was demft 1 ished there with still more impressiva overthrow. ' \ Ghap. IX.] MAOTTFACTUKES. 215 By a coincidence so remarkable, that it xequires not much superstition to deem it providential, the terms ultimately acceptftd by the British negotiators as the basis of the treaty of peace, were presented by the Amerioan ministers at Ghent the day of the Back of Washington — 24th August, 1814. The course of the negotiation always w .-for the British commissioners to postoflhe auswering our notes till they hajJ^HJmie to transDjit them irqm Gheayjii^jondon, and get the'mittisteiis-iBstrtlclions from Down- ing Street how to answer. During one of the intervals, occasioned by these postpone- ments, Mr. Clay, Mr. Russell, and Mr. -Hughes ijiadp a visit to Brussels, then, like liU that region, occupied by British troops. At Brussels they went to the theatre, where the Secretary of Legation, Mr. Hughes, ac- cidentally overheard in the lobby a loud boast by one British officer to another, that news had just qpime from London of the cap- ture and burning of "Washington. "Have you heard the news ?" said he, in a high tone of not unnatural gratification. "We have taken and burned the Yankee capital, and thrown those American rebels back -half a century." Disconcerted by, such Jistressiug intelligence, Mr. Hughes re- -turned to the box where he left Mr. Clay and Mr. Russell, and without letting them inow why, told them there was a reason why they should not remain in the theatre, where some of the British Legation at jCfhent were also present, having, like the Americans, taken advantage of the interval for an excursion to Brussels. Mr. Clay and -Mr. Russell' reluQtantly accompanied Mr. Hughes to their hotel, to be there told the tidings from Washington. Next morning the gentlemen of the English mission sent them a London new:spaper with the official dispatches, which induced the American party to return to Ghent much mortified. In a few days," however, arrived the account of the affair at Baltimore, British repulse, Ross' death, and precipitate departure of the invading army, which intelligence was sent by the American to the British com- missioners, with compliments as gratifying as those sent to them at Brussels on the captui-e of Washington. On the 27 th of September, the London jCourier published the letter of Lord Mel- ville to the Lord Mayor, announcing the success of the army under General Ross, adding, "that the Park and Tower guns were fired at noon in honor of the victory, -Which is surely worth an illumination." - The London Gazette, officially announc- ing the capture of Washington as a great and decisive victory, was translated, ]iy order of the British ministry, into French, German, and Italian, and industriously scattered broadcast over all Europe. But ±he French and continental press generally expressed horror at an outrage such as had n<>t been perpetrated in any of the capitals of that continent, nearly aU recently cap- tured. Even the London Statesman queried, "Istdt quite clear that the expedition to Wa^iington will meet universal approba- tioB ? The Cossacks spared Paris, but we spared not^the Capitol at "Washington." At "the head of social, literary, fashionable, and political influence in the saloons of Paris, in the presence of the viceroy, Duke of Wellington, Madame de Stael de- nounced the conflagration of Washington as an unexampled enormity. At London she had become intimate with her fellow- countryman, Mr. Gallatin, who sometime.'' accompanied her in her drives about that city, and with whose highly intellectual conversation she was much pleased. A Brussels Journal of the 8th October, 1814, in the midst c-if British armies of occupa- tion, published, that " by the last accounts from Ghent, the late events in North Ameri- ca, destruction of Washington, &c., have made a very deep impression on the Ameri- can negotiators. After a short absence they returned to Ghent, and expect with impa- tience instructions from their government that will probably decide the fate of the ne gotiations." Hostilities had done their worst in Ame- rica. Thenceforth they ceased to be dis- astrous or terrible. The spirit, energy, and resouxp g A..^ n f^^e.. VSStSdr' Stfttey were" in de'TOl^mem^THae u npoten cy of ,-€>rea|} Bri- tai fW todt i ffl CT-'m.l.ffl ow'^ onTMI'ebnntry deiBtfUljteMltifl. ,tJtij" fereigtr commerce was, indQffl9((f(/i_ilhB . mtonent suspended. But amid all the vicissitudes and difficulties of military operations, the great work and agj^J^^dv^S,^^^^^ people of th.g.. on i;'nffl anar~Ey en while arms were silent, foreigiiwlinnierce languished, and muskets and cannons were idle, thousands of shut- tles and millions g |^gg^ks^y.jsm,iafflq ^iQn. e ver-V-.oa &.,c.Q3K rib"nting to ^the independenc e ^t ^l^. Aroerlean people . ■ War ',05perQ y, lugentilty, machinery, and manu- factures, which enabled every workman in England to perform the labor of five men, and every child that of a man, were by English war forced in America by prema- ture commencement to rapid niaturitv. These Avere moral and political European reinforcements to our cause which, from that crisis, carried it onward to wonderful success ; and if, for the conflagration of the semblance of a capital at A\'ashington, and wasting with fire and sword the United States from Plattsburg to New Orleans, peace was procrastinated 1-iy the English- government rejecting disdainfully the sim- ple terms of settlement to which they after- wards came, was there not a just retribu- 216 HARTFORD CONVENTION. [1814. tion and terrible vengeance inflicted by the carnage tlieir troops underwent J)efore New Orleans? The God of battles seemed to be with us from the moment when, after the paeifioaiion of Europe, and all practical ■■■% cause of war at an end, our humble en- treaties for peace were coldly rejected; "a#id, from April, 1814, until December, war was prolonged by Great Britain for havoc and revenge. -!**i,. CHAPTEK X. *■«*,: THE HARTFORD CONVENTION. The aborlion of an enigma which, in 1814, as the Hartford rionveution, became execrable and rontoniptible, was the most alarming occurrence of that j'oav. Like the capture of AVashington, its reaction on its authors was terribly disgraceful ; like our Canadian and southern victories, it invi- gorated the American Union, liasteneil and ameliorated peace, and to the New Orleans triumphs, its ridiculous cat.astrophe ren- dered inevitable by them, was mainly attri- butable. After passing a night in August, 1809, catching codfish on his favorite Banks of Newfoundland, retiring from trouble in Massachusetts to a Russian mission, John Quinay Adams, by s;'^** he deemed the natural transitioiiyom ■q^ftyhtJ'fl.lS^" .b '" "' tory of the 'TJnited Stains, "wr^mg^concern- ing the alleged treason of New^^lSftS, to his associate informer" agamsOf^VOT^Sm Plumer, expressed hit 'SeTTgpT;mil''^*ere would be no impartial chronicle, no true history of their time, in their age, but only fedw^liistoasies.^ or •'^republican b-iatfjjjps, N«wi- England -Jtiistories or Virginian ms- tories. Yet, if not developed by some con- tempotPSKcy- annalist-,' bat 4eft to ppsteritir speculation, must it not" be^ mere thjgory and fable? less historical, phiiSf!ipIiical or veritable than the narrative of oven a Iji- assed eontemporary,;jj^,^£aafiinc;, as 1 do, the diffieiilty of djsooifffJ , or telling the.,truth..oftliaji.J lAfeve, whose first resolution was»j4iiai.|their meetings should be opened by prayer, the next, intensely cabalistic, that the moat in- violable sccresy should bo olisorved by cai'h meinliiu- of the convention, including the scci'ctarv, as to all propositions, deljates anil proceedings : and the third, that not even the duorkcopor, messenger, or assist- ant should Ijo made acquainteil with the pi-o<'ec'lings. Wrapjieil in such dark sus- jiicJMUS si>ci'esy, iif whieli the sen], if ever iiroke, was not inetemled to lie npencil till several years afterwards, wlion a liave jour- nal was unvoileil to face thi' univ(u'sal (iilium by that time fastened on the con- vention, become a proverb of roproiuh, even conlemporaries are loft to gni]ie in the obscurity of mere circumstantial toMti- mony, perplexed by contradictions and pre- judices, invoMng the design whether merely partisan or criminally treasonable, the sectional animosities peculiar to New England conflicting with each other, con- fronting and confounding prepossessions of the rest of the United States, whose na- tional character and existence the Hartford Convention implicated. Of positive proof of treason, so seldom attainable that it is not to be expected, there is none. But Mr. Adams insisted on the fact, overpowered by denials, though supported by circum- stances. Posterity has acquitted and im- mortalized many Sydneys executed for trea/- son, and condemned Burrs acc[uitted of the charge. A\'as Burr guilty of what .Jeffer- son brought him to trial for, and, with his killing Hamilton, sentenced to irrevocable condemnation, like the Hartford Conven- tion, without conviction of any oifence? Adams accused Hamilton of complicity with the convention, whose primary meet- ing at Boston, Adams believed, was post- poned b}' Burr's killing Hamilton, without preventing, however, its final catastrophe at Hartford. But Adams was prejudiced by hereditary hatred of Hamilton, and his suspicious credulity was as unquestionable as his veracity: formidable as an accuser, but fallilile as a M-itness. Not till ten years after the moral public execution of that ill-fated cabal, appeared its first and best apology, in twelve letters, addressed to tlic people of ^Massachusetts, Ijy Harrison ("Jray Otis, called by Mr. Adams its putative father, followed, nine years later, liy a history of the convention, Ijy its secre- tary, Theodore 1 'wight, who may be con- sidered its voluntary executor in his own wrung. In a dull work uf more than four hundred irksome pages, Dwigbt attempted its deience ))y repeating the superannuated and egregious alisiirdities of Jeiferson's'hos- tility to tlio Federal Constitution and subser- viency tci I'ram-e. and Madison's subjection to JelforsDii, as causes and excuses of the Hartfnrd ( 'unviMitiou ! AVithout method, scarcfdy chronology, f^n^l with ii:\\- authentic documi'uts, the argument of tluxt feeble at- tempt is, that a score of New England law- yers, locked up in clandestine cabal, foment- Chap. X.] INFAMY OF THE CONVENTION. :217 ing the unnatural and unwise antipathies alid "narrow prejudices of an eastern party against southern fellow-countrymen, inas- much as they w«re well reputed as lawyers, .punctual in the payment of their debts and performance of their religious exercises, therefore could not be inimical to the Ame- rican Union, but served it faithfully, by resisting what many New England acts of authority, with almost insane dread," de- nounced as Jefferson and Madison's coali- tion with Bonaparte to overcome Great Britain and enslave America, together with all mankind. Tinctured, but not stultified, with that infatuation, Mr. Otis' twelve let- ters to the people of Massachusetts, pre- ceding Dwight's history nine years, even then tardy in their appearance, are the eloquent and best defence of the Hartford Convention, on which its humbled apolo- .gists must chiefly rely for pardon. With the beginning of Monroe's conciliatory presidency, in March 1817, Mr. Otis was chosen by Massachusetts to the Senate of the United States to represent her degrad- ed national character, diminished influence, and almost repudiated claims for militia services in the war. With fine talents, fascinating manners, southern predilec- tions, and great experience in legislation, he bore up, during some time of tribulation, against the disadvantages besetting a mem- ber of the Hartford Convention in Con- .gress, till, at length, unable to endure such mortification to the end of his term, Mr. Otis resigned his seat in the Senate, in June 1822, to be succeeded by one of the most acceptable and high-spirited of eastern le- .gislators, the late James Lloyd. The twelve letters published at Boston in 1824, were then Mr. Otis's testamentary political .disposition, leaving the once commanding State of Massachusetts to the mercy of the Union in which he deplores its annihila- tion, Mr. Otis's letters being called forth by -Governor Eustis, the Secretary of "War in 1812, in his firstpublic address as Governor of Massachusetts, when chosen to that place over Mr. Otis as his competitor, denouncing the Hartford Convention as a danger and dishonor to New England. Memorably admonishing are his confes- sions, that the " history of human credulity aflTords no example t)f a more general illu- sion than prevails in relation to the origin and objects of the Hartford Convention. A deep-rooted and indefinable prejudice is formed among thousands lyhose distemper- ed imaginations resist the prescriptions of truth and reason, choose to believe that it was organized first for some bad purposes. Or that it spontaneously brooded over some atrocious conspiracy, heresy, or schism. The rising generation," add his precious compunctions, " must be taught to believe that the convention was a cabal menacing the integrity of the Union, arffl disgraceful to the State its parent." Mi-. Otis, to this edifying confession, adds, "that hereafter similar associations for political purposes will be inexpedient, unwise, and impolitic. Public opinion," he says, " has become con- solidated in disapprobation of such con- ventions for political objects." It is a prin- ciple conceded, he thinks,- that all meetings of delegates from State Legislatures to consult on political objects confided to the national government are, in their nature, inexpedient. Such invaluable acknow- ledgment wrung from the conscience of one brought to the confessional, attests the wis- dom of Washington's farewell advice on union. Another, and more celebrated Mas- sachusetts senator went still further than Mr. X)tis to exculpate himself from the much dreaded stigma of being suspected of the established infamy, whether well or ill founded, of the Hartford Convention. Not only in the Senate did Mr. Webster repel that insinuation, but when a Boston gentleman, of respectable family, fortune, and character, and of the federal parW, Mr. Theodore Lyman, published there Mr. Adams- impeachment of the Hartford Con- vention, and connected Mr. Webster's name with it, he instantly prosecuted the charge as a libellous calumny, and in open court, as a witness, testified against Mr. Lyman. Whatever the perhaps inscrutable truth may be, the salutary and certain results are more important than ascertaining the fact of guilt or innocence. A secret as- sembly of State representatives, in time of war, to counteract the national governinent, incurs punishment more severe than by- legal prosecution. Through all the doubte and darkness under which the Hartford Convention is doomed to lie buried, pene- trates the clear and cheering truth, that American love of union is a national senti- ment beyond question, which, with over- whelming power, consigns to infamy those even suspected of designing its destruction. Hamilton and Jefierson, before that power, laid down, the one. his fears of anarchy% the other of monarchy, at Washington's feet, in obedience to the Federal Constitu- tion, which certainly the two, perhaps all three, doubted. Burr's unproved conspi- racy and the undetected Hartford Conven- tion daily dishonor their authors, while foreign wars, intestine controversies, acces- sions by purchase and conquest of vast ter- ritories, have corroborated a union becom- ing the republican empire of all America, which it is criminal to be suspected of a design to dismember. Jefferson's election to the presidency in 1800, and purchase of Louisiana from Bo- naparte in 1803, caused unquestionably great discontent in New England. During the long and eventful session of Congress in 1803-4, William Plumer, a senator from •218 DESIGN OF DISUNION. New Hampshire, -was, as he afterwards confessed, one of several federal members of Congress from the New England States who projected the establishment of a sepa- rate government there. They complained •that the slave-holding States had acquired by •meansof their slaves agreater increase ofthe slaveholding representatives in the House of Representatives, than was just ; too much revenue was raised in the Northern States and spent in the Southern and Western ; and -the states, to be formed out of Louisiana would annihilate the influence oftheNorth- -ern States in the government. Mr. Plumer Tvas informed, he said, by one of the par- ties to this project, that there was to be a select meeting of the leading Federalists of New England at Boston, in the autumn of 1804, to consider and recommend measures for a government for the Northern States, and that Alexander Hamilton had consent- ed to attend it. But Mr. Plumer found, on his return to New Hampshire, a great mar jority of the leading Federalists there op- posed to the project, as appeared to be the result of his limited inquiries in Massachu- setts, and Hamilton's death, he says he was told, prevented the meeting in Boston, though the project was not abandoned. Convmced of his own error, Mr. Plumer •abandoned it, and did all he could to defeat the attempt when he avers it was made during the restrictive system in 1809, and the war of 1812. Such is the positive, testi- mony, and all there is positive, by a respect- able witness, who, convinced of his error, informed against his own participation in the alleged offence. The design of dismemberment thus faintly and briefly breathed in 1803, slumbered, Mr. Adams «aid, till 1807, when revived by tiie embargo to prevent a war, which it provoked and aggravated, grievously fomenting the morbid discontent of New England. A letter from the fiovernor of Nova Scotia, never •published, whence or to whom addressed ■not divulged, but «hown at the time, Mr. Adams said, to him and others, just before the seizure of the frigate Chesapeake, aroused in his mind almost unnatural fears •of treasonable designs in Massachusetts, which haunted him ever afterwards, as those suspected of such designs thought with as little reason as all must now con- sider their irrational dread of French inter- ference in America, a fear natural to Eng- lishmen, but which their influence suc- ceeded in spreading throughout America. That Mr. Adams was not in 1807 aware of Mr. Plumer'g avowals, is more than proba- , ble, so that his decided movement, begin- ning from the BritMh governoi''8 undivulged letter, must be ascribed to his own unfa- vorable impressions of his recent party as- sociates. The governor's letter alone can hardly account for what Mr. Adams did. 4t^ imported that the British government. {1«1 — . typographical attraction of italics, capitals and rhetorical language, Mr. Otis displays as what he calls the egg laid in the Hart- ford Convention, hatched by daylight under the wing and incubation of the national eagle. Still more discordant was the spirit than the letter of that hostile act. In all American wars, there will be a peace party ; war aggravating party spirit to which free speech and a free press give outrageous but legitimate vent. Chatham thanked God, in the British parliament, that America had resisted. Dexter declared that opposition must speak so loud as to be over- heard by the enemy. Extreme party hostili- ty, nevertheless, like other warfare, risks de- struction, and success is its only justification. The Hartford Convention was one of those sectional and distant combinations to which" this wide-spread, confederated Union is lia- ble, justly suspicions and unquestionably unwarrantable, whether criminal or lawful, or excusable, provoked by no intolerable sufiering, neither famine, pestilence nor the ordinary calamities of war, whose severest infliction was privation of commerce, en- terprise and gain, not afflicting New Eng- land alone, but common, in great measure, to all the United States ; not deprived of subsistence, raiment or habitation, while, by turning the versatile genius of the East- ern people to manufactures, the hotbed of war fomented what has proved as pro» fitable as their commerce. That Convention, without treasonable act or hostile collision, contemplated the separate government of one or more States, which was dissolution of the Union ; leading to partial peace and ulti- mate alliance with the enemy, which, Mr. Otis confessed, would have prostrated pub- lic credit and private property, real and personal, annihilated the public funds, and increased every calamity complained of. Granting the severe pressure and question- able constitutionality of the embargo, still, when war ensued, the first misdeed was withholding from national service and command the militia, and from the Presi- dent, his constitutional right to judge when they are wanted, an error, as since ad- judged unanimously by the Supreme Court of tie United States, so flagrant that it could not be without unworthy prejudices and sectional disloyalty. Apologists for the Hartford Convention urge, the subsequent South Carolina nuUifloation ; but that was neither plotted in secret nor armed against war. Other analogies, argued from legisla- tive, judicial or popular resistance to federal supremacy in several states, were but occa- sional jars in the intestine working of the complex machinery of State and United States government, faintly resembling the organized and confederated disorganization of several States combining to defeat a foreign war. The Hartford Convention stands alone in its design, mishap, disgrace, Chap. X.] JOHN QUINCT ADAMS. 243 and catastrophe ; condemning Massachu- setts, Mr. Otis bitterly deplores "to stand in a -white sheet in the Halls of Congress, and letting loose a gulf stream of abuse on the most honored of her sous, laboring in vain to roll back, like Sisyphus, the continu- ally recoiling fragment of popularity :" in vain, innocent of hostile collision or trea- sonable act, nevertheless guilty and justly condemned for infamous design against the Union. Former good character, urged for its members, every lawyer in the Convention knew that courts of justice treatas testimony so weak as to be often suspicious. The offence 'j{ the Hartford Convention, though it may have violated no law, shocked public opinion and national pride. When an individual treasonably resists government, alleging that it infringes the Constitution, it has provided judicial tribunals to pass between them. But when States by legislative acts resist acts of Congress, and command their citizens to resist them, the dissension be- comes civil war. Whether the people of a State can leave the Union without breaking the federal compact, may be a constitutional question. No such power is in the charter, and, according to Mr. Adams, is like an in- dividual's right to commit suicide or set fire to his house in a populous city, thereby endangering conflagration of all the rest. Governor Eustis orMassachusetts, Govern- or Plumer of New Hampshire, and others of less authority, might not, however, have sentenced the Hartford Convention to in- famy, had not the most vigorous and for- midable of controversialists, from the Pre- sidential chair, struck his mortal blow of remediless denigration. In the agonizing crisis (to borrow his owu words applied to another crisis), of his presidential contest for re-election, Mr. Adams impeached the Hartford Convention of treason. The ac- cused, who- have a right to be heard, denied the charge as not only a base calumny, but uttered for the reward of apostasy. Having as Senator voted for the embargo, avowedly ■without deliberation, and merely, as he de- clared, because recommended by President Jefferson, they charged Mr. Adams with turning informer against his party and his State ; and inheriting his father's hatred of Hamilton and other leaders of the Federal party, to whom father and son imputed the loss of the former's re-election, the son went over to Jefferson for vengeance and for office. To atone for a load of political guilt, indi- vidual and hereditary, prove the sincerity of his abjuration of party, place an impas- sable barrier between them and him, and attest the sincerity of his conversion, private denunciation of his former friends was re- quired and given ; and -within a few months ttie Bussian mission followed, leading to ' other promotion, and eventually to the Pre- sidency. To this retort, Mr. Adams replied, that the first act of his public life in the Senate of Massachusetts, was a proposal to admit to the council of that State represent- atives of the minority in the two Houses. And certainly his whole public career, as Secretary of State, President, and member of Congress, notwithstanding the violence of his temper, was remarkably abstemious of party and proscription. Those he accused of treason furthermore denied that he pro- duced any proof, and asserted that, in place of witness, he was himself a mere party, twenty years after the secret of his treach- ery came to light, turned from accuser to accused ; not naming any one living as guilty, but fixing his charge on the dead, and on them not individually. That Uriah Tracy, it was said, well aware of Adams' hereditary resentment against Hamilton, should be accused, after both were dead, of divulging to Adams so disgraceful an im- putation on Hamilton, as that he was to be military leader of the northern confe- deracy, was treated as a palpable absurd- ity. James Hillhouse, John Davenport, John Cotton Smith, Simeon Baldwin, Ben- jamin Tallmadge, and Calvin Goddard, Tracy's associates from Connecticut in Con- gress, by solemn public denials repelled the charge as far as by negative testimony was possible : all gentlemen of character for truth as good as Mr. Adams. HLUhouse and Goddard were indeed members of the Hartford Convention ; from which incredu- lity might infer their original misconduct : and notwithstanding Mr. Adams' disa- vowal to General Hamilton's son of belief in his father's connection with the design of disunion in 1803, in which the Hartford Convention was said to originate, yet President Adams was known to harbor that suspicion. Having left in print a de- claration that it was not improbable that, at some fiiture day, a sense of solemn duty to his country might require him to disclose the evidence he possessed, perhaps his forth- coming diary may clear up the hitherto in- scrutable mystery. Whatever passions, prejudices, and errors there must be in those forty volumes of impressions, they can hardly fail to explain so important a circum- stance in his life as the Hartford Conven- tion. During three years immediately before, and three years after, its occurrence, Mr. Adams was in Europe, and acknowledges that he knew nothing about it. All he could do was to trace its conjectured descent " from the indubitable design of 1803, matur- ed, he declared, in 1808, to rotten nothing- ness in 1814 ; and while ever his memory endures, infamous, if not indisputably so. The magic of success, especially by vic- tory in arms, which strikes terror or joy upon the most sensitive fibres of human nature, fear and imagination, sudden, dif- fusive and powerful as electricity, winged the deeply impressive influences of Jackson's unexpected and astonishing triumph to the. 244 MASSACHUSETTS. remotest parts of North America, filling the hearts of all the war's supporters with ex- ultation, and of all its factious antagonists with dismay. As soon as, if not before, the Hartford envoys could skulk home, i*unning the gauntlet of pcorn more stinging than the lash, and with no solace from any sympathy, the Boston tone of defiance fell to self-abasement. Distrust of and alienation from their country, confidence in the overpowering might of its 'great enemy, assurance of British success and American disgrace, were changed to shame and remorse by amazing victory, crowned by as unlooked for and almost unwelcome ■peace. By special Providence, Louisiana,the cause and argument of eastern estrange- ment from the Union, was the cause and place of its glorious preservation, joined to the east by sympathy like the overruling necessity which, stronger than constitu- tional admission, adopted that illegitimate sister into the family of jealous American States. Constitutional objections, party and personal repugnance, were drowned by shouts of universal triumph. Pilgrim de- scendants, in all the austerity of Puritan sectarianism, embraced French and Spanish Koman Catholic fellow countrymen two thousand miles off. Jefferson's purchase from Bonajarte was consecrated like the Plymouth Kock and Bunker Hill. The very slaves who-defended New Orleans were ap- plauded. Scales fell from the eyes of the sharpest vision to interest, theretofore seal- ed to the eastern advantages of the magni- ficent southwest, whose Kentucky savages, Tennessee barbarians and motley Creoles had saved the American soil from pollu- tion, the country of the whole United States from dishonor, and the entire American Union from destruction, almost without help from any arms but their own, none, military or civil, from New England. The British army did not retreat in more pre- cipitate or clandestine discomfiture than the government of Massachusetts from all but factious and contemptible oppo- sition to the war or the Union. The same Senate which resolved it unbecoming to re- joice in the victories of their own Boston built frigate, manned by New England sea- men, on the report of a committee on the 13th of February, 1815, of which Mr. Jo- siah Quincy was a member, ordered a vote of thanks to General Jackson and the brave troops under his command, for the glorious and signal victory obtained by them over the British army near the city of New Or- leans. The place mentioned for felicitation was the key and mart of those southwestern States which the press, the pulpit, the ex- change and the legislature of Massachusetts, by inimical proceedings and outrageous terms, had divorced from the Union as un- worthy of it with the thirteen original States. Mr. Quincy, who in Congress vehemently [1814. , — contested the admission of Louisiana into the confederacy, rejoiced when he must have regretted that" Louisiana had rescued the Union from dismemberment, and closed, the war in a blaze of glory. Narrow-mind- ed Massachusetts, who as early as 1643 strove to exclude even Connecticut from the primeval consociation; from 1803 to 1812 repelled Louisiana, and then all the south- west, joined, in 1815, in a national shout of far di^taot victory, while part of the old Bay State was a conquered British pro-' vince. Mr. Quincy, driven from nations ') distinction to the mayoralty of Boston, un- derwent that searing of blinded sight which opened to behold the commerce, the manu- factures, and the advancement altogetlier of his discontented birth-place, greatly aug- mented by those national dev.elopmenta which render New Orleans the correlative of Boston, illustrated by the glory of the southwest, and without disunion by peace indefinitely perpetuated. Yielding, however, the vanquished fo- mentors of disloyalty subnutted with the worst grace. On the 28th February, 1815, tjis repubbcans of the Senate addressed Gen. Jackson in what they called the small voice of a minority of a remote State, of 'little re- pute in arms and less in patriotism, declarr mg that they would not then have obtruded, had not Mr. Holmes' resolution expressive of thanks experienced an extraordinary fate : committed, and after much delay and embarrassment reported, with an offensive preamble, denouncing the war as unjust, the government as improvident and wicked, with extreme virulence and invective, ap- proving, only of what related to defensive warfare ; which the republicans were con- strained to oppose as censure under pretext of approbation. Such was the last folly of that faction derided by Cobbett as the " serene highnesses, Cossacks and poor creatures of Massachusetts." Perpetual peace, a dream of some enthu- siasts in all ages, is repose more fatal than occasional war. Commercial people, steeped in mere acquisition, become debased bke miserly individuals, and can be roused from' selfish pursuits to high-minded individual- ity as well as nationality, raised from ig- noble traffic to nobler aspirations, only by the shock of hostilities. Conflict with their own national government had long sharpened wits, but attacks of solemn ene- mies were necessary to awake manlier energies. Sordid motive for disaffeciion forbade lofty or daring action, which vent- ed itself in vilification and petty malice. When, therefore, a whole country was re- lieved by distant successes, which rivetted every State to the union of all, the re- morseful discord quailing, surrendered, re- joicing for victories which it envied, but dared not disown. National joy, reluc- tantly re-echoed from the depths of eastern Chap. X.l JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. 245 disloyalty, could not be flalrowed to defen- sive triumphs by the metaphysics of fac- tion. Insulting quodlibets of the press, innuen- does of politicians, and pulpit fulminations —how their tone changed 1 Madison's wis- dom was admired, his firmness applauded by outrageous revilers, who, a few years after his retirement from the presidency, performed pilgrimages to his Virginia home- stead as a shrine, and extolled its modest master as the model of American states- men, his politics as the true standard of constitutional principles. In that worship of success, transforming a demon to a demi- god, some of the most unbridled censors of the war President were among the foremost adorers of the father of the Constitution. The Boston Gazette gave out that the legis- lature of Massachusetts had resolved to sus- pend their unexecuted law for raising State troops, except as to one thousand men ; but a committee had been appointed to the cha- racteristic duty of reporting what additional remuneration ought to be allowed to the Massachusetts members of the late Hartford Convention. From the lofty tribunal of chief magis- tracy, John Quincy Adams passed sen- tence on those he tried, as "certain leaders of a party which had the management of the legislature (of Massachusetts] in their hands," marked them one and all with what he termed "the stamp of indelible reproba- tion," particularly Mr. Otis, of whom with peculiar sharpness of sarcasm he said, that, "having as putative father enjoyed unrival- led the honors, he was disposed to bestow on others the shame of its paternity." Although he reached the presidency without a popu- lar majority, and was expelled from it with popular disfavor, yet Mr. Adams' character stood too high and fair, and his talents were too commanding for his word to be disbelieved in what he positively affirmed against those of his own State and neighbor- hood and party, with whom he long lived in social and political fraternity. On his authority the Hartford Convention is exe- crated. As foreign minister, Mr. Adams was superior to most and equal to almost any of the many able men commissioned by this country to defend its interests in Europe. Bred to that vocation, familiar with, its forms, habits and conventionalities, in its princely, noble and other elevated inter- course, he was simple, candid and manly, without the derogatory obsequiousness to rank and splendid hospitalities to which American representatives so often sacrifice their political usefulness. As Secretary of State, his conduct and public correspondence kept up the high character of that depart- ment. And as President, his administration was economical and temperate, cherishing the welfare of all parts of the Federal Union. But soon after losingthe presidency, he violated the examples of all his prede- cessors, one of them his own father, a much better parliamentarian than himself, by plunging into that boisterous sea of troubles, the House of Representatives : rash and fatal plunge, into a purgatory where whatever sins he had committed or should, instead of being expiated, were aggravated by the turbulent violence of his temper, con- tinually betrayed to excesses. With supe- rior literary and scientific attainments, lin- guist, poet, geometrician, dramatist, one of thebestbiblical scholars of his day, andwith many other talents for happy, dignified and admired retirement, convivial tastes, col- loquial powers, perfect health, easy for- tune, repute not only American but Euro- pean, to constitute a household deity, like Jefferson and Madison, which even the warrior Jackson became without literary attraction — Mr. Adams preferred sixteen years of tumultuous controversy in Congress ; and what might have been the brightest period of his power, as a shrine, he made a last stage of undignified squab- bles on a hustings. In a splendid hall, of marvellous inaptitude for hearing and total indifierence to speaking, he commanded the attention bestowed on very few and that rarely : yet no member combined so much eminence with so little influence. Indis- putable homage to his superior information and experience in all branches and affairs of government, foreign and domestic, to- gether with acknowledged purity and weight of character, well husbanded and used, might have rendered his legislative more potent than his executive word. His word, which should have been a law, was that of a disorderly wrangler in a fluctu- ating assembly biennially renewed from remote regions, with various views, among whom no one seemed to delight more in noisy conflict, or voted oftener in small sectarian, ineffectual and condemned mi- norities than the ex-president. Although not much accustomed to public speaking till more than sixty years old, he was a frequent, strenuous and passionate declaimer, without the rhetorical finish which ornamented his written efforts, any grace of action, commanding tone or per- son, but forcible and eloquent from earn- estness and passionate logic, the. best ele- ments of commanding oratory. On one occasion he held the floor the time al- lowed by rule, for thirteen successive days of one protracted speech. Owing to the licentious extravagance of his conduct, he was more than once in danger of censure or expulsion, which he anxiously and ad- mirably prevented by inimitable powers of discussion and deprecation. In such per- Eetual turmoil he was never the author, ardly the mover, of any great national measure. During his service in Congress 24ft he was always in opposition, generally with extreme antagonism to successive adiuinis- trationa ; latterly with outrageous aversion to the slave States, and all acquisition of further southern territory, which, as Secre- tary of State and President, he as warmly countenanced; as much against Texas and Mexico, as he was for Louisiana and Florida. Vindication, which he ardently espoused, of what he deemed the right of petition, was rather an English than American consti- tutional position, more sentimental than rational, transient than lasting, and local than national. Insatiate of living notoriety as well as posthumous fame, for such grati- fication he spent many of his latter years in turmoil on the stage, where indeed he bravely maintained himself to die at last as he desired, in the Capitol and of emotion. One year before his glorious death and im- mense post-mortem glorification, no mem- ber of the whole House of Representatives was so odious to so many others, or with- out distinction of party, sc decried. For he provoked the animosity of the repre- sentatives of fifteen of the thirty States by his unmeasured, and as they charged, ma- lignant, envenomed, vindictive efiorts for their destruction, because their votes pre- "vented his re-election to the presidency. While he lived and railed and defied in the twenty-ninth Congress, hatred of him was nearly as universal and intense, as, in the thirtieth Congress, when dying in their midst, the feeling, without one dissenting voice, was reverential and applausive. As Senator and Secretary of State, no one did more to extend the United States where slavery prevails, to which as President be seemed as well disposed. As member of the House of Representatives, no one so furiously and commandingly brandished firebrands of disunion. Though Mr. Adams did not live by many years as long as his father, yet he was a man of remarkably robust frame and excel- lent constitution. A female, when he was first made President, complaining to a mem- ber of Congress that she could not see the chief magistrate as she desired, " You have only," said he, " to go down to the Potomac bridge any morning about day-light, and you may see him swimming in the river." After he was seventy years old, that con- tinued to be his habit, and it was said that he often swam across the Potomac where it was more than a mile wide. Although com- monly taciturn and often abrupt, Mr. Adams was a very pleasant companion in society, relished with gentlemanlike enjoyment the pleasures of the table, fond of good food, choice wines, and all other resources of con- viviality. One Sunday evening, while Se- cretary of State, entertaining at his own house Nicholas Biddle and other gentle- men, becoming much animated with de- Boription of dramatic performances, of which JOHN QTTINCT ADAMS. ♦ [1814. he was very fond, he started from the table to the middle of ibe floor, and performed an imitation of Kemble pronouncing the curse in King Lear. Through life a systematic student, he was indefatigable in reading and writing, and, as the world is to find, kept one of ihe most voluminous diaries ever put to paper. Exemplary in the whole routine of domestic duties, he was liberal, hospitable, and placable, though subject to gusts of passion and fits of taciturnity. Churches and theatres he frequented with the utmost assiduity, and so blended political with re- ligious obligation, as to deem it incumbent on him to attend the miscellaneous divine service in the Capitol every Sunday morning, going to some other place of worship in the afternoon, and often to a thiifd in the ^ening. When he first entered the Hall to resume his seat, after some months' absence during his illness, the whole House of Represent- atives, every member, rose 'as he walked down the middle aisle, and by a salute of silent homage welcomed their illustrious as- sociate to a place from which, for fourteen years and more, he had never been absent, in all seasons and weathers, night and day, and not only present, but certainly taking a much more constant interest than any other member in whatever was going on. Always present in body and mind from that time till his death, though his memory may have suffered with his health, his reason and conversation appeared unimpaired ; but I think he made only two speeches, and neither of them with his usual vivacity. The last speech he made was against an appropriation for the Spanish slaves who had been (as I contended unlawfully), set free by his exertions, reappearing as advo- cate in their cause before the Supreme Court of the United States, after thirty years ab- sence from it. The House was in committee of the whole on the state of the Union, with the rule in force which prevented debate. The Spanish minister had strongly urged, the President recommended, the Secretary of State by special letter pressed, the Senate, almost, I beheve, without serious opposition, had passed, and the proper committee of the House of Representatives reported for adop- tion, the appropriation which Mr. Adams opposed^ He rose, and with strong feeling, asked leave to address the committee of the whole, which they had no power to give, con- trary toaruleoftheHousethatwas irrevers- ible in committee, who nevertheless gave leave by an irregular consent to a venerable and moribund applicant. Asking leave for a few minutes, he spoke for forty with ani- mation and force, appealing to humanity and passion ; and such was the efiect T)f his expostulation that the gra;nt was rejected by a large majority. "So his last speech was against slavery, as no dpubt he would have wished it should be, forTiis feeling on that subject had become overpowering. Chap. X.] HIS DEATH. 247 On the 21st February, 1848, he underwent his death-stroke in attempting to give utter- ance to an emotion. The House of Ee- presentatiyes were voting thanks to seve- ral of the generals in the Mexican war, to which he was opposed, not only because of his disapproval of the war and the adminis- tration charged with it, but because, as he objected, some of the generals were under charges to be tried for misconduct. Utter- ing his nay to the clerk's call for votes, with the petulant vehemence he often affect- ed, as if not merely to negative but stigma- tize the proposition, and soon afterwards trying, as is believed, to rise and say some- thing, he sunk forward in his seat senseless, in a fit of mortal paralysis. A crowd of members rushed to his help, and keeping my place at some distance, I did not see him till lifted up and borne off by Dr. George Fries, one of the Ohio members, who, attended by many others, carried him through the middle aisle out of the House, by the centre door, into the totunda, where Dr. Fries in his lap supported Mr. Adams, tiU a sofa was brought, on which he was laid and taken into the Speaker's room. Almost inanimate, he is said to have uttered a few words, " This is the last of earth," as his valedictory to the world, from which he had prepared for conspicuous departure. His family, friends, and several ministers of the Gospel, soon came and prayed for him, not, however, without misunderstanding as to whfch clergyman was best entitled, and further heartburning afterwards concern- ing their invitations to the funeral, as pas- sionately preached by one of the disap- pointed from the pulpit the following Sun- day. Few braver men have lived or died in emulous vanity of patriotism, like a soldier in the breach or martyr at the stake, intent on daily as well as posthumous celebrity. Mr. Adams longed to die in the Capitol, and surpassed Chatham's death, which he emu- lated. Chatham did not die in Parliament, but fainted in the House of Lords, when speaking against the Duke of Richmond's motion for acknowledging American inde- pendence, in 1778, was taken home, and lin- gered a fortnight before he expired. If Adams could have expired when, as well as where, he wished, it would have been next day after his attack, the 22d February, Washington's birth-day, instead of living till the evening of the 23d, on which memorable day, how- ever, another remarkable coincidence sig- nalized his demise. From the Duke of Orleans' first installation on the French throne, Mr. Adams confidently predicted that he could .not remain there ; anointed neither by the grace of God nor the sove- reignty of the people, vrith no principle for his diadem, which, therefore, Mr. Adams insist- ed, he could not wear to the end of life. The from attempted renovation of decaying roy- alty in Europe, struck out a republic like the American, driving the last French mo- narch from his throne as Adams' prophetic spirit left the earth. Hated and vilified as he had been in the Capitol, his death was instantly followed there by a gush of unani- mous veneration for his memory, and un- bounded respect for his mortal remains. Adjourning at once on his apparent, the House of Representatives adjourned again the next two days, awaiting his actualde- mise, and then the rest of the week for his ob- sequies. The Hall and his chair were draped in mourning on the day of his funeral, and many of the houses of Washington in like manner. Obituaiy notices were pronounced by several members of each House. Forty thousand copies of them were distributed by the House, together with the funeral discourse pronounced there by one of the chaplains in presence of both Houses. A committee was appointed to arrange the funeral ceremonies, and another committee of thirty members, one for each State, to attend the body to the birth and burial-place of the deceased at Quincy, near Boston. Transported by steam and announced by electricity throughout the long viaticum of several hundred miles from Washington to Quincy, much of the whole intermediate population of all parties and colors, and both sexes, thronged the city streets and flocked to the places of temporary deposit, reverentially to behold the face, exposed to view by a glass covering on the upper part of the coffin. Railroad companies and other conveyances refused pay for the transpor- tation. Cities defrayed the expenses of the convoy during its stay within them re- spectively. City mayors, clergymen, and other panegyrists, vied with each other in eulogies on the departed patriot, whose remains were displayed at Philadelphia in the hall where Independence was de- clared ; at New York, among four hundred thousand inhabitants, increased from forty during Mr. Adams' manhood ; and atBoston, surrounded by aU surviving tokens of that birthplace of riotous American independ- ence. At Quincy, when interred, applause was first tempered with candor in the final funeral discourse, which, like obituary of Egyptian kings, awarding to the illustrious dead many excellencies, sketched also some of his deficiencies, denying him the great- est quality of a statesman, talent to rule men, to found, raise, or overturn States. The last offices of the pall-bearers being performed, the committee of thirty re- turned to Boston to partake of the elegant hospitalities of that city, where two Evm- dred and more sat down to a luxurious en- tertainment, refreshed by the viands of America - and the wines of Europe. At every plate, in mid-winter of a harsh cli- people of Paris verified his prediction, and I mate, a bouquet of flowers cast fragrance 248 HARRISON GRAY OTIS. around the table, as the hotbed of a flinty soU forces the ingenuity of New England to flou- rishing industrial development. Members of Congress were there from Attacapas and Florida, where no winter rages ; from cotton growing Mississippi; from Chicago, once far west, already but mid-way in the march of republican empire ; from nullifying South Carolina; and all the other slave- holding states ; of whom Mr. Adams had more than once said, during the last year of his life, that slavery must be extirpated, though in torrents of blood. "When his apotheosis was elevated, perhaps his spirit among the guests in unity at the Bos- ton festival of merry mourners, in their midst arose a bright octogenarian, with still sparkling eye and musical voice, whom the almost deified departed had marked with the stamp of indelible repro- bation, as putative father of the Hartford Convention, renouncing the shame of its Jtatemity. Appealing with smiles to tite Sympathies of a national auditory, "you see in me," said Harrison Gray Otis, gaily, " a live Hartford Convention man :" and reading portions of the resolutions which he wrote for that body, he asked, " Is there any treason in this 1" For the first time in twenty years Mr. Otis then appeared at ft public meeting, eveii in Boston, after his martyrdom of attempted service in the Senate of the United States, withdrawn from public life, and marked like a regicide for voting the death of his king. Admired as a gentleman, and beloved by many friends, Boston and Massachusetts would still have awarded him public honors ; but exiled from American respect, he was sen- tenced to national disfranchisement. When President Madison cast about- for eminent citizens to appoint for the sussion of peace at St. Petersburg, Mr. Otis' distinguished talents and position were taken into consi- deration, and he might have been selected, instead of Mr. Bayard, to negotiate the peace which, attempting surreptitiously to compel, stripped him of all his well-earned liational honors. His chief, accuser, too, lived to forget Waslyngton's valedictory precept, indig- nantly to frown upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of the country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts: in which backsliding, Mr. Adams, as member of Congress, widely strayed from all his prior ana presidential federalism ; encouraging, by the pernicious example of an eminent statesman, the still grosser deviations" of inferior followers. Neither Hartford Convention, nullification, or ex-presidential denunciation, however, has done more than vulgarize the threat, disparage the States, and denationalize the individuals attempting that patricidal extremity of factious and sectional dis- [1814 I affection, which has been always over- powered hj popular disgust, and frustrated by territorial, more than even constitutional impossibility. Of the committee of thirty members of the House of Representatives, accompanying Mr. Adams'" remains to the place of inter- ment, besides the New England members, some representing districts in other States, were natives of New England, or their sons, and others had been educated there. "When, therefore, the Boston wake closed at mid- night, after pledging the memory of John Quincy Adams, and the health of Harrison Gray Otis, the whole assembly united in singing the venerated Hundredth Psalm : " Te nations ronnd the earth rejoice^ Before the Lord, your sovereign king ; Serve him with cheerful hearts and voice— With allyoor tongaes liis glory sing." The positions, recollections, and vicinage of Boston, combined to render it in 1814, what it has since become, a city of great influence throughout America, by com- merce and intefligence, whose merchants are the best educated in the world. Cam- bridge University, in one of its suburbs, is the oldest, richest, and most celebrated of American colleges. Boston harbor, capable of containing a thousand ships in deep water, protected from storms by numerous islands, from enemies by a narrow entrance, guarded by forts "Warren and Independence, has Copps' Hill, Lexington, Concord, Dor- chester, Roxbury, and omer classic grounds, hard by, to call to mind the daring exploits of an uncommon population, whose intel- ligence, enterprise, and advancement palpi- tate in every throb of American national existence. Not a church, or a forum, a medi- cal hall, or counting-house, but is con- tinually replenished by, and both Houses of Congress acknowledge the intellectual contributions of, those New England States, of which Boston is the capital. The name of mixed reproach, admiration, and aver^ sion by which the whole country is known in others, comes from those thickly settled throughout all its borders, composing a uni- versal Yankee nation. But many innocent persons burned to death from religious ha- tred, the Revolution begun by a respectable mob, and the prevalence of metaphysical re- finements on Christianity, mark apeculiar and intolerant community. While Vice-Pre- sident Gerry at Cambridge, Judge Story at Salem, and the patriarchal ex-president, John Adams, at Quincy, zealously sustained the war, and Madison's administration of it, a large majority united with Mr. Otis, Mr. Quincy, Governor Strong, and others, to oppose both, among them Mr. Thomas H. Perkins, whose princely fortune and esta- blishments were staked on his errand as one of the ministers of the Hartford Con~ vention.' Should the British ^orth American pro- Chap. XI.] UNITED STATES BANK. 249 vinces become parts of these United States, with the Newfoundland fisheries, and shores, the mariners of New England mas- ters of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, must concentrate a large portion of the commerce of the globe in Boston. But without that union, which too many of its angry inhabitants resisted, what now would be Boston, Massachusetts, and New Eng- land? dwindled to worse than insignifi- cance. If disunion was the design of the Hartford Convention, no part of these Unit- ed States has gained so much by its frus- tration as the authors of that design ; whose moral treason and moral punishment are among the memorable events of that war, and sunset pledges of perpetuated free go- vernment. CHAPTER XL THE BANK AS ATTEMPTED AND PREVENTED IN 1814. On the 4th January, 1814, a young man of Long Island, New York, John Lefierts, one of the delegation from that State, pre- sented a petition, signed by one hundred and fifty of its inhabitants, dated 18th De- cember, 1813, praying for the establishment of a national bank, with a capital of thirty millions of dollars; offering to loan half that sum to the government ; and stating as reasons for the bank that its means of lending to government would be much greater than those of the state banks; and all the fiscal concerns of government much better conducted by it than by them. Such, they said, had been its experience. The whole circulating medium of the United States, fifty millions, is now appropriated by the stockholders of the State banks to their own purposes, who, in lieu of it, cir- culate their own paper ; whereas by a na- tional bank, the whole people would receive the benefit of its funds. The political ef- fects, this petition added, would be as useful as its fiscal and economical. It would in- duce men of property all over the United States to invest their means in a national institution tending to perpetuate the Union. On Mr> Calhoun's motion, the petition was printed. On Mr. Leffert's motion, it was referred, contrary to the desire of Mr. Cal- houn and others, to the committee of ways and means, of which Jefferson's son-in-law, John W. Bppes, an uncompromising enemy of a national bank, was chairman-, and the other members were John Taylor, Jonathan Koberts, William Creighton, Willis Als- ton, Alexander MoKim and William Coxe. This important committee consisted, as Mr. Speaker Clay's committees mostly did, of a decided majority of members of his own party. The general principle is to ap- point two to one, or five to two of a commit- tee consisting of seven members, like this. The only Federalist upon it was Mr. Coxe of Burlington, New Jersey, a well-informed and respectable gentleman, but not one who ever made speeches. A majority of the committee at that time denied constifn- tional power to charter a bank. The in- fluence of the Executive, disorder of the currency, and tendency of public opinion, concurred to render eventually such an in- stitution so convenient, as to resolve the question of constitutionality into that of necessity. It was supposed to become es- sentially necessary to the execution of a power expressly delegated by the Constitu- tion. The commercial interest had no re- presentative on that committee but Mr. MoKim, of Baltimore, an intelligent mer- chant ; while the landed interest was largely represented by Mr. Eppes, Mr. Roberts, Mr. Alston, and perhaps Mr. Taylor and Mr. Creighton, wno at any rate were without seaport sympathies with inhabitants of commercial marts, to whom banks were most familiar and acceptable. In a few days, therefore, on the 10th January, 1814, Mr. EppeS reported in three lines of conclu- sive rejection from the committee, that a national bank is unconstitutional ; and there the matter seemed to be ended with a flat negative of the possibility of any bank. On the 4th February, on Mr. Calhoun's motion, however, the committee of the whole House was discharged from fiirther consideration of the report of the committee of ways and means on the petition for a national bank t and both report and petition were referred to the committee of ways and means, vrith instructions to inquire into the expediency of a national bank in the District of Colum- bia ; to be located, the resolution said, in that district. By that escape of the ques- tion of unconstitutionality, the first of Mr. Calhoun's steps in the movement was taken. On the 19th February, Mr. Taylor from that committee reported, accordingly, a bill for the establishment of a bank in the city of Washington, -with a capital of thirty millions of dollars, declaring, however, him- self opposed to the report and plan, which was also opposed by several other members, and had few friend, none probably among 250 SIMON SNYDER. [1814. the President's adherents. Like the first attempt by Mr. Lefferts, that second one by Mr. Calhoun proved an abortion. On the 2d of April, 1814, Felix Grundy moved for the appointmMit of a committee to inquire into the expediency of establishing a national bank ; which resolution, Thomas Newton moved to postpone indefinitely. The motion for indefinite postponement, by ^mixed votes, in which parties were con- founded, was lost hy seventy-one ayes to eighty nays. An amendment to confine the bank within the District of Columbia got only thirty-two votes. Grundy's motion was then carried by a majority of seven, seventy-six to sixty-nine; and. a special committee appointed, consisting of Felix Grundy, Thomas J. Oakley, John C. Cal- houn, Wm. Gaston, John G. Jackson, Wil- liam Lowndes, Artemas Ward, Samuel D. Ingham and Jonathan Fisk. Of these nine, onfy one, Mr. Jackson, was opposed to a bank, and that only as unconstitutional, and there was some prospect of its success. But the session was then too near *n end for anything requiring time and discussion. On the 18tn of Aprd, 1814, Congress ad- journed till the last Monday in October fol- lowing, and thus every efibrt to create a national bank then failed ; Grundy's in April, like Mr. Calhoun's in February, and Lefierts' in January. During those four months the cireulationof the whole country was distempered. Without national finan- cial reservoir, ignorant and avaricious state legislation supplied an unwholesome cur- rency, taken from the turbid and often stagnant pools of local banks erected in virtual, if not actual violation of the Federal Constitution. The course of hostilities, before Congress met again, gave color, if not cause, for resort to a national institution. , The official statements of the twenty-six banks of Massachusetts, rendered in Janu- ary, 1814, and published by order of the Senate of that State on the 20th of that month, reported nearly seven millions of specie in their vaults. Simon Synder, the Governor of Pennsylvania, in his message of the 19th of March, 1814, putting his veto on the bill of the legislature of that State, creat- ing the litter of fo*ty-one banks, declared, "a fact, well ascertained, that immense sums. of specie have been drawn from the banks of Pennsylvania and certain other States, to pay balances for British goods, which Eastern mercantile^ cupidity has smuggled into the United States, liie de- mand for specie, has in consequence been, and is still so great, that the banks in Phila- delphia and in some other parts have stopped discounting any new paper. Shall we in- crease this pressure ? Shall we indirectly aid our internal and external enemies to destroy our fiinds and embarrass the government, \iy creating fort j-one new banks, which must have recourse for specie to that already much exhausted source ? Is there an intelh-' gent man in Pennsylvania who believes that a bank note of any description is the reprer. sentative of specie ? Forty-one new. banks, . with a nominal capital of seventeen millions of dollars, upon the bare payment of one- fifth part, shall have the right to throw into circulation an additional overwhelming, flood of paper money 1" The banks which flooded the State with paper, and ruined hundreds of people, in- toxicated the prosperity and swelled the seeming capital of the whole commonwealth. Those who endorsed for each other to bor- row credit of the banks, compelled to pay when they could not, were many of them ruined. The sheriff sold the houses they built and farms they improved by bank dis- counts ; but the houses and farms remained in the hands of other owners, and the, in- fatuation continued unabated. One of the most respectable members of that legisla- ture, Mr. Thomas Sergeant, voted with the majority to overcome the veto, for fear, he. said, of its recoil. TJie year before he voted against the bank bill which provided for twenty banks. The exasperated mercenaries who solicited them threatened to resume the effort next year for forty instead of twenty ; for why, said those ignorant and rapacious men, should the city of Philadelphia make, all the money for the State? Accordingly, ' when their throat was realized in 1814, by a bill for forty, Mr. Sergeant and the Go- vernor's nephew, George Kremer, voted for the forty, not because they approved them, but dreaded an infliction die year after of eighty. In such geometrical ratio ofusurpation have those scourges of Ameri- can industry and morality multiplied tUl near a thousand disorder the currency, im- poverish the community, and grind the poor. The tanner governor of Pennsylvania was the first of that Democratic dynasty of chief magistrates, ruling, as he said, by com- mon sense instead of the lawyer learn- ing of common law, triumphantly chosen throughout his constitutional term of nine years, as Shakspeare's grave-digger, philo- sophizing on the skulls of lawyers, states- men and courtiers, had said, '* a tanner shall last you nine years." In spite of his eloquent -remonstrance, pregnant with the wisdom of political economy, the constitu- tional two-third rule of lawyers, bankers, brokers, speculators and their creatures in the legislature, vanquished the veto, and let loose the ravages of irredeemable paper mo- ney. Science, experience, the Constitution and common sense contended in vain against avarice and fraud trampling down all obsta^ cles at Harrisburg, as on such occasions they always have at London and at Paris. But the Regent Duke of Orleans, with the splen- did aristocracy of France, in 1790, and the Premier. Pitt with the commons, prelates Chap. XI.] STATE BANKS STOP PAYMENT. iSl and peerage of -Great Britain, in 1797, yield- ed to the paper storm, which the tanner go- vernor resisted, though in vain, in 1814. A member of the State Senate of Pennsyl- vania, then dawning, who afterwards fell a blazing meteor from the firmament of banks, in 1814 a young man of fine talents, temper and address, well educated, and im- proved by the finish of European travel, Nicholas Biddle, was one of the minority who stood by Simon Snyder against that reckless and senseless revival of continental money, issued on corporate, so much worse than public credit. Another, who, as Se- cretary of the Treasury, struggling to undo Jackson's soldier grip of the Bank of the United States, tearing out its vital deposits, when by Nicholas Biddle as defyingly de- fended as assaulted, William J. Duane, who mediated in that battle of giant com- batants, resolved to rule or ruin — likewise in the crisis of 1814, as a member of the Pennsylvania legislature, voted with the mi- nority, vainly sustaining Governor Snyder. The banks of Boston, full of iU-got gain, those of Philadelphia, New York and Bal- timore, drained nearly to emptiness, the capture of Washington on the 24th of Au- gust, 1814, brought on the panic which was instantly followed by the stroke of palsy. The banks of that forlorn metropolis fell empty into the enemy's hands. The nine banks of Baltimore being nearest the dis- aster, quickly gave way. On the 30th of August, 1814, the presidents of the six banks of Philadelphia gravely and gladly adver- tised that they were no longer able to pay coin. Large importations of foreign goods into eastern ports had drained, they com- plained, the eastern banks ; a drain in- creased by trade in British government bills of exchange, causing large sums to be ex- ported from the United States. The banks of Philadelphia thus announcing their own insolvency, publicly ascribed to the trea- sonable practices of those of Boston, next day a meeting of a committee from all the New York banks, considering that the Phi- ladelphia banks had suspended, considera- bly indebted to those of New York, affect- ing the utmost regret, nevertheless found it necessary to stop. The usurpation of bank imposture th&s established, reigned for se- veral years without interruption, redress, or almost complaint. Large discounts and divi- dends ruled with impunity and flagrant wrong. The banks yielded to the always desirable necessity of submitting to irre- sponsible promises and inflated dividends ; protesting aversion, like lewd women ra- vished in a sacked town. Village pigmies, hardly pretending to metallic subsistence, of course followed their city betters. South and west of New England, everywhere the whole frail sisterhood, with affected regret, gladly submitted together to revel in ruin. On the 4th of March, 1814, the Baltimore banks solicited the Secretary of the Trea- sury to suggest an act to Congress ren- dering foreign gold a legal tender and pre- venting exports of specie. The Boston banks surfeited with it, and spawning small notes, the precursors of smaller, worse and still more abominable, nick-named shin- plasters, triumphed in the derangement of the currency of the war-waging States, and mocked the agonies of the federal govern- ment. The Eastern press and pulpits, with Timothy Pickering in Congress, openly, and others by connivance, decried all banks subscribing to war loans. One extremity of the Union rampant with the means of disaffection, the rest reduced to paper mo- ney, the whole monetary system disordered, the sudden and overwhelming capture of Washington gave the finishing stroke. Mo- ney entirely disappeared, except where vir- tually represented by smaU notes, which constituted the exclusive circulation then, as they still do, in New England and New York. The ashes of the capital and tho feculence of currency forced the se- cond edition of a national bank. Begin- ning with a ruined circulation to rectify, its outset disordered by disgraceful specula- tion of its own officers, after some years of precarious existence, fluctuating even when well established between expansion and contraction, delirious in decline and tre- mendous in dissolution, with too much ca- pital for the Union controlling the State banks till driven from it and constrained to become one of them, vrith that unwieldy capital, then protracting caducity by un- warrantable contrivances, the great mis- tress of banks broke at last with a catas- trophe not confined to America, but felt in Europe and in Asia. Notes, which in Chi- na, India, and England had been taken as better than gold, proved worthless in the hands of impoverished and defrauded hold- ers. Worse than the;, frauds, illegalities and immoralities of stupendous confusion by paper money, through the deranged re- sources of the flourishing commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and maledictions of Eng- lish holders of its stocks, the stigma of re- pudiation of public debts was unjustly and audaciously fixed on the national charac- ter of the American people. The Constitu- tion of the United States saved them, after the war of 1812, from bankruptcy by paper money repudiation like that which foDowed the war of the Revolution. Since that soli- tary revolutionary repudiation, the United States have never failed in the punctual payment of their debts, and are the only nation that has extinguished them all, though cursed with a debased and vile cur- rency. Great Britain for three and twenty, years repudiated just as her fundholders reproached Pennsylvania; and pays the in- terest of debts which the most credulous cannot hope will ever be extinguished. If THE TREAStTRT. I1B14. State la-«-8 could evade the Federal Constitu- tion forbidding legal tender of paper money, the enormou8 iniquity, of which an act of English Parliament -was the seducing exam- ple, might have found American imitators aggravating English fraud, as Americans are prone to exaggerate English improprie- ties, and Bnglish tribulation to restore coin might have proved intolerable throughout so many sovereign States, empowered, it seems, to grant intangible bank charters. Moreover, excepting that federal safeguard, our monetary system is worse than the Eng- lish, its suspensions more inevitable, and its destruction more fatal. English depreciation was uniform and universal ; American as various as difierent localities, and as much worse as one dollar notes or less are worse than one pound notes or five dollars. BUIb of circulation, defended by the Malagrow- thers of the Scotch novelist, may fertilize by irrigating there. But they depress and de- grade American labor. Nowhere in the world is small paper money so pernicious, so inexcusable, so unnatural or so absurd as in America. Whether a national bank is the most effectual prevention of it and the best means of a sound convertible cir4 culation, the disastrous fate of the second bank has precluded the fair ascertainment. Mother country aberration more than reconciled this to bank suspension. The banks were not complained of. When Jack- son substituted them as safe depositories of the public money in preference to the na- tional bank, their paper emissions of the war, loaned to the government for money, were eulogized as acts of patriotism. In- dispensable brokers were cursed, and an inevitable war blamed, for all the vexatious inequalities of prices and em- barrassments of traveL Few perceived — none, or hardly any, denounced — the losses they submitted to. Prices rose, business was bris^ dividends increased, the press was interested to sustain in- flation, and flattering facilities of trade intoxicated the community. A school of modem economists arose, of whom a bro- ther of the English chief justice, connected with Washington's family — another Law — was one of uie first preceptors, who, like the Yansittarts, Percivals and other Phari- saical ennobled of Pitt's followers in Eng- land, denied the value of bullion and taught the superiority of paper. While the bank was undergoing its many trials in Congress, even Mr. Calhoun was pleased with that novelty. The National Intelligencer was filled with its metaphysics. That cabinet gazette, transplanted from even Simon Snyder's organ, the Democratic Press of Philadelphia, that " all men of business, property and patriotism considered that the Philadelphia banks aoted wisely in sus- pending specie payments. The directors save the publio confidence, and that con- fidence is the greater because tJicy adopt' ed this salutary measure." Thus necessity fashioned public opinion for a Bank of the United States. By taxation put off till hostilities lan- guished, through thirteen months of want and fear, and when at last enacted in July 1813, not to go into effect till 1814, when ^e war was nearly over ; within fifteen months of its termination, the income averaged but about twelve millions; of which, eight were taken for interest of former debts and for ordinary civil expenditures. There was but about one miUion sterling to make head against a mighty and vindictive foe, relieved from all other enemies, with one hundred millions a year to take vengeance with on us. Three millions of treasury notes in 1812, six millions in 1813, and eight in 1814, ■bearing interest at five and two-fifths per cent., always reimbursable within one year, much reduced the os- tensible avails. Though the first loan of six millions in 1812 was got at par, that of twenty millions in 1813 cost one hundred and thirteen dollars for each hundred, and the twelve millions of 1814, vrith difficulty obtained, cost one hundred and twenty-five ; diminishing means all paid in paper depre- ciating more and faster than it was possible either to reckon or prevent. Much of the last loan was not paid at all ; the contract was broken from inability of the contractor to borrow worthless bank notes to loan go- vernment. The body politic was sick, its blood was diseased, and strength wasted, wben the capture of Washington gave the finishing blow. There had been no Secretary of the Trea- sury from Mr. Gallatin's retreat in May, 1813, when he embarked on his pilgrimage for peace, determined never to return with- out it. During the disconsolate interval, from May 1813, tiU February 1814, Mr. Jones imperfectly performed the routine duties of that vital organ; who, on the 23d of July,"" 1813, in the midst of our first session, in a report respecting duties on prize goods, not only overruled Mr. Gal- latin's and Adam Smith's opinion, but by quoting Hudibras, as a fiscal reason. Mr. Gallatin's position was, that the duties on importations are paid by consumers ; to which Mr. Jones' reply was "the maxim derives more weight from the felicity of argument and commanding cha- racter of the great author of the Wealth of Nations, than from the universality of the principle. It is undoubtedly true in the abstract ; but my experience as a mer- chant has taught me to know the practical value of a maxim derived from an author of a lighter cast : " What is the worth of anything: But so much money as 'twill bring?" Hamilton's master reports, and Gallatin's, Chap. XI.] ALEXANDER JAMES DALLAS. 253 in unpretending prose, had ill prepared the community for lyrical economy ; at whose interpolation, in a finance report, Congress laughed, while the community complained of obstinate dereliction of the most import- ant department. At last, during the winter, Mr. Madison received private intelligence from Mr. Gal- latin that he was no longer to he expected ; and it became indispensable to fill his place. For that purpose the President had long been thinking of Mr. Dallas, to whom he was personally much attached, and of whose abilities he had formed a high estimate. The desire to get him into the cabinet was, however, nearly disappointed, and for some months more of treasury stagnation at least deferred. On the 10th of February, 1814, the Senate confirmed the appoint- ment of Albert Gallatin as one of the mission to Gottenburg. Next day, George Washington Campbell of Tennessee re- signed his seat in the Senate, on being ap- pointed Secretary of the Treasury. Both the Pennsylvania senators, Jona- than Roberts and Abner Lacock, were of that portion of the Republican party of Pennsylvania opposed to Dallas. Mr. Ro- berts' senatorial predecessors. Dr. Leib and General Lacock, were so inimical to him that, when sounded, by Madison's direc- tion, as to his nomination, they flatly re- fused their votes in Senate for a mere Phi- ladelphia lawyer, as they contemptuously termed Mr. Dallas, out of favor with the great bulk of the Democratic party, against which he and Mr. Jones, with others, not long before the war, had taken sides with the Federalists, at first defeating Simon Sny- der, the favorite of the country and ulti- mately prevailing democracy. Before Mr. Campbell was selected as Secretary of the Treasury, when John "W. Bppes and others were thought of by Madison as Mr. Galla- tin's successor, and, I believe, the place was tendered to Mr. Cheves, who declined it, the Secretary of the Navy, Jones, was au- thorized to write to Dallas, informing him of the absolute necessity of appointing a successor to Mr. Gallatin, and asking Mr. Dallas to take his place. Mr. Rush and I also wrote, strongly urging him. William Pinkney having just then resigned the at- torney-generalship, the choice of that place or the treasury was presented to Mr. Dallas, who declined both early in February, 1814. Apprehending the hostility of Lacock and Leib, Mr. Madison would not expose Mr. Dallas to the mortification of rejection b^ the Senate ; which was too probable, if both Pennsylvania Senators opposed him. He was not then appointed, but Mr. Camp- bell became the Secretary for a few months. Mr. Speaker Cheves changed the com- mittee of ways and means, leaving Eppes at its head, but excluding Alston, M'Kim, and Coxe, and substituting Stevenson Arch- er, Jonathan Fisk, Thomas J. Oakley, Wil- liam Gaston, and Samuel D. Ingham — the last named for Jonathan Roberts, gone to the Senate. William Creighton, retained, favored a bank ; which, by this new con- struction of the committee to pass upon it, had no opponent except the chairman, and the ablest advocates in Mr. Gaston and Mr. Oakley, with friends, also of ability, in Mr. Ingham and Mr. Fisk. The Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Camp- bell, on the 26th of September, 1814, sent in his report on the state of the finances, deplorably indicating that he had not been successful in their gestion. Of the loan of twenty-five millions authorized in March, 1814, ten millions had been advertised for in May, only $9,795,056 got for the ten mil- lions, and, at a very losing rate, $1,900,000 of the ten contracted to be paid was not paid. In August six millions more were advertised for, of which only about two and a half mil- lions could be obtained, and that small sum at 80 for 100 ; the Secretary's plea for taking it at that ruinous rate being that .80 was the market price of the United States stocks. He had to submit, moreover, to the condi- tion exacted by the lenders, that if any other sum was borrowed at less, their loan should be put down to that of the lowest. An at- tempt to effect a loan in Europe altogether failed. Outstanding treasury notes amount- ed to six millions; internal taxes yielded less than three millions ; customs only about four. The Secretary faintly suggested some increase of taxation ; but not a word of a bank, to which he probably was not in- clined, and which was reserved for Secre- tary Dallas' approaching advent. This state of financial atrophy, the toils and chagrin of the treasury, depriving Mr. Campbell of health and confidence, brought him to the determination to resign, which he did, im- mediately after his report, on the 28th of September, 1814. " TeU Doctor Madison,-" said Senator La- cock to the President's private secretary, " that we are now willing to submit to his Philadelphia lawyer for head of the trea- sury. The public patient is so very sick that we must swallow anything the doctor prescribes, however nauseous the bolus." On the 5th of October, 1814, Alexander James Dallas was nominated, and the next day confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury ; whose exploits and labors, his intrepidity and firmness, gave fresh impulse to the war for the few months that it lasted after hi» coming — ^from October, 1814, till February, 1815 — and rescued the treasury from the, disgraceful inanition it had fallen to during the prior twenty-eight months of hostilities. Arms, revenues, national power and re- source were just elevated to the proper war standard when it ended — never till then. On the revolution of parties in 1801, when, the federal government had been recently 254 BANK. [1814. transferred from Philadelphia to Washing- ton, Mr. Dallas was appointed by Jefferson the District Attorney of Pennsylvania. Dur- ing the succeeding thirteen years of repub- lican ascendency he was always useful and ■well known to the general government, a leading member of the distinguished bar of Philadelphia, and active in the politics of Pennsylvania — though not, from Simon Snyder's election, in 1808, in perfect har- mony with the Democratic party. Phila- delphia, from 1790 to 180L the metropolis of the Union, trained lawyers there to dis- cuss all the great topics of national and international, constitutional, maritime and elevated jurisprudence ; to which the judi- cature of a large seaport in a considerable State also contributed. Mr. Dallas had filled important State offices,' was the au- thor of several volumes of law reports, and well reputed as a gentleman, prepos- •sessing in figure and address, for liberal, literary, and hospitable qualities. Still, his reputation was local. Never a member of any legislative body, that first credential of a public man in popular government was not his passport to preferment. Perhaps newspaper abuse, as ne was an active and very able partisan, was the chief means of his notoriety. Not known to have ever turned his attention to finance, and profuse in his own expenditures, the usual detrac- tion met his selection for the treasury, by sneering queries where our new Secretary, Madison's strange choice, had learned his political economy, or any economy at all. As his bold stand and vigorous measures, from the very outset, surprised most and disconcerted many, some of the old Repub- lican economists, who voted for war but shrunk from its cost — ^Macon particularly —desired to know if their experience of many years in public affairs was to be all at once set at naught by a mere Philadel- phia lawyer, whose powdered hair, old-fa- shioned but ostentatious dress and graceful manners were far from merits in many ob- serving eyes. Macon complained of Dallas' high tone to Madison; and the President cautioned his Secretary against giving umbrage to that vanity of place which is inveterate with members of Congress im- mediately representing portions of sove- reignty. From the very outset Dallas denounced inefficient measures. Unlike Gallatin and Campbell, both brought up, by service in Congress, to that reverence of its power to which the President, too, had served his apprenticeship, Dallas laid hold of the crisis to bear him out in loud calls for increased taxes, and more taxes on eve- rything taxable. The conjuncture, crowned by sack of the capital, was fortunate for a minister determined to rally the people, and bring forth their resources, with their patri- otism, to repel a foe who everywhere, except at Washington, vas defeated as his arro- gance and barbarism increased. It was fSie moment, as he was the man, to conquer ex- pensive parsimony, and not be over nice with restive constitutional scruples in the legislature. Macon abounded in parables and radical axioms. One of his sayings was that paper moTiey never was beat; a maxim which Dal- las enforced with a sway perhaps india- pensable. Whatever was his motive for refusing, in February, the station he so earnestly assumed in October, the fall of Washington, suspension of specie payments, blockade of all our coasts, interruption of most business, professional and other, con- centration of all thoughts on war, took him to his post, bent on a bank of the United States as the only regulator and curb of the State banks, a principal one of which, the Bank of Pennsylvania, he had been among the leading Bepublicans of that State to charter as a counteraction of a national bank. The first bank of the United States had always been a hard money institution. The State banks, after its charter expired, the 4th of March, 1811, poured out their paper, much of it in small notes, which became the chief, and from their suspen- sion just before Dallas went to the trea- sury, the only currency, and that in local circulation. Intimate with Albert Gallatin, Stephen Girard, David Parish, John Jacob Astbr, and many other of the financiers and commercial capitalists, he imbibed their ideas as he enjoyed their confidence. Some of the old Republicans, Gen. Samuel Smith, the Livingstons, and other northern politicians, pronounced a national bank the best relief. Contrary to the original judg- ment by which he so' powerfully protested against its constitutionality. President Ma- dison was brought to yield to the weight of the imposing authorities, federal, state, legis- lative, judicial and executive, which nearly everywhere and everyhow sanctioned its con- stitutionality. More, much more than that, jiotwithstandingMadison's beautiful denun- ciation, in the Federalist, of the pestilence of paper money, he was subdued, if not to discard coin altogether as the basis of a bank, at least to disown its just and indis- pensable proportion. Hamilton's bank, pre- ceding the monster bank fraud of the Eng- lish government in 1797, never issued a note for less than ten dollars. After a strife, extending through several sessions of Con- gress, DtSlas' bank, but for veto upon veto, would have legalized not only five doUar notes, but suspension of coin payments. On the 14th October, 1814, Eppes, for the committee of ways and means, " hav- ing had under consideration the support of - public credit, by extending taxation, offi- cially infbrmed the Secretary that their report was suspended to afford him an oppor- tunity of suggesting any other, or such ad- ditional provisions as might be necessary to Chap. XI.] DALLAS' BANK, 255 revive, and maintain unimpaired, the public credit." In three days, forth-with, on the 17th of that month, Mr. Dallas sent his ex- tensive answer, strongly recommending the national bank, of vrhich he submitted out- lines, asserting that repeated sanctions had settled the constitutionality, of what was " the only efScient remedy for a disordered condition of our circulating medium, a safe depository for the public treasure, and con- stant auxiliary to the public credit," adding that the Secretary would "not merit the confidence which it would be his ambition to acquire, if he suppressed the declaration of an opinion, that in these times the estab- lishment of a national bank will not only be useful in promoting the general welfare, but that it is necessary and proper for car- rying into execution some of the most im- portant powers constitutionally vested in the government." — Hamilton wont no far- ther, if so far. The second bank followed the precedent of the first in its origin. Congress asked for neither openly ; if at all, it was by un- published understanding. Both, according to the public journals, came of executive initiation, and both as mere engines of public credit. An order of the House of Representatives, the 9th August, 1790, re- quired Secretary Hamilton to prepare and report, at the next session, such further provision as might, in his opinion, be ne- cessary for establishing the public credit. From that hint, if such, on the 13th De- cember, 1790, his report premised a bank of the United States in the first sentence — the first five words. Organic law of September, 1789, made it his duty to prepare plans for the support of public credit, so that the special order of the House was a work of supererogation. In like manner a call in October, 1814, by the House of Kepresentatives, through their committee, on Secretary Dallas, for addition- al provisions by extended taxation to support public credit, with no allusion to a bank, produced in three days his report, strongly recommending one of which he present- ed a plan. All four of the national banks passed by Congress, in 1791, 1816, 1832, and 1841, were Treasury suggestions, adopted by acts originating in Senate, even the two vetoed by two presidents, in 1814, and 1841. The first bank began and end- ed in Senate, without recharter, by the casting vote of the vice president, George Clinton, in 1811, after having been indefi- nitely postponed by a casting vote in the House of Representatives. President Wash- ington did not approve the charter, till the eleventh day after its passage, notwith- standing the constitutional provision for ten dOTs, as the Sundays were not counted. The Senate committee, by whom it was originated, were Caleb Strong, Governor of Massachusetts during the war of 1812, Robert Morris, General Schuyler, the fa- ther-in-law of Hamilton, Oliver Ellsworth, afterwards Chief Justice, and Pierce But- ler. The bank bill approved by Madison, the 10th April, 1816, began in Senate, and was agitated by reiterated trials in both Houses of Congress, from January 1814, when the subject was introduced, for more than two years before an act was carried to the President, to which he would set his sig- nature. The bank commencement in 1817, and end in 1841, were not equally, only because the latter was more disastrous. The Bank of England has been radi- cally altered in ISfi. Its bankruptcy in 1797, protracted by acts of Parliament till 1823, was the mother impostnre of all the lesser ones of the thousand ofispring of that iniquity since pullulated throughout the United States. On the 24th October, 1814, in committee of the whole House, with Timothy Pitkin in the chair, the standing committee's reported resolution that it is expedient to establish a national bank, was carried by ayes 66, to 40 nays, without one word of debate. The committee then rose and reported it, to- gether with resolutions considerably in- creasing taxation. On the 28th of that month the House passed upon the report of the committee of the whole, for a bank vrith branches in the States ; when State sove- reignty was laid low by a vote of 138 to 14; Richard Stanford, of North Carolina, a gentleman of the Macon school's motion, to strike them out, being rejected by that overwhelming majority. Three great States were then supplying tiie deficiency of Con- gress to vote armies adequate to the crisis, to succor and maintain the Union, when Congress resolved to enter their borders by banking establishments, with command- ing regulations, transcending aU other federal and even martial law. As soon as that vote was taken, the House adopted the resolution for a bank, with branches in the States, by 93 ayes to 54 nays. Eppes, and the constitutionalists thus deposed, and many of them not sorry to be so, for many thought the bank expedient who could not consider it constitutional, the resolution was referred to the committee of ways and means, to bring in a bank bill, and on the 7th November, 1814, Jonathan Fisk, now become the leader of the measure, reported the bill, which was in due form twice read, and committed to the committee of the whole House. It was essentially Mr. Dallas' plan, with some modifications, however. He sought and had a personal conference with the committee of ways and means, in which he explained and enforced his views with all the eloquent earnestness of which he was capable. The capital was to be fifty millions of dollars, one-fifth in gold or silver, three-fifths in loan stock, and one-fifth in treasury notes ; the United 256 CALHOUN'S PLAN. [1814. States to subscribe for twenty millions, and the bank not to lend tbem at any one time more than three hundred thousand dollars ; no other bank to be created, and this one to last twenty years, its notes receivable in all public payments ; and the President of the United States was authorized to direct tem- porary suspension of specie payments, if at any time there should be an undue press- ure for them, either for exportation, or with minister design to injure the bank. On the 13th and 14th November, 1814, came on the battle — not of the bank, but of the stocks: for the small proportion of coin was not much considered; but the prevailing controversy, to which the whole scheme ultimately fell a victim, was what stocks should compose the capital. The frightful power suggested, for the President to suspend specie payments, such as the Emperor of the French or of Kussia never could have exercised with- out national convulsion, and for exercising, something far short of which to save a country, Jackson was severely punished soon after at New Orleans — ^that awful ille- gality was. little dwelt on in discussion, uiough expunged before the bUl was finally lost, and the withdrawal of that monstrous license was a principal cause of the failure of the bill. Mr. Webster, late in the discus- sion, advocated the indispensable virtue of coin. The capital should not exceed, he contended, twenty millions ; all notes not on presentation paid in specie, should bear interest from the moment they were refused ; and penalties should be inflicted on direct- ors who put notes in circulation while spe- cie payments were suspended. Mr. Gaston, too, in several speeches, deprecated the amount of capital, which he moved to re- duce from fifty to twenty millions, and the inordinate disproportion of paper; which he likened to Law's Mississippi scneme and the assignats of the French Revolution. During the eleven days' discussion that ensued, from the 14th to the 29th November (with some interruption), many motions and speeches were made which, need not be mentioned, mostly concerning the government subscrip- tion, direction, and other functional parts of the plan, and on the constitutional ques- tion. On the 16th November, Mr. Calhoun struck in with his triumpliant project, which carried all before it, by large majori- ties, on repeated divisions, till at last, un- der the direct and energetic interposition of Mr. Dallas, both their plans, in severe collision, were rejected, and all others with them. On the 15th November, 1814, George Bradbury, of Massachusetts, moved to substitute future for past loans, denounc- ing the whole plan, however, as a contriv- ance to issue paper promising to pay more paper, a mere paper money bank. Mr. Calhoun got the committee to rise, for the day, and Mr. Bradbury to withdraw his motion, in order that, next day, Mr. Calhoun might submit his project. Striking out all government interest in or control of the bank, together with the presidential power of suspension ; the bank not to be compelled to loan any money to government ; his plan was a capital of forty-four millions of trea- sury notes, to be provided by future acts of Congress, of which twenty to be thrown as fast as possible into circulation; fifteen mil- lions to be disposed of so as to convert them into stocks ; five millions applied to redeem treasury notes falling due at the commence- ment of next year; thus raising, as Mr. Calhoun reckoned, the price of stocks so much as to afford a bonus for the bank, and indirectly a loan to the government, which was to receive exclusively the bank notes in payment of all taxes, duties and public debts". By this plan, Mr. Calhoun argued, with his usual cogency and ardor, the treasury would be relieved from immediate pressure, public credit permanently ele- vated, and a permanent as well as safe circulating medium afforded. Six-fiftieths of the capital were to be paid in coin. John Forsyth, Samuel D. Ingham, and Jonathan Fisk attacked the C^oun pro- ject, which William Lowndes and Thomas J. Oakley defended.- Its severest and most' strenuous assailant was Mr. Ingham, some years afterwards one of Mr. Calhoun's warmest adherents. My unimportant help was also given in a'speech vindicating the treasury plan. Mr. Ingham, afterwards Secretary of the Treasury in the beginning of Jackson's administration, was Secretary Dallas's most effective advocate for pro- visional if not spurious doctrine, which the crisis pleaded by Dallas' report might render then justifiable, but which neither Mr. Madison, Mr. Dallas, nor Mr. Ing- ham could deem permanently proper. Vindicating the English bank suspension and its American exaggeration, Mr. Ing- ham declared that " necessity sometimes requires suspension both at home and abroad; and with the existing condition of the specie medium of the country in full view before us, it would be a species of frantic enihusiasTn not to provide for the case." It was stated in Senate, as a reason for giving government control of specie pay- ments during war, that whatever amount of coin might be placed in the United States bank, would inevitably be drained from it by the enemy and his American confede- rates. Cost what it might, that fatal opera- tion would be effected. Government had got hold of a treasonable contract with Bri- tish agents to furnish them with as much specie as there proba,bly was in the coun- try. At that time, though ihe Boston banks were full of it, the State treasury of Massachusetts was almost without any funds, and dependent on loans from the banks for all the State had to pay. On the Chap. XI.] CALHOUN'S PLAN REJECTED. 257 19th November, Mr. Lowndes, supported by Mr. Forsyth, but earnestly resisted by Mr. Calhoun, made an unsuccessful effort to reduce the capital from fifty to thirty-five millions. That day the committee of the vrtiole rose and reported the bUl, so altered that even the clerk could m)t read the nu- merous and extensive amendments, carried by decisive majorities. It was, therefore, ordered to lie on the table, and be printed. On the 21st, 22d, 23d and 25th November, 1814, the House by numerous votes con- firmed the adoption in committee of Mr. Cal- houn's, rejecting the administration plan. On the 25th November, Mr. Lowndes, stat- ing that reference, to an«ther select com- mittee might accomplish reconciliation of views, which he thought' further debate would rather increase than diminish, moved and carried that reference. The new com- mittee consisted of Mr. Lowndes, Mr. Fisk, Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Ingham, Mr. Forsyth, Mr. Oakley, and Mr. Gaston. Every one of them had professed his wish for a bank ; but scarcely any two of them agreed in th&plan. Five were opposed to that of the Secretary, ■who had but three supporters on the com- mittee. On the 27th November, 1814, Mr. Lown- des, by direction of the new committee, called on the Secretary for his opinion in relation to the effect which a considerable issue of treasury notes, receivable in sub- scriptions to the bank, might have on the credit of the government, and on the pros- pects of a loan next year: whether it would be practicable to get fortry-four millions of treasury notes into circulation without de- preciation; and his further opinion in re- gard to any part of our fiscal system. lu- stanter, the same day, Mr. Dallas answered, in terms of strong and lofty condemnation of Mr. Calhoun's, or any such, scheme. His feelings thrown into his judgment in •unusual terms for a state, especially a fiscal state^aper, he retorted : "When I arrived in Washington, the treasury was suffering under every kind of embarrassment. The demands upon it were great in amount, while the means to satisfy Siem were comparatively small ; precarious in the collection, anddifScultin the applica- tion. The demands consisted of dividends upon old and new funded debt, of treasury- notes, and of legislative appropriations for the army, the navy and the current service ; all urgent and important. The means con- sisted, first — Of the fragments of an author- ity to borrow money, when nobody was dis- posed to lend, and to issue treasury notes, which none but necessitous creditors or .contractors in distress, or commissaries, quarter-masters and navy agents, acting as it were officially, seemed willing to accept. .Second. — Of the amount of bank credits ■Bcattered throughout the United States, and tprincipsiUy in Wis soutiiem and western banks, which had been rendered in a great degree useless by the stoppage of payments in specie, and the consequent impractica- bility of transferring the public funds from one place, to meet the public engagements in another place. And, third — Of the cur- rent supply of money from the imports, from internsu duties, and from the sales of public land, which ceased to be a foundation of any rational estimate or reserve, to provide even for the dividends on the funded debt, when it was found that the treasury not«s, (only requiring indeed a cash payment at the dis- tance of a year,) to whomsoever they were issued at the treasury, and almost as soon as they were issued, reached the hands of the collectors, in payment of debts, duties and taxes ; thus disappointing and defeat- ing the only remaining expectation of pro- ductive revenue." Such of us as had labored to place Mr. Pallas in the treasury, even though not sa- tisfied with any bank not founded on the rock of the precious metals, were consoled for the loss of his plan by the manly fervor of an official reply to Congress, uiat " a faithless government might borrow even without credit, which hardly existed at that moment. But when the wants of to-day are supplied, what is the new expedient that shall supply the wants of to-morrow ? After all, the immeasurable tracts of the western wild would be exhausted in succes- sive efforts to obtain pecuniary aids, and stiU leave the government necessitous, un- less the foundations of public credit are re-established and maintained." This was a tone to which the puny sovereigns and constitutional economists of Congress were little broken. Whether Mr. Dallas was right or wrong in his bank plan, his tone to Con- gress, in the face of the country, and before the world, was a stirring appeal to the ris- ing spirit of the nation. Bom in Jamaica, with tropical excitability, he would shed tears at tnat time of trial, provoked by the contradictions, anxieties and disappoint- ments he was doomed to undergo: but with ambition and capacity for indefatigable toil, his buoyancy never faUed. Exertions were not spared to bring bim and Mr. Calhoun together, but without success. The strife of stocks and schemes was irreconcilable. The day after his uncompromising letter, on the 28th November, 1814, Mr. Lowndes reported the bill without alteration; in- forming the House that the select commit- tee had not been able to discover any means of uniting the conflicting opinions on the subject. Then it was tnat the Secretaiy had his first gratification in Congress. Col- onel Johnson rose on his crutches in the House to put an end to contest by moving the previous question, which was carried on engrossing the bUl for a third reading; when Mr. Calhoun was left, in a minority, by ayes and nays of m(a:e than 258 SENATE'S BANK. two to one ; the vote for engrossing his treasury note bill being but forty-nine to one hundred and four against it. So ended the fourth attempt for a bank. John For- syth, -who voted in the majority, immedi- ately moved a reconsideration to clinch the rejection, which he said he voted with us in order to do. After much excitement and sharp skirmishing, he withdrew the motion, intending to renew it, but lost his chance. But for succor from Senate, the cardinal measure of the administration had no chance that session. Revived and quickly passed there, with extreme diffi- culty it struggled through the House of Bepresentatives, to be at last strangled by the Executive, so anxious for a bank enact- ment. Notwithstanding his failure to obtain a bank, Mr. Dallas had much restored public credit in the few weeks of his administra- tion of the treasury. It was known that he contemplated the establishment of a vigorous sinking fund, a mere fiscal delu- sion unless the nation actually spends less than it receives. But such was its influ- ence on most minds, especially those of the seaports, where credit is fabricated or extinguished, and public delusion a large element of it, that the anticipation of such a fund, amply endowed, together with the altered and elevated aspect of all Secre- tary Dallas' measures and conduct, enabled bim to effect the loan in October which in •August his predecessor had failed to obtain. There were no constitutional scruples ; the whole Republican party were united respect- ing a sinking fund. Notwithstanding Tfimo- thy Pickering's published letters, and hifi speeches in Congress, proclaiming that fu- ture administrations would not be bound to redeem the loans contracted for Madi- son's war, as he and other Eastern antago- nists denounced it, there were few, at any time of that extreme disaffection, which suc- cess crushed in ignominy. Moneyed men, as those in credit are called, were too clear- sighted to be blinded by such mists exhaled from the conduits of faction. Mr. Dallas and Mr. Calhoun were un- shakenly firm in patriotic confidence. John Caldwell Calhoun was the same slen- der, erect, and ardent logician, politician, and sectarian in the House of Representa- tives in 1814 that he is in the Senate of •1847. Speaking with aggressive aspect, •flashing eye, rapid action and enunciation, -unadorned argument, eccentiicity of judg- ment, unbounded love of rule, impatient, precipitate ambition, kind temper, excell- ing in colloquial attractions, caressing the young, not courting rulers; conception, perception, and demonstration c^uick and clear, with logical precision arguing para- doxes, and carrying home conviction be- yond rhetorical illustration; his own im- pressions so intense as to discredit, scarcely [1814. listen to, any other suggestions ; well edn- cated and informed. In September, 1814, a petition from David M. Clarkson and others of New York, had been presented to the Senate, for a national bank, and referred, on motion of Genefal Samuel Smith, on the 31st of October, 1814, to a select committee, consisting of Rufiis King, Samuel Smith, John Taylor, William W. Bibb and Jeremiah Mason. As soon as all proceedings in the House of Repre- sentatives, on the subject, ceased, with no prospect of their renewal, Mr. King, on the 2d of December, 1814, reported another bank bill, which, after thi-ee days' consi- deration, on the 5th, 8th and 9th of that month, passed the Senate by yeas seventeen to fourteen nays, mostly party votes, the Republicans for, and the Federalists against the bank, and on the last-mentioned day, it came to the House of Representatives for their concurrence. There it was at once referred to the committee of ways and means, and by Jonathan Fisk from that committee reported, with amendments, on the 14th of December, 1814. The capital of this scheme was to be fifty millions, five in coin, twenty-seven in past loan stocks, seven in treasury notes, re- deemable in stocks, and ten to be subscribed by government in stock bearing interest at four per cent.'; to loan government not ex- ceeding five hundred thousand dollars, un- less authorized by act of Congress, wiich might require a loan of thirty millions. During the war and for one year after, the directors were authorized in certain contingencies to suspend specie payments, and to report it to the President of the United States, for his afirmanco or reversal. On the 23d of December, 1814, debate broke out afresh, in a renewed argument against the constitutionality of a bank, all of which arguments I omit, for there are frequently measures whose expedi- ency is ' more momentous than the Con- stitution. On the 24th of December, after a long day's discussion, the committee rose, and me bill was reported by the chairman, Macon, to the House, without material al- teration. On the 26th, the few amendments were concurred in. On the 27th, 'Williani Hale, a Federalist of New Hampshire, moved to strike out the section authorizing a suspension of specie payments. Where- upon I called for the previous question, and got it by a small majority, seventy-two to seventy. Mr. Webster then moved to lay the bill and amendments on the table; which, Mr. Macon in the chair, substituted for the Speaker, Mr. Cheves, ruled out of order, as the previous question was in force. Mr. Gaston appealed from that decision, and again from Macon's further decision, that tne question was not on Mr. Hale's proposition, but whether all the amend- ments reported from the committee of the Chap. XI.] BANK CONTROVERSY. 259 whole should be engrossed, and the bill read a third time. That settled, the main question was carried by eighty ayes to sixty-two nays, Mr. Lowndes and Mr. Cal- houn voting with us, the minority composed 01 the Federal opposition and the constitu- tionalists. There were well founded hopes then of the passage of the bill in that shajje. But next day, the 28th of December, 1814, Mr. Gaston succeeded in getting it recommitted with instructions as to some details, and a change of the kind of stock to be subscribed, the much contested future to be coupled with the past. Next day, Stephenson Archer, from the committee, reported the required amendments ; one of which was then, how- eyer, refused by the House, another carried only by the Speaker, Cheves', easting vote; and angry debate ensued on the kind of stock, past or future. The whole day was con- sumed in motions to lay the bill on the table, to recommit, to adjourn, and their attendant speeches by Mr. Webster, Mr. Gaston, Mr. Pitkin, Mr. Oakley and others to defeat, Mr. Forsyth, Mr. Ingham, Mr. Archer to carry the bill. It was the storm- iest bank day of the session. A paper money bank was supported and assaulted by contending parties, as the pivot of the administration. Denounced as fatal and corrupt, defended as the only means of restoring credit, maintaining the govern- ment and carrying on the war, the ma- jority strained every nerve to pass it that night, but were frustrated by the pertina- cious manoeuvres of a minority, nearly always invincible if resolved not to give way. Seldom, whenever passion prevails, docs a majority rule in a deliberative assembly. Tactics defeat numbers in Con- gress as in arms. As venerable as the Bible and Homer is the truth, that not to the strong, but the artful, belongs victory. On that occasion Mr. Webster and Mr. Gaston led and triumphed with striking ability. Webster's last effort was a motion to recommit with specific instructions, on which, after his own and several other speeches for, and none against it, our ward beinw silent action without debate, at length an adjournment was effected. New Tear's day, like Christmas, was a relaxation from the combat. On the 2d of January, 1815, Timothy Pickering, with others of the op- position, took the floor, and Mr. Webster made his ablest speech ; an admirable view, commercial, economical, fiscal, political, past, present and future of the whole sub- ject; quite superior to anything said on either side during the session. He had studied thoroughly, historically, and pre- sented doctrines immutable in diction of the choicest rhetoric. With that masterly effort, after some insignificant motions, the debate closed and the votes were taken, eighty- one for,' eighty against the final passage of the bill ; Mr. Lowndes voting for, Mr. Cal- houn against it. Then instantly took place one of those memorable struggles in legislation which are attended by strong sen"sation at the moment, and followed by deep impression ever after among the combatants, though unarmed, carrying or losing the turning point of ex- cited controversy. The year 1814 ended on Saturday. The day before, the death of Richard Brent, one of the Virginia sen- ators, a gentleman of the equestrian order, as he might be considered, for he seldom was abroad, except on horseback, attended by his well mounted slave, but long incapa- citated by the disorder of which he died, suspended proceedings in both Houses; superadding the last twenty-four hours of that anxious twelve months to Sunday's repose, retrospect, combinations and ar- rangements for renewed conflict. Congress were hutted in the post-office building, the only public edifice not in ruins. The de- partments, with their various incumbents, were billeted about in private houses ; the President occupied a gentleman's mansion ; the department of state was without a secretary, Mr. Monroe, on General Arm- strong's discharge, after the capture of Washington, having been transferred to the war department. On the 2d of January, 1815, the new year came in with intelligence of General Jackson's arrival at New Orleans, the first day of December, to prepare for the invasion, of which the van was said to be off Mobile in a ship of the line yrith several transports. Thursday's vote had defined the position of parties with discouraging precision. Eighty-one of the Republicans voted for a bank, the false hope long deferred of a perplexed administration. By that fiscal contrivance, five millions of coin altogether, which by familiar bank necromancy might be diminished two-thirds when the bank went into operation, with forty-five millions of stock, were to enable government to bor- row from the bank thirty millions more. Seventy-five millions of discredited paper, with at most five millions of coin, was at least fifteen to one, the reliance for a nation's fiscal salvation. It was the drunkard's bill of Falstaff, five shillings and eightpence worth of sack to a half- penny of bread. For that delusion we contended as bur existence. Nonsense of the people, does it surpass the foUy of their wise representatives in Congress assembled? Madness of party, how often does it save, as well as destroy ! Twenty Republicans, after nineteen had that week voted vrith us for the third reading of the bill — ^twenty intractable Republicans, com- bined with sixty Federalists, now stood out against all that country was supposed to demand, and party angnly, or entreatingly urged. Many no doubt voted from factious 260 CHEVES' CASTING VOTE. [1815. motiYes to embarrass government, but not a few because conscience forbade, and some few under the influence of wise economy. Mr. Cbeves, elected Speaker by a mixed party vote, disgusted with the administra- tion, impressed with, strong and settled conviction against paper contrivances, re- minding the House of the rule which au- thorized, and he thought reqiiired, the pre- siding officer's interference on such an occasion, voted with the minority and defeated the bill; which, in an impressive brief discourse, he pronounced not only dangerous, but desperate, as a resort to merely speculative and ruinous experiment. Once more, and'*for the fifth time, the un- lucky bank miscarried. There were, how- ever, so many of both parties voting against the rejected ^an, yet willing to sanction another, that Boiling Hall, one of tlie most strenuous Bepublican sticklers for new, in preference to Dallas' plan of past stocks, immediately moved a reconsideration. Suf- ficiently disturbed by the evils of that doubt- ful day, the House adjourned without tak- ing the question. Next day, the 3d Janu- ary 181&, reconsideration was carried by nearly two to one, 107 to 54: but the journal of names gave poor promise of any bank ; the speeches still less. On the 3d January 1815, Mr. Hall, a Elain upright Georgian, who afterwards ved and died in Alabama, from his seat next to mine, advocating his motion to re- consider, vehemently rallied the Republican party to rescue their country from internal traitors, worse than foreign foes, who were striving to crush the adminislration ; in- dignantly expressed his contempt of the attempt twice made by Mr. Grosvenor to prevent my voting because I held govern- ment stock. Such attempts, he declared, made his blood run cold. But, after nu- merous sharp and angry speeches on both sides. Boiling B.obertson, afterwards Gover- nor of Louisiana, William P. Duvall, after- wards Governor of Florida, Mr. Forsyth, Mr. Calhoun, I and others earnestly urging reconsideration, strenuously opposed by Mr. Grosvenor, Mr. Gaston, Mr. Webster, Mr. Macon and several more, it was finally carried, on the merciful motion of Alexander 'McKim, a Scots merchant representing Baltimore, who said he was opposed to any bank, but disposed to let his friends (he was of the Bepublican party) have every chance on a question of such magnitude. The vote, as before mentioned, was 107 to 54. Samuel MoKee, of Kentucky, a very " peculiar person, one of the few who had Voted for war against France as well as England, considering t^ie injustice to us -t&e sAme — ^having also his own notions of "Whkt kind of bank it ou^t to be — amoved to 'ife^nui^t the bill, but without instructions, 'to aititi^ei' Bele'Ct committee, which, after ifuilther aitgihf controversy, carried- by 89 votes to 71. Mr. Cheves gave us as the committee, for this sixth essay, Samuel McKee, William Findley, Richard Stockton, Timothy Pitkin, John Taylor, Alfred Cuth- bert and Bartlett Yancey ; five for some kiad of bank to two likewise for a bank, buf un- compromisingly hostile to the administra- tion. Before I proceed with the narrative of their, the final, abortion, which the Presi- dent vetoed, I must mention a remark- able outbreak in the House, of the Sd" of January 1815. One of the Ohio members, John Alexander, was a giant between six and seven feet high, large, stout, muscular, and apparently strong m proportion to his formidable thews and sinews. Immediately after Hall's appeal to our party, which was extremely animated and unreserved, Alex- ander planted his imposing frame right at the foot of the Speaker's chair, and stand- ing there erect, almost in contact with Mr. Cheves, he poured out upon him a torrent of the fiercest invective for his casting vote of the day before. The Speaker had ex- pressed his regret at feeling obliged to vote as he said duty required. Alexander acri- moniously denounced such regret. Ti) vot« against a measure which the Speaker con- demned as ruinous and desperate, should have pleased, not pained, an honest man, and his Ohio assailant broadly intimated offensive doubts, whether other than either conscientious or patriotic apology could be pleaded for so reprehensible a vote. Mr. Cheves, who always wore spectacles, had the benefit of their intervention between his looks and the flashing glance of his accuser. The Speaker calmly kept his eyes on the orator during his harangue, which, like many more bursts of passionate disappoint- ment, passed off without any permanent effect, except perhaps the recollection of the actors in that exciting scene. On the 6th January, 1815, Mr. MoEee reported from the select committee their scheme ; a bank with thirty instead of fifty millions of capital, five millions of coin, fif- teen millions of treasury notes, and ten mil- lions of war stock; no loan to government, or power to suspend specie payments. With $1,666,000 in gold and silver, and twelve millions in stocks, the bank was to begin. Mr. McKee pronounced it a specie paying bank, on which alone, he said, could a sound circulating medium rest. After a. few brief speeches, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Pitkin, Mr. Yancey and I advocating the scheme as a compromise more likely than any other to pass, Mr. Forsyth and Mr. Pearson op- posing, the capital was fixed at thirty millions by a vote of one hundred and twenty-nine to thirty-One. ' Next day, January 7, 1815, after very little said by but a few members, the bill wus passed by one hundred and twenty ayes to thirty-eight nays, and Sent to Senate. Chap. XI.] BANK YBTOED. 261 On the 9th January, 1815, our bill was re- ferred in Senate to a select committee, con- sisting of Samuel Smith, William W. Bibb, Joseph Anderson, William B. Giles and Joseph B. Varnum. On the 13th January, 1815, they reported some minor amend- ments, that the capital should be thirty- five millions, and the bank empowered to suspend specie payments. On the 14th, 15th, and 17th January, 1815, the subject was debated in the Senate, who, by a ma- jority of one vote, seventeen to sixteen, re- solved to authorize suspension of specie payments ; by a majority of three, seventeen to fourteen, increased the capital to thirty- five millions ; and then passed the bill, thus amended, without a division. On the 17th January, 1815, their amendments came to the House. Next day, after much sharp contest, personal and party recrimination, we refused by eighty-seven votes to eighty to enlarge the capital, and by eighty-five to eighty to authorize suspension of specie pay- ments. Republicans, some of them, pleaded, others denied, the fact and force of a compro- mise attempted by all parties in this bill. JFederalists declared that they had gone as ^ar as they could in concession, and would yield no more. The House insisted on such of their amendments as the Senate disa- greed to. Recriminations began to extend from persons and parties to the two Houses of Congress, and the Executive too. Each House blamed the other for unnecessary procrastination and unreasonable tenacity. On the 19th January, 1815, the Senate quarrelled with each other and with the House, in that excited state which indicated that the end was at hand, in whatever shape it might be. The administration Senators insisted on the increase of five millions to the capital, and still more pertinaciously on the power to suspend specie payments, as a mne qua non. James Barbour, of Virginia, lately chosen from being Governor of that State, to supply Mr. Brent's place in the Senate, General Smith, Jonathan Roberts, William Bibb, (afterwards Governor of Ala- bama,) not only pressed the increased capi- tal and suspension power as indispensable, but declared their repugnance to the bill vrithout those clauses, which Mr. King and Mr. Giles supported. Defeated in that ef- fort, the administration, represented by mo- tions severally made by Mr. Roberts and Mr. Bibb, endeavored to reject the bUl- altogether. It passed, however, on the 19th as it went from the House ; the Senate re- ceding from their amendments, after every shift of parliamentary strategy had been exhausted to prevent any bill for a specie paying bank. From the petition presented by Mr. Lefferts in the beginning of January 1814, to the bill reported by Mr. McKee in February 1815, much of the time of two sessions of Congress had been vexed in the elaboration of an imperfect and time-serv- ing fiscal contrivance, which, after on the seventh trial coming out of the fiery furnace, was flung back again with indignation, on the eighth, and once more frustrated by public good luck on the ninth trial. A year afterwards, by another Congress, in April 1816, at length a bank became a law and a charter, which war alone made necessary, and peace at least postponed. Offspring of distress, its war birth was as protracted and painful as its first miscarriage by peace was exciting, and final dissolution calami- tous. On the 30th January, 1815, the President returned the bill to the Senate, where it ori- ginated, with his objections. In substance they were, that the notes were too few, and the coin too much, of which the institution was to be compounded ; also that the bank would be too independent of the govern- ment. Next day the Senate re-considered, when but fifteen were for the vetoed biU, and nineteen against it. On the 6th Feb- ruary, 1815, Governor Barbour on leave in- troduced another bill, which, on the 8th and 10th, was warmly discussed in Senate. Mr. Giles moved clauses compelling a loan of thirty millions by the bank to the govern- ment, and legalizing suspension of specie payments till April 1816 ; both of which amendments were rejected. Christopher Gore, too, tried an unsuccessful amendment, that the notes should express their nonpay- ment in specie. On the 11th February, 1815, Senate passed this bill eighteen to sixteen. Its features need not be particu- larized, as peace prevented it becoming a law. The day it came to the House, was that on which the dawn of peace broke on us from the East, on the 13th February, 1815. The bank thereupon lost much of its importance and attraction. After mo- tions to commit and to alter the biU, which failed, we adjourned rejoicing. Great news, great joy, great national, and great party triumphs crowded in upon us from aU quar- On the 14th of February,_1815, the wel- come rumor, current the night before, of Mr. Carroll's arrival from Ghent, at New Tork, with peace, was published and gene- rally credited. Next day the fact and the terms were officially made knovm. The last lingering spaspis of the bank, in both Houses, were almost without sympathizers. After our tame, languid action in the House on the 13th of February, the day of the dawn of peace, quickly following the tri- umph at New Orleans, the subject slept through the 14th, 15th, and 16th. No one cared for banks, for stocks, even for silver and gold. The country, crowned vrith victory, was blessed with peace. The party which waged the war triumphed in the redoubled joy of patriots and partisans. When, therefore, on the 17th of February, 1815, the House resumed the bank biU, 262 BANK INDEFINITELY POSTPONED. [1815. after some cold, and, as it were, posthu- moua, at least moribund discussion, be- tween Mr. Forsyth, Mr. Fisk, and others, on one side ; Mr. Gaston, Mr. Oakley, and Mr. Calhoun, on the other ; an ineffectual attempt was made by Solomon Sharp once more to recommit the prostrate bill, with in- structions to a fifth special committee ; and another, also ineffectual, to revive the ex- piring battle of the stocks. But that tem- perate, judicious, and independent member, William Lowndes, moved its indefinite post- ponement. He had no hostility, he said, to a national bank; but the present mo- ment was most unfavorable to its establish- ment. Pressure of the times had sup- pressed important differences of opinion. The evil, as it was universally acknow- ledged, of suspended specie payments, ■would be prolonged by establishing a bank then. In short, that was the worst moment for a bank. Forsyth insisted that it was the best ; Gaston, that it was as good as any ; Grosvenor and Pickering, always opposed to the administration, whatever it wanted, were for putting off what might be another triumph superadded to the incredible vic- tory of New Orleans, and the comfortable consummation at Ghent. Postponement was carried by the magical majority of one vote, seventy-four ayes to seventy-three nays. Macon's quaint. maxim, that "one is majority enough," signalized the last moments of a national lottery, of which the whole drawing attested another of his fiscal saws, that " paper money was never beat." The final vote was promiscuous ; neither party, as such, voting either for or against, but both parties all mixed together. There were many absentees. After Speaker Cheves' vote defeated the bill on the 2d of January, 1815, so near was its death be- yond reprieve, that only six Federalists voted to reconsider. And when McKee's bill bid fair to become a law, there was great administration rejoicing. No doubt was allowed of its passage. " Speculators and money-mongers," said the National Intelli- gencer, " are no longer to prey on the ne- cessities of the nation, or sport with the public credit. Treasonable intercourse. be- tween New England and the British pro- vinces will no longer en^ouraM the buying specie at twenty per cent.- above govern- ment paper ; the whole country will not be paying tribute to one disaffected corner." On the other side, denunciation and de- traction were not idle or diffident. " Madi- son," it was reported, " would resign : he must: a sufficient number of his own party were resolved to insist upon it. The imbe- cility of the administration — ^their wretched failure to raise means, and- profligate waste of what little they had — their evasion or violations of the Constitution — their whole eourse since the wicked and unnatural war began, had convinced majorities in both houses — as the people were undoubtedly of opinion, that other rulers were indispensa- ble. Peace, or a change of administration, we must andvjUl have." ^ Prior to the bank veto on the 9th of January, 1815, the bill to provide addi- tional revenue for defraying the expenses of government became a law. On the 17th of January, the Secretary of the Treasury, in a letter of much animation, laid bare to foes as well as friends the condition of the country. Little more than fifteen millions was estimated as the niaximum of the year's income ; and more than forty millions as the minimum of its expenditures. Taxes were called for to a large amount on many ob- jects from which Congress shrunk ; incomes and legacies, mortgages, stocks, flpur, manu- factures ; an emission of fifteen millions of treasury notes, and a loan of twenty-five millions of dollars. " A liberal imposition of taxes," said the Secretary, " ought to raise public credit, but can have no effect in re- storing a circulating medium. It is for the ■wisdom of Congress to decide what other means can be resorted to than taxes, loans, and treasury notes. The humble opinion of the Treasury Department has been frank- ly given, and remains unchanged." Although no bank came of that official objurgation, at any rate Mr. Dallas succeed- ed in getting taxes laid with a liberal hand ; and'the taxing power, which State opposi- tion could not effectually interrupt, worked' well throughout the contest everywhere. As money is the main sinew of war, so the Federal Constitution is much less fettered in the financial than the belligerent faculty. Massachusetts could lay no tax for rebel- lion without revolutionizing parties there : whereas the federal government heavily taxed many things in that commonwealth, and much increased the taxes. The mass of the people, who always pay the bulk of taxation, paid without a murmur. In vain the richer, not paying their proportion, la- bored to excite and mislead the poor, who paid more than theirs. Popular instinct preferred taxes to revolt : nor could State authority do anything but revolt, either by overt treason, or color of law, to resist the federal government. Hence a Hartford Convention to devise, if possible, a peace- able plan to withdraw from the nation, and transfer to the State the exclusive and com- plete constitutional means exercised at Washington ; legislative, judicial and execu- tive — even military, if need be, of enforcing, collecting, and applying the public revenue. A national bank would have been for that purpose additional federal power ; and there were no anti-federal engines worked with more effect than the Boston banks. Soon after the struggle, that followed peace," for the restoration of money and re- , duction of paper, Mr. Dallas resigned — re- Chap. XII.] BANK CHARTER. 263 sumed the practice of law, and died in January 1818. His labors were not con- fined to -what may, without exaggeration, be termed heroic remedies for the diseased and prostrate finances, in which his intrepid administration was like Brown's and Jacli- son's in the field ; it invigorated the Exe- cutive, roused Congress, and inspired the people. Elevation, promptitude, concilia- tion, and decision, with great labor, cha- racterized his brief career; which began with government at the lowest, and soon left it — favored indeed by fortune — at the highest pitch. In three of the pripcipal departments, he left the impression of that fearless but prudent energy which governs best and is most approved. The ablest vindication of the causes of the war was the production of his midnight hours, stolen from the repose required after toil some trea- sury days. And the delicate task of reduc- ing the army from the war to a peace es- tablishment, which Monroe, a candidate for the presidency, would have found an invidious and ungracious duty, was per- formed by Mr. Dallas as acting Secretary of War. CHAPTEE Xn. CHARTER AND CATASTROPHE OF THE UNITED STATES BANE. The next Congress, when I was no longer a member, received, in the President's an- nual message, the 5th December, 1815, Madison's first entire adhesion to a national bank, though in still measured intimation. " If all other means failed of arranging the finances and exchanges," it said, " and the operation of the State banks cannot pro- duce the result, the operation of a national bank will merit consideration." Next day a special committee, the seventh raised by the House of Representatives for that pur- pose, besides several in the Senate, was ap- pointed by Speaker Clay, re-elected, con- sisting of John C. Calhoun, Nathaniel Macon, James Pleasants, Joseph Hopkin- son, Boiling Robertson, George Tucker, and Timothy Pickering. Secretary Dallas' report, on the 7th December, 1815, strongly recommended, and his letter of the 24th of that month, in answer to Mr. Calhoun, for the committees' official call of that day, de- veloped his plan of the institution, which, on the 10th of April, 1816, was duly char- tered by act of Congress, approved by Pre- sident Madison. The bank was carried by the Republican party, mainly ; the Federal- ists mostly voting against it, especially Dan- iel AVebster, Jeremiah Mason, and John Sergeant, who became its chief counsellors, advocates and agents. Opposition by Jo- seph Hopkinson and John Sergeant nearly fixed it at New York instead of Philadel- phia. The votes on the final passage of the bill in the House were 80 to 71 ; in the Se- nate 22 to 12. The difficult and disreputable beginning, slow and doubtful progress, succeeding use- fulness, power and celebrity, contest and catastrophe of the bank, were not events of the war of 1812, but, considered as among its ofispring, may justify a continuance of their history from the beginning to the end. In 1800 one of those civil revolutions, which, without mobs, massacres, or more than popular commotion, periodically con- vulse by party and corroborate by patriot- ism this republican empire of distant sove- reignties, placed Jefierson, one of the few inflexible opponents of a bank of the United States, in the presidency. But from 1801, when put there, till 1809, when he retired, the bank was in full operation, and his Se- cretary of the Treasury, Mr. Gallatin, had become convinced of its great public utility, if not constitutional propriety. As a mem- ber of Madison's succeeding administration, he endeavored to bring about its re-charter, and among the disadvantages of the war of 1812, regretted the want of such a fiscal en- gine. Restored, as we have seen it was, af- ter five years' interregnum, in the close of Madison's, the eight years of Monroe's tranquil, and the four of John Quincy Ad- ams' contested presidencies were adminis- tered with a bank of the United States, seve- ral years of them under Mr. Riddle's much approved direction. The United States had never, but for the short interval from 1811 to 1816, been vrithout a national bank, when in 1828 another civil revolution raised a soldier to the chief magistracy, who, as he conquered the Indians in 1813, and the English in 1814, by similar bold aggression in his first year, attacked the bank of the United States, never resting tiU he achieved its overthrow. Mr. Rush's last annual re- port to Congress, as Mr. Adams' Secretary of the Treasury, in December, 1828, bore strong valedictory testimony to the great usefulness of the bank. President Jack- son's first of his rapid series of Secretaries of the Treasury, Mr. Samuel D. Ingham, soon after the Jackson administration be- gan, in an official letter to the bank, dated the 11th of July, 1829, "took occasion to 264 JACKSON DENOUNCES THE BANK. express the great satisfaction of the treasu- ry department at the manner in which the president and directors of the parent bank have discharged their trusts in all their im- mediate relation to the government." The President, too, in his first annual message to Congress, in December, 1829, applauded the judicious arrangements of the officers of the bank, averting an evil apprehended at a fime of unusual pressure on the money market, in paying off a large amount of na- tional debt. Yet a distinct and alarming paragrapTi in that same message significantly declared that "the charter of the bank expires in - 1836, and its stockholders will most proba- bly apply for a renewal of their privileges r Both the constitutionality and tne expedi- ency of the law creating this bank are well questioned by a large portion of our fellow- citizens; and it must be admitted by all that it has failed in the great end of esta- blishing a uniform and sound currency. If such an institution is deemed essential to the fiscal operations Of the government, I submit to the wisdom of the legislature whether a national one, founded on the cre- dit of the government and its revenues, might not be devised, which would -avoid all constitutional difficulties, and at the same time secure all the advantages to the government and the country that were ex- pected to result from the present bank." With that portentous assault began the struggle and final agony of the monster, as Jackson afterwards called the bank, whose dissolution shook this countir to its found- ations, involved the State banks in alternate expansion and suspension, disturbed the exchanges with Europe and Asia, and, after many years of tribulation more painful than foreign war, and more expensive, accom- plished, if any thing, that separation of State from bank, which was no part of Jackson's design. To a United States bank his uni- form language indicated that he was not opposed ; with the State banks he was led into extremely detrimental conjunction. His most confidential intimates and advisers, if indeed he took any advice so persuasive as his own instinctive will, declare that he as- sumed the presidency determined to put down the institution as it was. His inten- tion was to proclaim that determination in his inaugural address. But from that he was dissuaded by friends, who convinced him that, inasmuch as the bank charter was a legislative act, his first notice of it ought to be in a message to Congress. From the intimation of that first message he never swerved, though great efibrts were made to turn him aside. He relinquished the idea of retirement after his first presidential term, in order to effect his purpose. Early appeal to the popular attention and exoite- ment he deemed necessary to his success.oon- sidfering the bank question not a formidable [1829. but a favorable issue to lay before the peo- ple, for the people love vetoes, and his veto, notwithstanding strong interposal to prevent it, was inevitable. The early attempt of Mr. Ingham, his first Secretary of the Treasury, to remove Mr. Mason from the Portsmouth branch, instead of Jackson's effort to enlist, was Mr. Ing- ham's to preserve the bank, and that skirm- ish, which seemed to bring on the great bat- tle, was not at all indispensable — the battle was inevitable. StiU, it was provocation. The president of the bank set up a stand- ard of independence which could not be maintained ; the power of money on credit, against that of popularity, in the country of universal suffrage. Sharp letters be- tween him and the Secretary of the Trea- sury, with futile &.lat, swelled the parade of hostilities, proclaimed, as the adherents of the President of the United States af- firmed, to turn a government bank into a bank government. The first annual message of December 1829 was countervailed by favorable reports from the appropriate committees of both Houses of Congress. The House of Representa- tives referred the subject to a committee, of which Mr. George McDuffie was chairman, and the Senate to one presided by General Samuel Smith, both of whom made reports, that of Governor McDuffie prg-eminent in. constitutional and fiscal exposition ; that of General Smith abounding with practical views, all in favor of the bank, and depre- cating the President's destruction of^ it. Three years of contest followed between the president of the bank and the Presi- dent of the United States. Jackson's sa- gacious temerity, his hatred not of a bank, but of all currency but coin, his un- bounded confidence in the people and theirs in him, were resisted by BidcUe, with unli- mited disposal of several millions a year, for enlisting the press, the forum, legislation, speculation and party under a leader proud to be pitted against the great tribune, and resolved, like him, to conquer or die. Jack- son staked his re-election on the issue ; proof of uneducated knowledge of man- kind, superior to the calculations of those who are wise by learning, instead of mother-wit: Biddle staked the bank on wresting a charter from Jackson; and seldom was the might of money more tho- roughly, or more adroitly exerted. In 1832, Mr. Biddle pitched his tent at the seat of government, and there, with majo- rities in both Houses of Congress to sus- tain him, precipitated the conflict with Ge- neral Jackson, upon his own anticipating tactics. Nearly all of Jackson's cabinet, favorable to the bank, warned Biddle against then bringing on the struggle whether the government should rule the bank, or the bank rule the "government. The second annual message of 1830 ia- Chap. XII.] CHANGE OF CABINET. 265 dicated no insuperable, much less constitu- tional objection to a bank of the United States. " The importance of the principle involved in the inquiry, whether it will be proper to recharter the Bank of the United States, requires that I should again call the attention of Congress to the subject. No- thing has occurred to lessen, in any degree, the dangers which many of our citizens apprehend from that institution, as at pre- sent organized. In the spirit of improve- ment and compromise which distinguish our country and its institutions, it becomes us to inquire whether it be not possible to secure the advantages afforded by the present bank, through the agency of a Bank of the United States so modified in its principles and structure as to obviate constitutional and other objections. "It is thought practicable to organize such a bank with the necessary officers, as a branch of the treasury department, based on the public and individual deposits, with- out power to make loans or purchase pro- perty, which shall remit the funds of the government; and the expenses of which may be paid, if thought advisable, by allow- ing its officers to sell bills of exchange to private individuals, at a moderate premiuni. Not being a corporate body, having no stockholders, debtors, or property, and but few officers, it would not be obnoxious to the constitutional objections which are urged against the present bank ; and hav- ing no means to operate on the hopes, fears, or interests of large masses of the commu- nity, it would be shorn of the influence which makes that bank formidable. The States would be strengthened by having in their hands the means of furnishing the local paper .currency through their own banks ; while the Bank of the United States, though issuing no paper, would check the issues of the State banks, by taking their notes in deposit, and for exchange only, so long as they continue to be redeemed with specie. In times of public emergency, the capacities of such an institution might be enlarged by legislative provisions. " These suggestions are made, not bo much as a, recommendation, as with a view of calling the attention of Congress to the possible modifications of a system which cannot continue to exist in its present form, without occasional collisions with the local authorities, and perpetual apprehensions and discontent on the part of the States and the people." This repeated attack had no great effect. The House of Representatives took no ac- tion on the subject; and Colonel Benton's motion in the Senate for leave to introduce a biU against recharter was rejected by 23 to 20 votes. On the 20th April, 1831, the government gazette, the Globe, astonished the com- munity, by officially announcing a total change in President Jackson's cabinet. A camariUa quarrel, which troubled the unity of his administration, was supposed to have eventually led to that explosion, or state stroke, in which, as females were in- volved, no more need be said than that it was one of those sudden, astonishing, and strange events, such as a Duchess of Marlborough or Madame de Maintenon might cause, but till then in American republican government unknown ; to which, however, it is proper to allude, as far as it affected the bank, and as a trivial personal quarrel of society acted on the gestion of public events. After the death of De Witt Clinton, who, it was supposed, would have been President Jackson's Secretary of State, he called to that post Martin Van Buren, Governor of New York, who gave out that he should go to Washington to revive the doctrines of Jefferson, which others had preached, but he should prac- tise, and among them he soon coincided in General Jackson's opposition to the bank, to which Mr. Van Buren professed uncompro- mising hostility. Appointed minister to England, on resigning the Department of State, and succeeded in that department by Edward Livingston, the bank acquired a fast friend, instead of an avowed enemy there, near the President's person. Mr. Louis McLane, brought home from the English mission to take Mr. Ingham's place in the Treasury Department,'was, like him, a sup- porter of the bank, without approving the course of its president. In his annual re- port, the 7th December, 1831, Mr. McLane applauded " the present good management of the bank, the accommodation it has fiven government, and the practical bene- ts it has rendered the community, which give it strong claims upon the considera- tion of Congress." And he connected it with Jackson's laudable longing to extin- guish the national debt, by selUng the go- vernment bank shares, if sold, for eight millions of dollars, which, in addition to the incoming receipts, would accomplish that consummation. The President's annu- al message at the same time left the mat- ter to Congress, where it belonged. " En- tertaining," said the message, "the opin- ion heretofore expressed in relation to the Bank of the United States, as at present organized, I felt it my duty in my former messages frankly to disclose them, in order that the attention of the legislature and the people should be seasonably directed to that important subject, and that it might be considered and finally disposed of in a manner calculated to promote the ends of the Constitution, and subserve the public interest. Having conscientiously discharg- ed a constitutional duty, I 'Seem it proper, on this occasion, without a more particu- lar reference to the views of the subject heretofore expressed, to leave it at present 266 VAN BUREN REJECTED. to the investigation of an enlightened people and their representatives." In that frame of the President's mind, the Senate recalled Mr. Van Buren from England, by an inconsiderate for them- selves, and for the bank unfortunate mistake. Established, and contented in London, with his epicurean inclinations and easy temper, the American minister enjoyed the splendid hospitalities of the British aristocracy in a life of luxurious ease, freed from the rude cares of demo- cracy, and perhaps vrithout thought of further promotion, when, on the 7m De- cember, 1831,_his nomination was cast into the Senatorial urn. The dean of the di- plomatic corps then at the court of St. James, old Prince Talleyrand, had lived an exile at Albany, an unfrocked and impover- ished priest, when Martin Van Buren was a poor boy at Kinderhook. On the 19th May, 1794, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Pe- rigord voluntarily made oath before Mat- thew Clarkson, Mayor of Philadelphia, that "born at Paris, and arrived at Philadel- phia from London, I will be faithful and maintain allegiance to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and to the United States of America, and that I will not, at any time, wilfully and knowingly do any matter or thing prejudicial to the freedom and in- dependence thereof:" — one of his numerous oaths of allegiance, to which he had added several more before meeting Mr. Van Buren in London. Soon after that oath the French ambassador's royal master, Louis Philippe, rode on saddle-bags, which contained all his wardrobe, a wanderer in American wilds, cleaning his own boots" and taking other lessons of humility, which in 1831 he seem- ed to approve, and in 1848 is sorrowfully bound to undergo. The sailor king of Great Britain, William the Fourth, of George the Third's seven sons the most vulgar and ill- bred, with facetious civility, entertained the American minister at Windsor. Among the gorgeous embassies of spendthrift po- tentates, contemning the parliamentary re- form by which some approximation to Ame- rican institutions was attempting to prevent revolutioii in England* the American minis- ter was basking under the Corinthian co- lumns of magnificent governments, while Senatorial cabal conspired to degrade him and mortify his protector. In mat Senar torial caldron seethe the many patent, and still more numerous latent presidential aspirations, thirsting for the draught never enjoyed ; for they are curious facts in Ame- rican politics, that no Senator ever has been elected President, and but few Presi- dents have been Senators. After favorable report from the com- mittee on Mr. Van Buren's nomination, John Holmes, on the 17th January, 1832, moved to recommit, with instructions, in- volving the cabalistic changes in the cabi- [1831. net. With ominous discussion, finally, on the bitter cold night cff the 25th January, 1832, Mr. Van Buren was rejected by a vote of 23 to 23, and the casting vote of Vice President Calhoun. Mr. Webster, the last on whom such an imputation sat grace- fully, charged Mr. Van Buren with sub- serviency to England. An iU-assorted tri- umvirate of Mr. Clay, Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Webster, all aspirants for the presi- dency, defeated President Jackson and his favorite, recalled Mr. Van Buren from his mission to preside over themselves as Vice President ; and from that bound, by them and their adherents, by Jackson's support, and the bank's opposition, to be carried forward to the presidency, after Jackson's second term, which he then thought proper to undertake, after having unequivocally declined it. By like Senatorial passion was Isaac Hill raised from being second comptroller to Senator, who probably caused the at- tempt to remove Jeremiah Mason from the presidency of the Portsmouth branch bank. Mr. Van Buren's elevation by popular reac- tion was a severe blow to the bank, against which Jackson's ardent antagonism had in. him a calm, wary, influential andprovident aid. On the 22d March, 1832, Mr. Van Buren had his audience of leave in England, on the 24th dined at Windsor Castle with the king, and on the 5th July landed at New Tort on his triumphant recall: declined the popular ovation there awaiting him, be- cause of the cholera then prevailing in that city ; but on the 8th was closeted with Jackson at Washington, to confirm his veto of the bank bill, sent the second day after- wards to the Senate, where it originated. Soon after the third annual message against the bank in December, 1831, Mr. Dallas, one of the Pennsylvania Senators, on the 9th January, 1832, presented their memorial for reoharter, and had it referred to a select committee, who reported on the 13th March, 1832, a charter, with modifica- tions, for the term offifteen years. Meantime, the conflict having begun in the House of Representatives, the Senate bill was laid on the table to await the action of the other House. On the 9th January, 1832, Mr. McDuffie presented the memorial there, and had it referred to the committee of ways and means, of which he was chairman, which committee, on the 10th Februa^, 1832, reported for the reoharter. Mr. Mark Alexander, from the minority of that committee, reported against it. Five thousand copies of the bill, report and counter-report, were ordered to be printed. When Mr. McDuffie, on presenting the me- morial, moved its reference to the commit- tee of ways and means, Mr. Cambreleng moved a reference to a select committee, which motion, after debate and under the previous question movfed by Louis Condiot, Chap. XII.] CLAYTON'S COMMITTEE. 267 was negatived 100 to 90. Among the ne^ tives on that vote appeared Mr. James K. Polk, the future President, whose opposi- tion to the bank as memhei', as chairman of tha. committee of ways and means, and as Speaker, was uniformly active and ener- getic. On the 23d February, 1832, Mr. Augustine S. Clayton, on leave, moved his resolution for a select committee to examine into the affairs of the bank, with power to send for persons and papers, and to report to the House. On the 14th March, 1832, liat resolution was considered, and after various amendments rejected, that of Mr. Adams was carried, 106 to 92, for -the amended resolution, and the select com- mittee appointed by the Speaker, Andrew Stevenson. Mr. Edward Everett moved to choose the committee by lot, but withdrew the motion on Mr. McDufSe's request, and the Speaker named Augustine S. Clayton, John Quinoy Adams, George McDuffie, Richard M. Johnson, Churchill C. Cambre- leng, Francis Thomas, and John G. Wat- mough. By Mr. Adams' amendment the committee had leave to meet in Philadel- phia, were to make their final report by the 21st April, 1832, might employ clerks, and their expenses were to be paid out of the contingent fund of the House. Not tiU the 1st May, 1832, Mr. Clayton from the majority of the committee ; on the 11th May, 1832, Mr. MoDuffie from the minority ; and on the 14th Mr. Adams alone, made their respective reports. Three of the committee for the bank, three against it, and one, Colonel Johnson, voted with the three supporters to enable them to report, but declared that, though he assented to their report, he disclaimed any intention to cast the least reflection on the integrity of the president of the bank or its government, and upon Mr. Biddle bestowed high praise for great merit. It would be useless to repeat the several counts of what Mr. McDuffie called Mr. Clayton's indictment. The bank went back to Congress not only not found guilty, but unimpaired by a altering if not failing impeachment. All the majority ventured to report was only that nothing should be done as to recharitering the bank until the public debt was paid, and the public reve- nue adjusted to the measure of public ex- penditures : conjunction, like individual competency, always desiderated, but never accomplished. On the other hand, the minority report was a bold and thorough vindication of the institution. Mr. McDuffie pronounced " visionary in the extreme all imagination that the bank was in the slightest danger of being reduced to the necessity of suspending payment;" and taxed the majority with " design to produce a scene of general embarrassment and dis- tress in the absence of natural causes." Mr. Adams, vrith all the power of the bitter polemics he delighted and excelled in, de- fended what was charged as subsidizing the press. Why should not a bank be suc- cored by a free prfess, as well as a presi- dent? who shall fetter the hallowed free- dom of the press? and he lashed with unmerciful if not unmerited castigation a quondam bank director who had forsworn (as Mr. Adams charged) against Mr. Bid- die. In short, it was at worst for the bank a drawn battle, if that. Public sentiment was aroused, but the bank had the best of it. A solitary resolu- tion of the Legislature of the State of New York had, on the 8th of February, 1832, in- structed the Senators of that State, and re- quested its Representatives, to vote against renewal of the charter. On the 23d of Janu- ary, 1832, Colonel Benton asked leave of the Senate to bring in a joint resolution declara- tory of the meaning of the bank's charter, on the subject of the paper currency to be issued, which was refused, 26 to 16 ; Mr. Dallas vot- ing against, Mr. Forsyth, Mr. Grundy and Mr. Troup, three members of the House when the bank was attempted in 1814-15, voting for. Colonel Benton's leave. The horoscope of stocks and of parly^, feeble reports to Congress against, forcible reports for, the bank, the undeniable fact that not one charge against it had been incontroverti- bly substantiated, betokened that the Pre- sident, if relying on Congress, would be disappointed. Mr. Cambreleng and Mr. Thomas indeed imputed sinister'expansions and contractions. Mr. Clayton, by bolder accusation, proclaimed the bank broken, and that it could not pay its debts. Mr. Polk, and a few other members of Congress, with Colonel Benton and the Attorney General, Taney, avowed their determination to put an end to it. But nearly all the conserva- tive portion of the Democratic party, with the venerable Madison at their head, advocated a renewal of the charter ; and very few of any party believed that the public deposites were not perfectly safe, with a superabundance of capital to meet every liability. No chargd had been established as specified, except, perhaps, the least specific, but most danger- ous of all, that the bank was in the field of politics, assailing government in the person of a popular chief magistrate, who, though by no means the government in theory, was practically so, and a formidable foe to chal- lenge by a bank, whose influence, however extensive and great, did not reach down to the roots of plebeian potentiality. Of the twelve members of Jackson's two successive cabinets, in less than two years no less than eight, four out of six of each cabinet, were friends of the bank, desiring its recharter. Majorities in both Houses of Congress were always so; and Jack- son's aversion was not to a bank of the" United States. Mr. Ingham's appeal to the public gave it to be understood that the Pre^ 268:. RBCHAE.TER PRESSED. sident's reiterated objection was to its expe- diency, but not constitutional. His public acts, and the veto itself, all said so. There were written application^ on the files of the bank for branches (and other similar tokens of approbation) from Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and Thomas H. Benton. Thomas, Jefferson, in 1817, recommended a branch bank. Ex-President Madison, in two publislied letters, ex-President Monroe and William H. Crawford, in published letters, Edward Livingston, Samuel Smith, if not Albert Gallatin, and many more of the abori- ginal Republican party, and amajority of the war republican party, were avowed advocates of the bank, and nearly all of them of its re- charter. It was a Republican act, as far as parties were concerned. The Federal party were nearly unanimous for a bank; and though many of their representatives in Congress opposed the bank attempted in 1814-15, and chartered in 18 16, yet they soon became its supporters, counsel, agents, di- rectors, and stockholders. The legislatures of many States, memorials from town meet- ings and various respectable bodies of citi- zens, solicited branches, for which sixty- three applications, respectably and power- fully presented, were refused by the bank, besides the twenty-five established. The Legislature of Pennsylvania, in February, 1831, by large majorities, resolved that the Constitution of the United States authorizes, and near half a century's experience sanc- tions, a bank of the Umted States, as neces- sary and proper to regulate the value of money and prevent paper currency of un- equal and depreciated value: and again, the next year, in February, 1832, instructed their Senators and requested their Repre- sentatives in Congress to use their exer- tions to obtain a renewal of the charter during that session of Congress, with such alterations, if any be necessary, as may se- cure the rights of the States. Although General Jackson's early, and, as was charged, premature and continual denunciation of the bank, it was insisted, justified and required its earlier application for recharter, some time before the expira^ tion, yet all the Democratic supporters of it counselled delay ; not to urge the question tfll after the presidential election. Mr. Clay and Mr. Sergeant, professionally employed by the bank, were the candidates nominated against General Jackson and Mr. Van Bu- ren; which proved a provoking circum- stance, when forbearance would nave been a great virtue, and inaction, probably, more masterly than any movement. To the last Mr. Biddle was strongly ad- vised not to press the recharter' when it was done. Mr. Livingston, Secretary of State, Mr. McLane, Secretary of the Treasury, and, I believe. General Cass, Secretary of War,- as well as Mr. Barry, Postmaster General, General Smith, John Forsyth, TVIr. WiUdns, [1832. Mr. Dallas, the Pennsylvania Senators, nearly all that portion of the Republican party which sustained the bank, counselled delay. Let the President have time, and his friends opportunity of reasoning^with him. Do not force, do not hurry him. Wait the event of his election. Let him be the author, instead of destroyer, of a bank. Edward Livingston was constant -in belief and assurances that, if conciliated and not constrained, the rugged chieftain would yield on fair and reasonable terms. The Attorney General, Mr. Taney, was the only open cabinet opponent of the bank. From the plains of New Orleans, where he served as his aid-de-camp, to the council, where, together, they produced the- proclamation against nullification, Mr. Livingston en- joyed Jackson's confidence. Into Hs hands a letter from Mr. Biddle was safely depo- sited — not trusted to the post — offering to accept a charter on almost any terms that Jackson might prescribe. Mr. Biddle was not insensible of the delicacy of his situa- tion among ambitious leaders whom he could harmy resist, avaricious followers whom he despised, and nvunberless flatter- ers. He too was ambitious, not avaricious ; not insensible to flattery, but not infatu- ated ; fond of mysterious ways, but not a mere intriguer. Surrounded as he was' at Philadelphia, much more at 'Washington, there were presidential candidates, party leaders, and other politicians to whom the proffer through Mr. Livingston would have been unwelcome intelligence. Some of his surrounding counsellors dealt with the bank as only the means of a political end. Striv- ing to overcome the President and supers sede him, they labored to bring Jackson to a dilemma by which he would be either degraded to submission, or driven to what they deemed the desperate resort of a veto. Others were avaricious and ambitious too, while many looked on^ to their own luora-- tive ends. Not a few flattered Mr. Biddle's ambition by assurances that the bank was his way to political honors — to the presi- dency of the United States, which was con- tinually held up to his contemplation. And who is proof against adulation? which mis- led Biddle and Jackson, as it did Napoleon and Alexander : by republican flattery more captivating than regal, as it is addressed, without impediment or interposition, di- rectiy and personally to its object. Notwithstanding, however, me politicians and the avaricious, the bill, as it passed both. Houses, showed that Mr. Biddle yielded, con- trary to the wishes of both those classes, to the supposed predilections of General Jack- son. No note under $50, unless on the face of it payable where issued-; power express^ reserved to Congress to prohibit,, iu 183o, all notes under $20 ; no more small checks or drafts ; every branch to receive notes of any other branch in payment of balanoea Chap. XII.] BIDDLE AT WASHINGTON. 269 due from State banks — were concessions of circulation to the States, and of coin to the President's preference, limitations and de- privations of a national bank clearly indica- tive of sacrifices wisely made by Mr. Biddle for General Jackson's expected acquies- cence. On the 2d of June Colonel Benton, the most uncompromising senatorial anta- gonist of the recnarter, said no more than " if the bank is pressed now, Jackson will put it down, as he did the British army; and government attempting to rectify its usurpations would be sending Ralph, the apothecary's boy, with a syringe to shiver the rock of Gibraltar." In June, 1832, at Gadsby's hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue, the great thorough- fare of Washington, the bank standard was hoisted by Nicholas Biddle, in person, and majorities of both Houses were ready, if not all, to flock to it, yet to vote as he wished. The most conspicuous, and a majority of the Senators attended his drawing-room, par- took of his entertainments, as some of them had of his bounties, counselled with him, caucused in his apartments, and did his bidding. Contrary to the warnings of a few, some of them disinterested advisers, Mr. Biddle's flatterers, debtors and deceiv- ers, urged constant action, early action^ and compulsion. Of the five hundred bank of- ficers he so extravagantly defended and ap- plauded, and the five thousand bank bor- rowers who thronged hia ante-chamber, there were few but fomented his confidence, which, misled as it was, was never so rash as theirs, indicated by votes of parasite directo- ries, with the color of by-laws to arm him, with power transcending the President's constituted authority. The bank's flourish- ing rental of three millions and a half a year, was put at his irresponsible and clandestine disposal. Twenty-five directors were melted into one gigantic corporation sole, in his person, with the revenue of a principality, and more than the power of a monarch, to distribute as he pleased. In the profit and loss account, what were one hundred thou- sand dollars a year, spent from three and a half millions ? a scarcely perceptible sum to lend, or give by discounts, fees, or other largesses, to those who make and inter- pret laws in legislatures and in courts, create and annul public sentiment in print. From the Senate committee on finance, in Decem- ber, 1834, Mr. Tyler, a constitutional op; ponent of any and every national bank, with his future Secretary of State, Mr. Webster, and others, members of that com- mittee, vindicating the moderation, extolling the wisdom, and to prove the purity of the bank, reported that there were never more than 59, nor less than 44, debtor members of Congress to the bank, whose loans, bills, and discounts, never exceeded $238,000. " Loans of sums of money could not be re- garded," said that report, " as likely so to operate, as to induce a member to forget the obligation he is under to himself, his country, and his God !" Yet not long before the bank made an insolvent assignment of its efiects, the debts of one Senator to it for drafts, discounts, and other advances, amounting to one hundred and eleven thousand dollars, were compromised for a conveyance of wild lands in the West, of no realizable value, leaving unsettled and outstanding, another debt of twenty-eight thousand dollars. In the Senate, on the 8th and 9th June, 1832, Hugh L. White, Isaac Hill, and Colo- nel Benton, intimates of the President, de- livered speeches against the bank. On the 9th, Mr. Wilkins presented the Pennsyl- vania resolutions of instruction in its favor. The bill was then ordered to be engrossed for third reading, by 25 to 20 votes, three of its voters not present at the moment. Renewed and earnest entreaty was then once more addressed to Mr. Biddle, to stop, and rest on that success, and not to venture further ; but with that vote of the Senate to indicate and influence public opinion, to pause, and wait for it next year, without then forcing a bill on the President. Nothing like personal enmity had then occurred between Mr. Biddle and General Jackson. At the beginning of that session, on the 30th De- cember, 1831, General Jackson had nomi- nated Mr. Biddle, as theretofore, one of the government directors, all of whom voted for him as president of the bank. The boasted exchanges, large circulation, profitable divi- dends, great accommodation to govern- ment, Mr. Biddle's pleasing manners, and avowed discountenance of party prefer- ences, all recommended the institution. But he would not, probably could not, stop then. He had been threatened with oppo- sition from the party then his chief reliance, unless he went on. Another bank of the United States might be chartered instead of that at Philadelphia, and he was assured that there was no danger of the threatened veto. It might be threatened, but never would be put in force. Jackson would not dare that extremity. If he did, the consequence would be his inevitable de- feat at the polls. Veto, or no veto, there- fore, the bank course must be onward. Mr. Biddle's presence at Washington might have offended one less umbrage- ous than Jackson, and looked like an attempt to carry the bank in spite of the President, whose intimates had mentioned the veto, and presses had promised it. Be- yond doubt the bill from the Senate would pass the House of Representatives ; so that everything depended on the conduct of two individuals, Nicholas Biddle to withhold, or Andrew Jackson to reject the bill, and neither hesitated. On the 9th June, 1832, Colonel Wat- mough presented the Pennsylvania Legis- 270 lative expectations to the House of Repre- sentatives, with all the weight of that trans- cendent thing, a state, clothed in the im- posing forms of constituted authorities ; the Speaker of the Senate and governor, au- thenticating the document both democratic. On the 11th June, 1832, Monday, the bank bill was presented to the House as it passed the Senate the preceding Saturday. The in- tervening Sabbath, with all its opportunities of reflection, and concert, made no change. On the 12th June, Mr. McDuffie moved its reference to the committee of the whole House on the state of the Union ; which, after ■ various skirmishing motions, was, by the ar- rival of twelve o'clock, put out of the routine for that day. On the 13th June, Mr., now Judge Wayne of the Supreme Court, with- drew his pending motion to postpone the consideration of flie bill to the first Monday of July, and Mr. McDuffie, withdrawing, likewise, his motion, to refer it to the com- mittee of the whole, which left its results to the ordinary accidents an4 delays of legislation, substituted and carried, with- out serious opposition, a motion to make it the special order for Monday, the 18th June, which gave it preference in the order of business. But it was not considered - till the 30th June, when Mr. Clayton mov- ed to commit it to the committee of the whole. On that day, except a motion by Mr. McDuffie, to retain the established branches, nothing 'beyond some common movements of. legislative tactics, took place. On the 2d July, propositions to tax the -branches, and the foreign stockholders, and to limit the interest on discounts, some of which were within three or four votes of being carried, were all rejected, and Mr. McDuffie's amendment succeeded. An attempt to close further controversy by the ?revious question failed. Next day, July 3d, 832, the previous question was at length carried, 96 to 82, on motion of Gen. Henry A. S. Dearborn, son of the General of that name, of the war of 1812. . Engrossing the amendments, and reading the bill a third time, were carried, 106 to 84. So strong and eager for a bank were more than the avowed majority that the order of business was suspended, so as to svuthorize reading the bill a third time that day, by a vote of two-thirds, 124 to 61. The previous question was then again carried on General Dear- born's motion, and the bill was passed by a majority of 22 votes, 107 to 85. On the same day, 3d. July, 1832, the Senate, on Mr. Dallas' motion, without delay, or di- vision, concurred in the House amendment respecting branches. On the 4th July, the bill was reported as enrolled, and on' the 6th, that it had been presented to the Presi- dent for approval. All the Pennsylvania members present in both Houses, voted for th^ bpjik, except one, who hanged him- .self Aftervrards. Large numbers of the VETO. [1832. — • Jackson party, as it had then been called, were for the bank, with numerous presses. To Mr. Biddle's personal superintendence of the passage of the bill, the Senate super- added,afler it was presented to the President for his approval, another irritation. The House hau passed a resolution for putting an end to a session of more than seven months duration, by adjournment on the 9th of July. As the bill was not presented to the President tm the 4th of that month, it was said that he might keep it without returning it till after Congress adjourned. To pre- vent that, and compel him either to sign or reject the bill, the House resolution for ad- journment, on the 9th July, after Mr. "Web- ster moved to lay it on the table, was changed from the 9th to the 16th, so as to give full ten days of session, without count- ing the Sundays. To this lie last of many provocations Jackson reposted the next day by sending his veto to the Senate. Various, contradictory, and perplexing were the week's predictions, conjectures, doubts, hopes, notions, from the 4th to the 10th, whether the bill would be approved or rejected. Public journals of all parties had t^en sides on the question ; before the bill passed Congress many insisted that it would be approved, others that it would be rejected. Did Jackson weigh both sides as Washington had done in 1791 ? He cer- tainly did not require written opinions from any of his constitutional advisers. Did he S'eld to counsel and to circumstances like adison in 1815-16 ? Upon Jackson's re-election or defeat both political parties put the fate of the bank. His hostility to it was avowed, his want of confidence m Congress to restrain or not recharter it, nay, his distrust of the federal judiciary by legal proceedings to repeal or to punish it. He would hang the ring- leaders of the nullifiers, and wring the bank's, head off. The Democratic press of Virginia and other places invoked the veto as Qie only safeguard against a bank be- come what Hamilton denominated it, a great political engine. But in Mr. Adams' felicitous application of the language of Hero in ' " Much Ado about Nothing," Nicholas Biddle took Hamilton's definition only to " spell him backward." All its millions were said to be lavished to conquer recharter, to carry it by torture. Whether the twenty-eight millions of increase in six- teen months, from forty-two millions of loans in January 1831, to seventy millions in May 1832, of which Jackson accused the bank, could be reduced, as the bank contended, to eighteen millions, and that increase ex- plained by sufficient reasons for such ex- pansion ; whether expansion and contraction in frightful and tormeiiting round, as .Mr. Cambreleng and other adversaries imputed ; whether the aiibsidized press, which Mr. Adams yjfidioated as parcel of its hafUowed Chap. XII.] PARTIES. 271 freedom not to be touched, and as warrant- - able in the president of a bank as the Pre- sident of the Union; whether these and other impeachments were well founded, they were at any rate urged as facts be- yond denial or excuse. Hostilities were declared with extreme bitterness. Three years of fierce rose to furious conflict be- tween the rival presidents, struggling with terrible composure, the subdued rage of victory or death, whether one should crush the bank, or the other overthrow the administration. The conflicting mo- narch 3 of popularity and of wealth raged till the deposites were removed. Then, though the masses did not suffer so much, the bank people, the tradespeople, money makers, dealers, artisans, speculators, and discount dependants, with their numerous tribes of auxiliary editors, lawyers and politicians; active workmen in the busy laboratory of ephemeral public sentiment, suffered, or thought and cried that they all suffered, intensely. The periodical wail of ruin went up from cities to the political metropolis, with hosts of hostile committees and of alarmed friends to browbeat or en- treat the President; who mocked at the ruin, which, he said, ought to overtake those who overtraded on borrowed capital in paper money, and defied the storm with imper- turbable resolution. "He was sure," he said, " of the cross roads. The streets of cities might swarm with bank myrmidons, his opponents. But the rural districts, where the plough worked without loans, ■ and God gave the increase, not bank direc- tors, in luxurious towns made by man — the yeomanry would sustain him." His entire confidence in the mass, and theirs in him as one of themselves, his sagacious and even artful boldness, if not temerity, his innate and honest detestation, not of a na- tional bank, or any bank, but of all artificial, and more than that, of all privileged ma- chinery for counterfeiting money, supplant- ing the good old system of personal loans, and individual credit by that of bank cor- porate discounts, protests and prosecutions, ■his love of coin as the only currency, strung his iron nerves to immortal resistance. The country people, too, adhered to their pri- mitive methods of lucrative transaction. When what was called scarcity of money distressed the seats of commerce, with de- JTOuriog usury, money to lend was plenty, at legal or less than legal interest among farmers and others not hasting too fast to be rich. Especially was that the case in the German counties of Pennsylvania, inhabited by the most frugal and thrifty agriculturists on the finest firms in America, of which more are transmitted from one generation to another in the same family than in the Eastern Puritan regions, whose boasted uni- versal but imperfect education makes many ashamed of manual labor, stimulated to other means of subsistence and advance- ment. More learned, are the people of New England as wise as the Swabiau race, contemptuously derided as American Boeo- tians — ^the Simon Snyder race of plodding, unspeculating Germans, the truest of the Saxon descent? The only two colossal American fortunes wore amassed by plain, uneducated men, one a Frenchman, Stephen Girard, the other a German, John Jacob Astor, without a drop of English vitality in their veins. It was officially stated in Con- gress, as a reason for a bankrupt act, that official ascertainment gives 95 failures out of every 100 mercantile enterprises in the United States. Why? Is it because the new Englishman is an exaggeration of the old, with greater licentiousness of paper money superadded to the English loose currency ; more liberty, but liberty fatal to equality, by incorporated privileged classes, foment- ing excess and perverting trade to gam- bling. Besides immediate and extrinsic mo- tives, the veto was preceded by political occurrences and party combinations, in all of which the bank, through the great body of its advocates, openly took part. Some of them declared that its error con- sisted in doing indirectly and sparingly what would have been more effectual if avowed, and openly carried out to the uttermost of- its vast means of influence. On the 4th July, 1832, the usual boisterous notes of conflict were uttered in the Satur- nalian quodlibets of politicians unavoidably, however undeservedly, influential with the people, heralding preparations for the sum- mer and autumnal campaign to decide whether Jackson or the bank should rule. Angry correspondence between the Presi- dent and Vice-President had estranged them, embittered by nullification. Among the interminable fragments of party, a mys- tic and sentimental anti-masonic modifiba;- tiou had arisen ; and many national exigen- cies to eicite a people fond of commotion, and their chief magistrate restless without exploit. The Maysville road veto, western river and harbor controversy, the King of Holland's unfounded compromise of the Maine boundary, and resilient Madawaska hostilities, the Georgia Cherokee nuUifioa- tion, removal of the Indians beyond the Mis- sissippi, Black Hawk war, Florida troubles, Falkland island and Sumatra naval attacks, proposed distribution of the public lands, treaties of amity with Turkey and Mexico, of indemnity from France and Naples, wrung by compulsion, all furnished fuel to the fiery era of bank contest. In September, 1831, the anti-masonic convention nominated their presidential candidates. In December 1831, the National Republican party nominated Henry Clay, the boldest of the bank's ad- vocates, and of Jackson's antagonists, by whom excited antagonism was returned, 272 THREE PER CENTS. for President, and of course a Pennsylva- nian, John Sergeant, director, counsellor, agent, intimate and immediate represent-" ative of the bank, as Vice-President. The Legislature of Pennsylvania renomi- nated Jackson, who was nominated by the Democratic National Convention, with Mr. Van Bunen as Vice-President. A frac- tion of that party in Pennsylvania, after wavering between George Mifflin Dallas, the son, and William Wilkins, son-in-law, of Dallas, author of the bank, settled on Mr. Wilkins, who, with Jackson, received the Pennsylvania thirty votes. Parties were marshaled and confronted on the bank bill as it passed through Con- gress to be vetoed. Before his election de- nouncing party as a monster, Jackson after- wards forfeited the support of nearly all those won by that denunciation, who were shocked when he declared the bank a mon- ster, and rallied party to its overthrow. Leaders need parties, which sometimes become factions, though demagogues are seldom long public favorites. But the people love vetoes, and admired his when it was laid before them in copious appeals to- their reason and passions. Jackson's confidence in them induced him to think that they love also extensive appeals to their judgment; that the illiterate enjoy state papers teeming with well developed views. One of them himself, he sympa- thized in their sentiments, and cordially vindicated what he considered their rights. Taking his stand accordingly, when his ignorance and violence were themes of half- ' educated egotists, their contempt made lit- tle impression on the mind, and less on the sufirages of the community, while complete success at the polls gave his arguments the .merit of predictions, and a volcanic banking system continually justified his opposition to it. Throughout this reading republic many ■ who live by their wits, despise honest labor, and the toiling millions. With' them pa- triotism is a calculation, while with the com- mon people it is an emotion. History writ- ten by and for the educated, bestows its ho- mage on those who despise the uninformed. Yet glorious as it is to do right, regardless of ■ popular clamor, and in despite of it, histori- cal homage is likewise due to those who not only strip privilege of its unjust advantage, but to bberty, vvhich has long flourished, add equality brit little known. Jackson's whole life and death taught the lesson which Napoleon, child and champion of democra- cy, was tortured to death tor disregarding, jfchat the discernment and attachment of the ■illiterate are less selfish and more reliable than those of the aristocratic, i Gn the 16th July, 1832, Congress :ad- -joumed. Before the next seeslonljegan ini -December, Jackson was re-elected by twoi iundred and nineteen votes to forty-ninel [1834. for Clay, and Vaii Buren, by all the demo- cratic votes, except Pennsylvania. Jn that State, too, the success was signal of Jack- son over the bank, by the choice of large majorities of his supporters. By that ple- beian victory firmly fixeid, he chose to con- sider it not only his right, but duty and popular instruction, his mission, to put an end to the Bank of the United States, and establish some other means of fiscal opera- tions. The issue had been tri«d and de- cided, he thought, by his re-election. That event was soon followed by two exclusively banking transactions which fortified his growing antipathy to the institntion; now pronounced and carried into destructive ac- tion. In the affairs of the three per cent, ■stocks, and the French draft, the bank gave its antagonists arguments for the final and fatal blow of wiSidrawing the public de- posites. Concealment threw over the stock transaction a cloud of suspicion ; detention of the disputed damages on the draft was treated as an act of rapacity, both illegal, the former as confessed by the bank, the latter as adjudged by the Supreme Court of the United States. The three per cent, stocks of the United States were part of the offspring of Hamil- ton's funding system, having its paternity at the time and by the measure, which on- finated tiie first bank of the United States, hat funding system was the first ^eat measure onwiich American parties divided, into those who under Hamilton clung to English system of finance, and those who witS Jefferson struck off into a more inde- pendent course. The three per cents were Eart of one of those fiscal compromises so 'equent in English budgets since the Bank of England took root there. The sub- scribers to the public debt of the United States, consisting, of foreign not quite twelve millions, domestic principal and arrears of interest upwards of forty mil- lions, and state debts estimated by Hamilton at twenty-five millions, altogether nearly eighty millions, were funded by act of Con- gress of the 4th of August, 1790. Ampng his certificates, each subscriber was' to re- ceive indents of interest, issued in p^ment of interest, purporting - that the United States owed the holder the sum specified, bearing interest at three percent., payable quarterly, subject to reduction by payment of the sum specified, whenever provision by law should be made for it. On the 1st January, 1817, more than sixteen millions of the three per cents remained part of the public debt of the United States; and it was not thought probable that it would, ever he redeemed, ■without undergoing some modi- fication by act ofgovernment,. with. consent of the holders. Nearly seven, millions wete held by English^ about eJeven millioiis' m this conntry. This rejnnajit of the bri^nal £uitding systepi, Jackson's administisfion Chap. XII.] THREE PER CENTS. 273 were determined to extinguish, together ■with all the rest of the debt of the LJnited States. On the 24th March, 1832, the day of Mr. Van Buren's royal feast at Windsor, the Acting Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. As- bnry Dickins, by a confidential letter to Mr. Biddle, gave the bank notice that the means of the treasury would be sufficient to dis- charge one half of the three per cents, on the first of July, and that it was proposed to give public notice accordingly on the first of AprD. One of Jackson's passions was that his administration should accomplish what William Lowndes in Madison's administration began, extinguishment of the national debt, a monument to public faith by a country audaciously reproached since for repudiation of debts by Eng- land, whose public debt often compro- mised, once for three and twenty years repudiated, never can be extinguished but by the bloody sponge of revolution. Jackson's incessant attention to the affairs of his administration, with an intelligent chief clerk, Mr. Dickins, made the neces- sary arrangements for discharging the three per cent, stock. The Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. McLane, 'was one of those warning Mr. Biddle not to press the re- charter when it was done in 1882, or pro- voke the veto. On the 19th July, 1832, he wrote to Mr. Biddle that the trea- sury would redeem about two-thirds of the three per cents, on the first of Octo- ber, the other third on the first of Janu- ary, and publish notice of it on the 25th July. On the 28th July, 1832, Mr. Bid- dle answered, that the bank had taken the necessary steps to obtain the control of a considerable portion of those certifi- cates, and would cheerfully employ it in such manner as might best suit the con- venience of government. But those ne- cessary steps were kept secret, and when divulged, confessed to be illegal. On the 18th July, 1832, immediately after the veto. General 'Thomas Cadwalader, "long a di- rector of the bank, and enjoying its entire confidence," was despatched from Philadel- phia to London to make an arrangement with the firm of Baring, Brothers S. Com- pany, for postponing payment of five mil- lions of the stock to be redeemed. The ar- rangement he made with them by contract in London the 22d August, 1832, was to "buy up the three per cent, stocks on the best terms that "could be done," in viola- tion of the bank charter, forbidding its purchase of the public stocks of the United States. This was not generally known till by Baring's circular published here the 12th October, 1832. On the 15th of that month, Mr. Biddle wrote to Baring, Bro- thers & Company, disavowing the pur- chase as illegal, and proposing a different arrangement. To indignant and abrupt vi- tuperative sensibility, like Jackson's, a com- mon texture of strong minds impelled by strong passions — the secresy, illegality and detection of what he deemed an intrigue, excited doubts of the bank's solvency, and suspicions of Mr. Biddle's fairness. It was, Jackson alleged, conclusive proof of the inability of me bank to refund the public deposites to the government, for payment of the public debt, as bound to do. The pre- tences and misrepresentations, he declared, by which it attempted to conceal the true, cause from the government and the country, proved it unworthy of public trust. When General Cadwalader was sent to England, the public deposites in the bank were nearly twelve millions, and thirteen millions on the first of October, when only nine millions of the public debt were to be paid. It was then only the betrayal of the bank's shifts by the appearance of Baring's circular of the 12th October, that forced Mr. Biddle, General Jackson charged, three days after, on the 15th, to disavow his clandestine and illegal contrivance to prop up the tottei-ing bank. On the 27th October, 1832, Mr. Biddle, in conversation with Mr. Dickins, explained this business, and by his request in a letter to the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. McLane. But by his reply of the 31st October, 1832, requiring further informa- tion, it was plain that the Secretary was not satisfied, as soon was distinctly and officially manifested. Early in July, 1832, the Asiatic Cholera appeared in .Ajnerica, beginning at Quebec, and traversed many parts of the United States. The ravages of that pestilence were pleaded for the bank, as threatening the pecuniary af- fairs of the country with great confusion, and, added Mr. Biddle, threatening "if it continued, to press with peculiar force on. the public revenue, more especiaily, as the demand on account of the foreign holders of three per cents, on the first of October, at New York and Philadelphia alone, would have exceeded five millions of dollars." To Jackson's mind this was mere pretext. Negotiations involving millions at Lon- don were not calculated to check or dimin- ish the established animosity between the bank and the government of the United States, when an occurrence at Paris ren- dered the French government almost a party to the contest, of which the whole mercantile world, European and Asiatic, were spectar tors, many of them interested in it. Nicho-; las Biddle's name became familiar every- where, more so than that of any other living American, not excepting Andrew Jackson. Eight millions of the stock of the bank of the United States were owned in foreign countries, mostly England. That immense dictator of public sentiment, American, French and German, besides English, the London Times,- interfered in the bank quar- rel, to declare it " an institution founded on 274 FRENCH DRAFT. correct principles, which aided commerce to a greater /extent- than any hank in the known world." On the other hand, jealousy of fo- reign interest and influence figured largely in the veto. Nobility and hierarchy, said to be among the stockholders, were fre- quent topics of reprobation in Congress, and did not escape presidential animadversion. The "three per cent, detection and contriv- ance, as denounced by the bank's enemies, occurred in the midst and heat of the pre- sidential election. The affair of the French draft followed soon after, almost simultane- ously with Jackson's renewed espousals to the American nation ; whose plebeian judg- ment it was his pleasure to consider as re- corded at the polls of more than a million of constituents, that he should destroy the bank. The deposites were to be removed, and both London and Paris furnished un- expected reasons for that strong measure of executive power. The French Revolution of July, 1830,- accomplished in no small degree by an American citizen. La Fayette, afforded the American minister at Paris, Mr. Wm. C Rives, an opportunilry which he properly laid hold of, not only to settle the long pending demands reciprocated by the United States and France on. each other for in- demnities claimed ever since Washing- ton's proclamation of neutrality, in 1793, infringing Franklin's treaty at Versailles, in 1778, but for ameliorating the commer- cial intercourse and amicable relations be- tween the two countries, not without much reason to sympathize, but by a series of fatalities so long alienated. £y Mr. Rives' treaty, dated the 4th of July, 1831, France engaged to pay the United States five mifiions of dcnlars. The treaty was mor- tifying to French vanity; and payment of the debt onerous to the parsimonious Chamber of Deputies, reluctant to appro- priate for such a purpose. Without wait- ing for the requisite appropriation, as soon as the first instalment fell due, the Se- cretary of the Treasury, Mr. McLane, on the 7th of February, 1833, drew for 4,856,- 666 66 francs, equal to $912,050 77, as the first instalment, according to the treaty, in- cluding interest on the 11th of February, 1^33, and the draft was purchased by the bank of the United States, which placed the amount to the credit of government. The draft was in favor of S. Jaudon, cashier of the bank, on Mr. Humann, the French min- ister of finance. Presented at his o£Sce, the 22d of March, 1833, payment was re- fused, and the bill protested. On the same day, Hottinguer & Co. interposed and paid it for account of Mr. Jaudon, cashier of the bank. On the 26th of April, 1833, the bank r9oeived information of the fate of their biU ; and on the 13th of May, 1833, claimed tiie amount with damages, from the Secre- tary of the Treasury. On the 16th of May, [1832. 1833, the Secretary repaid; the money, but without the damages, which he denied as unfounded. At the next send-annual di- vidend, on the 7th of July, 1833, when the dividend declared on the bank stock of the United States, was $233,422, the bank with- held $170,041 18, for the damages claimed on the protested bill. Mr. Rives having returned home, leaving only a charge d'affaires at Paris, and the settlement of our difficulties with France, requiring there a minister plenipotentiary, it was determined to commission Edward Livingston, and appoint Mr. McLane Se- cretary of State in Mr. Livingston's stead. But these changes were deferred till after the election. As soon as it was over, on the 4th of December, 1832, Mr. Wm. J. Duane was requested by Mr. McLane to take the Treasury Department, as Mr. McLane's successor, which was finally done on the 1st of June, 1833. In August following, Mr. Livingston sailed for France on board the frigate Constitution. By that time, the removal of the deposites from the United States bank to State banks had be- come the President's anxious resolve. Dal- las' United States bank was much more affiliated to government than Hamilton's. It was Mr. Dallas' plan, defeated by Mr. Calhoun, that the President of the United States should nominate the president of the bank. And going beyond Hamilton's plan, the second bank was by charter to be depository of the public money, unless the Secretary of the Treasury should otherwise direct. The Attorney-General, Mr. Taney, and Auditor of the Treasury, Mr. Amos Kendall, by whose talente, industry and devotion to his cause, Jack- son was much aided and gratified, coun- tenanced a change of the public money from the United States to selected State banks, to which the Secretary- of the Treasury, Mr. McLane, was decidedly averse, and his successor, Mr. Duane, also, unless ordered by act of Congress. In the annual message to Congress, the 4th of December, 1832, the President, after reproachfully adverting to the bank post- ponement of the three per cents., proceeded to say, that " such measures as are within the reach of the Secretary of the Treasury, have been taken to enable him to judge whether the public deposites in that insti- tution may be regarded as entirely safe. The subject is recommended to the atten- tion of Congress, with a firm belief that it is worthy of their serious investigation. An inquiry into its transactions seems called for by the credit given throughout the country to many serious charges impeach- ing its character, and which, if true, may justly excite the apprehension, that it is no longer a safe depository of the money of the people." The Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. M(Ujane also, in his annual report to Chap. XII.] DEPOSITES. 275 the House of Kepresentatives, Ibrought the subject under consideration. The untoward management and aspect of the three per cents., together with incTeas- ing alienation between the Executive and the bank, induced the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. McLane, on the 26th of November, 1832, by virtue of the charter authorizing him, ex officio, to inspect the general accounts of the bank, to empower Mr. Henry Toland, a respectable merchant of Philadelphia, long a director of the bank, and an intimate friend of General Jackson, to make that inspection. His examination was to be as complete as the law authorized to ascertain the security of the public moneys, and the solvency of the bank. On the 4th of December, 1832, Mr. To- land reported that he had made all the investigations required, excepting the ac- counts of private individuals, taking the monthly statement of the Ist of November, 1832, as the basis of all his inquiries ; that the liabilities of the bank, exceeding some- what thirty-seven millions of dollars, were provided for by assets considerably exceed- ing seventy-nine millions, so that neither the security of the public money nor the solvency of the bank admitted of a doubt. And its Western debts, to which his attention was particularly called, the examiner also report- ed as being as safe as the same amount would be on the Atlantic frontier. The president of the bank, in anticipation of any executive movement, however, and with a view to all events, on the 9th November, 1832, suggested to the directory the propriety of taking into consideration, at a full meeting of the board, the present situation, course of policy and future operations of the bank. The distant members, invited to Philadelphia for that purpose, on the 20th of November, 1832, took these subjects into consideration ; and, on the 23d of that month, by Manuel Eyre, chairman of the committee, reported against any. change in the general system of its operations; so that they might be continued and increased, or closed without inconveni- ence to the community. • The bank was, therefore, still indisposed to despair, if to doubt, of its continuance, notwithstanding the veto. But the Presi- dent of the United States was resolved on depriving it of the public deposites ; and the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. McLane, though not agreed to that measure, was dissatisfied with the conduct of the institu- tion. The affair of the three per cents., and other circumstances, inclined him to ques- tion the safety of the deposites and even the solvency of the bank, to question which is to endanger such an institution, whose com- mercial surface, as presented to Mr. Toland, and by him to the government, might be no reliance for its real situation. The simpli- city of the books and familiarity with bank business, which Mr. Toland's report men- tioned as the grounds of his judgment, were the very means to mislead it. More than probable, as it is, that the deposites were then perfectly safe, and the bank solvent, it is nevertheless part of the perilous price paid by commonwealths for such luxuries, that it is impossible to know what their condition is, which no examination can ascertain, while discredit may ruin them. The President's annual message recom- mended a sale of the government stocks in the bank ; for which purpose, on the 13th of February, 1833, Mr. Polk, from the commit- tee of ways and means reported a bill. But Mr. Charles A. Wicklifie, taking the strong ground of objecting to it, when, by parlia- mentary rule, a bill is to be at once rejected without reading, if that be the sense of a ma- jority, the previous question, demanded by Mr. Elisha Whitlesey, was sustained, and put an end to even listening to the attempt to sell the stock, by a majority of two votes, ninety-three to ninety-one. On the 11th of December, 1832, Mr. Cambreleng moved for the correspondence and documents relative to the arrangement in Europe for postponement of payment of the three per cent, stocks. On the 14th of December, 1832, these documents, mean- time communicated, together with Mr. Toland's report of his examination, were, on Mr. Wayne's motion, referred to the committee of ways and means, which con- sisted of Gulian C. Verplanck, Balph J. Ingersoll, John Gilmore, Mark Alexander, Richard H. Wilde, Nathan Gaithers and James K. Polk. On* the 1st of March, 1833, Mr. Verplanck, from that committee, to which during the session had been re- ferred sundry communications in relation to the agency of the bank, in the payment of a portion of the public debt, and to the pecuniary and financial state and manage- ment of the bank, reported a resolution that the government deposites might, in the opinion of the House, be safely continued in that bank, Mr. Polk, at the same time, from the minority of the committee report- ing adversely. Next day, Mr. Polk pre- sented an additional report, of which ten thousand copies were ordered to be print- ed, and appended to the report of the ma- jority, wnose resolutions regarding the safety of the deposites in the bank had been that day adopted, under the previous question, by ayes one hundred and nine to nays forty-six : of which majority many were the President's personal and political friends, but the minority voted his deter^ mination. The twenty-second Congress ended with the determination in his mind fixed to deprive the bank of the deposites and to prevent its re-charter. Jackson's want of confidence in it was vindisguised. His want of confidence in Congress was also avowed; and that the courts of justice could not be 276 relied on for its condemnation or impartial trial by judicial proceedings. The (matter was a contract wiich, it was generally be- lieved, could not be revoked; and any at- tempt would be futile to punish or put a sto^ to imputed irregularities. Not long after, it was said that the District Judge of Pennsylvania, before whom, as one of the Circuit Court there, legal proceedings, if attempted, must be tried, not only enter- tained but published in the newspapers an anonymous opinion as to what, in contem- plation of law, constitutes-the treasury of the United States, which opinion was also said to be controverted in another- news- paper, anonymously, by the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Taney, whose opinion was, that the United States Treasury is no where but where the Treasurer of the United States thinks proper to keep it, while Judge Hopkinson insisted that it is everywhere where public money is kept. Meanwhile, the. giant stride of American physical prosperity was moving onward with developments more prodigious as stimulated by bank expansions ; at times, indeed, checked and receding; but never falling back to where its ascent began, and me government of the United States mostly has the advantage of this natural progression. The bank contended for re- charter with great odds, against the pros- perity of a young and tbriving people, nearly all voters, the popularity and ascend- ant of their favorite leader, and the canker of paper money undermining it. Washington and Monroe, the two mili- tary Presidents preceding Jackson, and.the only two Presidents re-elected without op- position, introduced themselves personally, assuaged party spirit," and corroborated union, by journeys throughout the United ' States. The preponderance of national emotion over party altercation on such, as on most exciting occasions, lulls party, even where most inveterate and predo- minant, constraining nearly the whole population to render homage to their own representative in the chief magistracy. After Jackson's triumphant re-election, he too performed a presidential visitation to the Northern and Eastern States and cities, leaving Washington for that purpose the eUi June 1833. The season was propitious, nature in her first and gayest summer attire, the country teeming with flowers and pregnant with harvests, the towns progressive, animated, and prosperous. Jackson, like Washington and Monroe, was an excellent horseman. Mounted on a. noble steed, bareheaded in the warm sunshine, he gracefully saluted the con- course cheering hia; progress through the streets of Philadelphia, the city of the bank, where a large majority of the. inhabitants, d^conteatea with his cpnduct towards it, JACKSON'S JOURNEY. -*^ — [1833. and the city authorities, were awed into silent acquiescence, while the mass of population hailed the visit of a triumph- ant chief magistrate. With his tall form and long countenance standing erect in the consecrated Hall of Independence, he received the thronging people, order- ly, curious, each one grasping by the hand their first servant and soldier. In the art of polite popularity Jackson was also a" master, kind, and communicative with all, distinguishing the least appa^- rently entitled to notice by some encou- raging word, and saluting their seem- ing betters with elaborate urbanity. In what the Quaker founder Penn called "the great town," when it was but a ham- let, political liberty was promised by peaceable but unsubduable resistance to clergy, and soldiery, tithes and war, state, household and personal ostentation. An ultramontane Presbyterian, not more ra- dical than Penn, fierce, stern and devout, with warlike decision and popular pomp, was come to enforce other doctrines of the Society of Friends, their repugnance to corporate power and lucrative rapacity,- by methods more arbitrary and abrupt, but not more inflexible, or pronounced. Passing expeditiously through the capital of New Jersey, the scene of Washington's , most desperate campaign and Monroe's only military exploit, Jackson . landed in the magnificent bay of New York, at the confluence of the great Nortii and East rivers, whose aquatic superiority displays its numerous and industrious shipping,, by sail and steam the carriers for the world, welcomed at New York, the com- mercial emporium of America, as at Phi- ladelphia, the ancient capital, by every demonstration of homage. At Boston, the busy and polished metropolis of New England, his reception was, if possible, still more flattering, for emulation of places swells the tide as it rolls on. The growl of opposition was hushed in loud acclamations of respect. Harvard University, the first collegiate institution . of the United States, pursuant to an ab- surd English usage, conferred on the President the Doctorate of Laws; certify- ing that an illiterate man, and . in the opinion of nearly all who awarded the diploma, entirely ignorant of the rudi- ments of law, was sufficiently versed in its faculty to teach its sciences. Wherever he went universal attention, as far as the horizon of his perception extended, hailed his advent with gratification : for no mo- narch is more obnoxious to parasite im- posture than an American President, whom all may approach and flatter. The crowd of attendants is too dense for perception that tiiere are. also some neitiier present nor.pleased. Chap. XII.] Jackson, always restless with some ruling passion, thinking nothing done while aught remained to he done, in the midst of the festivities and congratulations of travel bent on removing the public deposites from the United States Bank, made that his constant premeditation. The new Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. William J. Duane, inducted the 1st June, 1833, was immediately appris- ed of the President's intention, before his departure, in several free conversations, in which he says the President expressed ap- prehensions of both Congress and the judiciary, neither of whom, he feared, could be relied on in controversy with the bank. The President, therefore, ear- nestly contemplated timely measures, be- fore the first session of the next Congress, for sustaining the veto, and, as he uniform- ly insisted, the will of the people expressed by his re-election, that the United States Bank should be deprived of its mischievous power. Jackson was resolved to remove the deposit«s, and find secretaries to do what he was willing and proud to take all the responsibility of. Mr. Duane detected, he thought, a clandestine and irregular influ- ence, stigmatized as the kitchen cabinet, embarrassing to him and disgusting to the public. Great men are often ruled by wives, children, servants, favorites, mistresses ; all easily made objects of popular prejudice and historical reproach. Though a man of Jackson's temperament was readily influ- enced, yet no will was so absolute as his own, much more apt to give than to take impressions. Mr. Duane's sensibility trans- pired throughout the well-constructed vo- lume, which, several years after his remo- val, because he would not remove the de- posites, he laudably dedicated to permanent public opinion. Yet the letters from Jack- son to Duane in that book are as temperate and convincing as those from Duane to Jack- son, arguingthe question of removingthe de- posites. Apprising his new Secretary of the Treasury, before leaving Washington; that he would write to him from Boston, and send him the opinions of the members of his car binet, Jackson, on the 26th June, 1833, from there dispatched letters largely arguing the question, and indicating his desire that it should be effected early in the following September. On the 12th July, 1833, soon after the President's return to the seat of government, the Secretary of the Treasury placed in his hands a voluminous answer, dated the 10th of that month, to the Presi- dent's also extensive letter of the 26th June, from Boston. They agreed to discon- tinue using the United States Bank as fiscal agent ; mutually regretted that Congress had not taken the President's recommendation to substitute some other than bank agency for that purpose; and resolved that the deposites should be removed. But the Pre- sident required their early removal, with- WILLIAM J. DUANE. 277 out waiting the sanction or action of Con- gress, and furthermore placing the deposites in selected State banks. 'The Secretary questioned the safety or fitness of all State banks, and desired, for whatever might be done, preliminary act of Congress. The Secretary had the right of removal, however questionable the policy ; but pos- ■ terior -coincided with prior experience, to confirm his opinion that State banks cannot be safely used either as places of deposite or fiscal agents for the United States. A President should not venture on -that experiment till Congress regulated the proceeding, however taught to apprehend irresolute and compromising proceedings by Congress, of whicn Jackson's experience in the afiair of the bank should not have determined his course ; for a President has no right to presume that the legislature will do wrong ; but is bound to await Congres- sional action, if not regulation. His official influence with Congress is very persuasive ; the veto is a powerful arm ; and Jackson, with his personal popularity, could hardly fail to accomplish his laudable purpose ; if that was to dethrone the bank, and the paper money usurpation both together, and restore coin, or strictly convertible medium. The Pre- sident and Secretary harmonized in their monetary principles ; but while the latter faltered upon temporizing and unavailing re- monstrance, the latter plunged into a detri- mental, if not illegal experiment. Jackson's work would have been admirably done, his fiscal renown would surpass his military, his personal popularity, beginning a se- cond term of administration, was the power which might have induced Congress, and the mass on whom he so constantly relied, if, casting away all banks, and their flimsy contrivances, he had mounted at once to the pure sources of constitutional currency, to which he was attached, and separating go- vernment from banks, planted the treasury on the rock of precious metals. Instead of that obvious and simple reform, after, on the 15th July, personal communion with the Secretary, on the 17 th of that month he ex- pended his force in an elaborate reply to the Secretary's letter of the 10th, with no view to such revival ; but aft«r some acri- mony on both sides abated, they at last agreed in a letter of instructions to Mr. Kendall, authorized to ascertain what could be done with the State banks. To the Secretary's alleged aversion to office, disgust at the clandestine influence he soon detected, and reluctance to com- ply with the President's wish for prompt and perilous action, were then superadded his doubts of the President's fairness and sincerity, suspicions of his double dealing, fears of the press, and of his own firm- ness to resist such conspiracy of malign evils. His letter to the President of the 22d July, therefore, closed with the 278 CABINET COUNCIL. half threatening penultimate, to concur, or retire. After many misgivings, hoVrever, he submitted to the President's imcandid alterations, as he read them, of the contro- verted letter of instructions to Mr. Kendall, delivered it to him, and he went on his ill- judged errand. The President left the Se- cretary uneasy at the treasury, to spend a few days sea-bathing at the Bipraps. There, on the 3d August, his impatient feelings vented themselves in a letter to Henryfi. Gilpin, John T. Sullivan, and Philip Wa- ger, the government directors at Philadel- phia, with whom he was in frequent and confidential correspondence, concerning alleged irregularities, which he and they were busy in endeavors to detect from the books and proceedings of the bank. Whe- ther the undisclosed influence was as repre- hensible as Mr. Duane thought, there is no doubt that the Attorney-General, Mr. Ta- ney, and Auditor, Mr. Kendall, were ad- vocates for the State banks, and Mr. Duane probably believed that they were large contributors to the long letters by which the President strove to refute him ; for it is a curious enigma in Jackson's character, that, uneducated, as he certainly was, his written compositions are copious, elegant, and masterly, though several of those dis- missed from his confidence, would, if they could, have made known his incapacity to write what is published as his, and denied by his antagonists. On the 25th August, 1833, the President and Mr. Kendall had both returned to Washington. The government newspaper, the Globe, in its editorial paragraphs, no- ticed the dissidence between the Presi- dent and the Secretary, concerning the bank deposits, with strong approval of the President's position. Mr. Duane, whose being one of the editors of the Aurora newspaper, had recommended him to Jack- son's choice, dreaded the overrated assaults of the press. On the 10th and 17th Sep- tember, cabinet meetings were held, at which Mr. Kendall's report was considered, and the President desired the opinion of each member on the removal of the depo- sites from the Bank of the United States to the State banks. The Secretary of State, Mr. McLane, spoke decidedly against it, having before submitted his reasons, in a paper of nearly one hundred pages. The Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Duane, was against it, without the prior sanction of Congress. The Secretary of War, General Cass, left it to the Secretary of the Trea- sury. The Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Woodbury, was for its gradual accomplish- ment in the course of the next year. The Attorney-General, Mr. Taney, was always for it, and then more than ever. Next day, the 18th September, 1833, the President read to his cabinet, again convened, the [1833. paper which has been the subject of so much animadversion. Mr. Duane, asking leave to read it, the President directed his Secretary to hand the paper to him. After reading it, he inquired if he was to understand the Pre- sident as directing him to remove the de- posites. The President said such was his desire, but on his own responsibility. At the private interview of the 14th of Sep- tember, he had more than hinted to the head of the treasury, that his acceptance of another place ^would be acceptable; with whom all his intercourse, by that gentle- man's account, was kindly. The newspa- pers reported the probability of the Secre- tary of the Treasury's translation to a fo- reign mission. On the 19th of September, 1833, the President's private secretary called and inquired of the Secretary of the Treasury whether he had come to a deci- sion respecting the deposites ; apprising him that the President's would appear in the Globe of next day: to which Mr. Duane objected as indignity, and asked for time to prepare his justification for the public. Next day the President's decision appeared : whereupon Mr. Duane wrote, and person- ally dehvered to the President, a letter, with twelve reasons why he would neither re- move the deposites, nor retire, as intimated by his previous letter of the 22d of July. That day, 21st of September, 1833, he sub- mitted no less than four letters to the Pre- sident, who returned them as inadmissi- ble ; and by a note, dated the 23d of that month, notified him, that his services as Secretary of the Treasury were no longer required. A short correspondence between Mr. Duane and the President's private se- cretary, Mr. A. J. Donnalson ; conciliatory on the latter's part, complaining and sus- picious on thei'ormer'B ; closed Wm. J. Dn- ane's brief and uncomfortable sojourn at Washington as chief of the treasury de- partment. Before Mr. Duane was selected to suc- ceed Mr. McLane as Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Kendall had, with much force and earnestness, by written commu- nications to the President and Mr. McLane, urged both the political and fiscal advan- tages of removing the public deposites, call- ed moneys, but in fact no more than cre- dits, from the United States Bank to State banks; to which fatal misstep General Jackson yielded. 'On the 16th of March, 1833, Mr. Kendall addressed the Secre- tary of the Treasury, Mr. McLane, a long letter against the United States Bank; and on tiie 18th of that month, another to the President, in answer to a letter from the President to him, dated the 16th, in which letter Mr. Kendall decried any bank of the United States, and contended that the State banks would better answer every Chap. XII.] MR. DUANE DISMISSED. 279 purpose. On the 24th of May, 1833, Mr. Campbell P. White, in a letter from him- self, at flew York, forwarded to the Presi- dent a representation from forty-three citi- zens of that city and State, representing the dangerous power of the United States Bank, and urging the removal of the public deposites from it to the State banks. Let- ters from Mr. Van Buren and Silas Wright to the President, advised delay, without discountenancing the removal, but suggest- ing that it ought not to be done without the action of Congress ; while Mr. Flagg made known to the President his opinion that it should be done at once, without any delay. In that state of the question, Mr. Duane was called to succeed Mr. McLane in the treasury ; Mr. Duane's sentiments on the subject not known, though believed to be in accordance with those of Mr. McLane, whose suggestion was said to have led to Mr. Duane's appointment as Mr. McLane's successor. Mr. Van Buren's correspond- ence with Gen. Jackson was of the most un- reserved and friendly kind; who endeavored to temper his self-willed patron's inflexi- bility by ca\ition and delay. The deposites would probably not have been removed till Congress passed upon the subject, had his advice prevailed. Nor was General Jack- son rash or imprudent, however self-willed. On the 8th of September, 1833, he wrote to a son of Alexander Hamilton for informa- tion respecting his management of the public deposites while he was Secretary of the Treasury ; also to ascertain the condi- tion of the United States branch bank at New York, and whether the State banks there would be safe depositories of the public funds. Mr. James A. Hamilton, on the 16th of September, 1833, answered con- fidentially by enclosing a letter from Wil- liam Seaton, cashier of the State bank of New York in 1792, to Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, complaining that the Bank of New York was drained of specie by the United States Bank, to re- dress wluch grievance, Mr. Hamilton stated that his father ordered some of the public moneys to be deposited in the Bank of New York. Thus General Jackson's investigation was fortified by a precedent of the highest authority, not only for the power, but the policy of removal, when necessary. Mr. James Hamilton added that Mr. Gallatin's opinion was that the State banks would be safe places of deposite, which Mr. Hamil- ton strongly recommended: so that the President had the action of Hamilton, and, as he was assured, the judgment of Galla- tin, both of great weight, that the de- posites had been removed by the Secretary of the Treasury, and that the State bank is a proper place to which to transfer them. His preconceived determination thus con- firmed, on the 18th of September, 1833, he read to his cabinet the forcible and ani- mated argument then presented. On the 23d September, 1833, General Jackson — certainly without an amanuen- sis or adviser, for the original is all in hia writing and marked with his feelings — addressed a note as follows : — " To R. G. Tanbt, Esq., Attorney-General of the United States : — " Sir, — Having informed William J. Du- ane, Esq., this morning, that I have no further use for his services as Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, I here- by appoint you Secretary of the Treasury in his stead, and hope you will accept the same, and enter upon the duties of said office forthwith, so that no injury may ac- crue to the public service. " Please signify to me your acceptance or non-acceptance of this appointment. I am, Sir, with great respect, " Your most obedient servant, "ANDREW JACKSON." Endorsed also in his writing : " The President's note to Mr. Taney in- forming him that Mr. Duane is dismissed, and appointing him Secretary of the Trea- sury United States, in the room of Mr. Duane." When Mi. Duane presented his fourth and last note to General Jackson, on the day of his dismissal, fatigued and disturbed by the efforts and excitements of that anx- ious day, the President (as he styled him- self by endorsement on the note to his suc- cessor), said to him, "Mr. Duane, you are fatigued ; you had better go to bed and rest ;" which was the farewell of a chief who was resolved on a lieutenant to execute his ordws, and who knew that Mr. Taney had constant- ly said that it ought to be done without de- lay. Mr. Van Buren was at his elbow, always, as he had written from Albany to General Jackson, ready to sustain what- - ever course he might take, as he felt in- debted to Jackson for his great and rapid fortunes. Mr. Kendall, too, was a constant counsellor of the President, to whom, when apprised of his selection for the treasury department, Mr. Taney expressed his deep regret. The ambition of his whole life had been, he said, a seat on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, which would be marred by involvement in the trammels and politics of the treasury, under a leader whom it was still more dangerous to displease than to follow. The future chief justice could not foresee, through the lowering imlroglio of that conjuncture, that the vivifying plum- age of Jackson's broad protecting wing, warmed by senatorial spleen, would bear him upward to the highest seat on the bench, where he only aspired to one less elevated. Nominated to succeed Judge Du- 280 KEMOVAL OF DEPOSITES. vail as an associate judge, on his resigna- tion, and rejected by the Senate, Mr. Taney was aftervrards nominated and confirmed to the chief justiceship on the death of his illustrious predecessor Marshall. And ■when Mr. Van Buren, inaugurated as Pre- sident of the United States, was sworn by Chief Justice Taney, in presence of the Senate, with what philosophic triumph Jackson, standing by, said, "there is my rejected minister to England sworn as Pre- sident by my rejected Judge of the Supreme Court!" Throughout that year, frequent correspon- dence with the government directors of the bank, called in the Senate Jackson's spies, apprised him of what they represented as the continual and flagrant misconduct of the other bank directors ; abetting and instigating their chief ofScer to unexam- pled interference, by loans to newspaper editors, profuse publications of pamphlets and other means, inflaming general senti- ment against the Executive, and, by secret appropriation of large sums for open de- nunciation. Exasperated by unwarrant- able contest, flushed and immovable by success, tantalized by an adverse cabinet, urged by extrinsic counsellors, exciting his own tendency to high-handed measures, be- sides the flatterers always waiting on power, Jackson poured forth his antipathy to the bank, the object of whose attempt at re- charter, on the eve of his re-election, was, he said, to put him to the test. Immense extension of loans was to bring large num- bers into the bank's power, and enlist con- ductors of the public press to procure from the people a reversal of his decision by ve- to, which was but the rational sequel of all his prior messages. He accepted the chal- lenge, the, battle was fought as offered by the bank, and the people had ordered him to do, what he would be ungrateful to them, as well as unmindful of his duty, not to do. The bank being to end, the pubUc deposites must, before it expired, be in due time carefully removed from it by Executive power, always asserted and often exercised. The bank was faithless as a public agent, misapplied public funds to interfere with elections, put its funds, including the go- vernment share, at the disposal of its arro- gant president, to compel re-charter. He opened a secret negotiation to delay pay- ment of the national debt, deceiving, per- sonally at Washington, the Secretary of the Treasury, and through him the Presi- ,dent. For that secret purpose, a clandes- tine agent, dispatohed to England, made an arrangement palpably illegal ; disavow- ed, but not till accidentally made known to government ; the whole contrivance betray- ing the inability of the b^nk to pay its debts.. Sinc6 Congress resolved that the deposites were safe there, a new state of things had arisen, vrliioli, if known to the [1833. >-r. — House of Representatives, would bring them to a difierent conclusion. The bank controls, in effect owns, and without dis- guise supports, insolvent presses to assail the government. With six millions of pub- lic deposites, buying a government bUl on -France, for which it was merely credited, not paid, the bank attempted to dishonor government by demanding damages for protest of ike draft. Although the charter declares that not less than seven directors shall transact business, discounts are made by a committee of five, who never report to the board. The President alone conducts nearly all operations, many of them in'Se- cret, the directors by repeated resolutions having invested him with the entire, un- controllable, and irresponsible power, and the government directors being excluded from all participation in, or knowledge of, what is done. The funds of the bank are put at the president's irresponsible -control, to hire writers and newspapers, to convert the bank into a vast electioneering machine, to embroil' the whole country in deadly feuds, and extend corruption through all the ramifications of society. Publications have thus been extensively circulated, con- taining the grossest invectives against offi- cers ofthe government ; all are degraded who resist its grasping and wanton calumnies. Torrents of abuse are continually issuing from its reservoir. With these facts offi- cially reported to him, the President would be an accomplice, not to punish the guilt of a body thus taxing human ingenuity for reasons to. disarm it. A bank suffered thus to abuse public money entrusted to it, must entail its corruption on the community. Assuming the responsibility of a measure of transcendent iraportance, and requiring no member of his cabinet to do what he be- lieved unlawful or unconscientious, the Pre- sident begged his cabinet to consider the measure his own, which he thus fervently pressed to execution. Orders to transfer the public funds from the United States bank to Stete banks were given first on the 1st of October, 1833, and thereafter, from which moment farious con- flict raged between the bank and the Presi- dent ofthe United States. Whatever reason or right there was for the strong, harsh measure of depriving the United States bank of the public funds, the President and his favorite advisers commit- ted a pernicious error by transferring to State banks funds safer and less liable to abuse in the Bank of the United States ; plunging them, as Mr. Duane welj objected, in the chaos of State banks, none of which were able to meet their own responsibili- ties in coin. There was in fact httle or no actual removal of deposites, but by familiar commercial legerdemain a mere transfer by checks and orders of the credit of one bank to the credit of several others, with which Chap. XII.] PROCEEDINGS IN CONGRESS. 281 the federal Executive had no legal privity. The whole operation was in paper. If the money had been taken from the United States bank in specie, and deposited, any- where, even in State banks, as a special de- posite of coin, to the credit of the Treasurer of the United States, Jackson's misman- aged design might have been accomplished. But that reform, worthy of his genius to conceive, and of his power and popularity to execute, seemed not to be thought of. Whether the State banks are constitution- al, is debatable ground, on which the Su- preme Court of the United States and other eminent personages have differed in judg- ment. But there is no doubt that the State banks, if not contrary to the Constitution, as near a thousand of them stole on the United States, are noxious, if not fatal to the exclusive control of the currency, which by the Constitution was believed to be secured to the federal government. The President pleaded, that as Congress, by the charter, gave the Secretary of the Treasury power to remove the public funds from the United States bank, it must neces- sarily be in the first movement an execu- tive act, and he regretted that Congress had not thought proper to adopt his sug- gestions as to a proper substitute. But he never seems to have contemplated the simple recurrence to first principles, by which all banks should be discarded. Con- gress had not, indeed, by the bank charter prescribed where deposites removed by the Secretary should be put, but State banks were the last place to be thought of. The journals and proceedings of the two House's of the first session of the twenty-third Congress, from the 2d December, 1833, to the 30th June, 1834, are overloaded with vestiges of the bank deposite conflict. Many printed volumes of petitions, memorials, reports and debates surfeit with materials the narrator of a controversy, which subse- quent events have deprived of much inte- rest. On the 13th December, the Speaker communicated to the House of Representa- tives the memorial of the government di- rectors. On the 18th December, Mr. Biuney presented the memorial of the other direob- ors, urging their contract right to retain the deposites taken from them, and asking redress. On the 4th of March, 1834, Mr. PoUc, chairman of the committee of ways and means, and Mr. Binney, from a mi- nority of that committee, reported reso- lutions on the subject. On the 4th of April, Mr. Polk's resolutions were carried, that the Bank of the United States ought xiot to be rechartered, by a majority of fifty-tvyo votes ; that tiie public deposites ought not to be restored to it, by a majori:- ty of fifteen votes ; that the State banks ought to be continued and further guarded as places of deposite, by a majority of twelve votes; and that another select committee should be appointed to examine the bank at Philadelphia, by a majority of one hun- dred and thirty-thiee votes ; who were ac- cordingly appointed, viz : Francis Thomas, Edward Everett, Henry A. Muhlenburg, John T. Mason, "William W. Ellsworth, Abijah Mann, Jr., and Robert T. Lyttle. On the 22d May, 1834, by Mr. 'Thomas, that committee reported to the House, (Mr. Everett and Mr. Ellsworth a minority, making a cbntradictory report,) that the bank refused to submit its books and papers to inspection, and its ofBcers to answer in- terrogatories : wherefore he called for a resolution, by the Speaker's warrant, to compel the attendance of Nicholas Biddle and the directors, at the bar of the House, to answer for the contempt. On the 29th May, 1834, Mr. Adams moved resolutions that there was no contempt, and that no warrant should issue. On the 13th June, the Senate's joint resolution disapproving the removal of the deposites was, on Mr. Polk's motion, laid on the table of the House by a majority of 13 votes. After various motions by several members during the session, which need not be particularized, the ses- sion closed on the 30th June, 1834, without action on the report of the select committee sent to Philadelphia. Mr. J>olk, Uke Mr. Van Buren, another presidential pupil of Jackson, successor of Mr. McDuffie, as chairman of the committee of ways and means, without his genius, but indefatiga- ble, with a clear mind and fixed purpose, maintained successfully the then established and increasing uncompromising hostility to any national bank. In Senate, on the 9th December 1833, Mr. Benton moved for direction to the Secretary of the Treasury to report a state- ment of the deposites in the United States Bank; which next day was amended on Mr. Clay's motion, and on the 11th De- cember adopted as amended. That day, on Mr. Clay's resolution, the Senate called on the President for a copy of his cabinet Saper of the 18th September, which next ay in terms of decided negation he refused. On the 8th January 1834, Colonel Benton moved to amend Mr. Clay's resolution, by requiring Nicholas Biddle to appear at the bar of the Senate, to be examined on oath touching the curtailment of the debts of the bank, and the application of its moneys to electioneering and political objects, which, like all his other motions, was over- ruled by large majorities. On the 4th February 1834, the President denounced, ia a written message to the Senate, the United States Bank for refusing to surrender the pension fund, which Mr. John M. Clayton^ by a report of the judiciary committee, the 17th of that month, justified, denying the authority of the war department to appoint pension agents, wherever the United States bank or its branches were established. 282 DEPOSITS ACT. [1835. ■which report was adopted by the Senate on the 26th of May, 1B34. On the 4th of February, 1834, Mr. Poindexter moved several resolutions concerning the bank, which were not carried. On the 6th of that month, on Mr. Southard's motion, inquiries were ordered as to the Stat^banks selected for_ the deposites ; and several other reso- lutions in the course of the session were presented by other Senators on other points of this subject. Finally, on the 30th June, the last day of the session, on Mr. South- ard's motion, the extraordinary authority was conferred on. the committee of finance, consisting of Mr. Webster, Mr. Tyler, Mr. Ewing, Mr. Mangum, and Mr.-Wilkins, to sit during the recess on the subjects with which they were charged by the resolutions of February 4th and May 5th; [they were then charged with no subjects by any reso- lution ;] and, among other bank questions, into the general conduct and management of the bank since 1832. Pursuant to that imperfect resolution and authority, Mr. Tyler, early in the next session, 18th De- cember 1834, reported from that committee an elaborate defence of the IJnited States Bank from all the charges against it. On the 26th December, 1833, ]VG. Clay moved a resolution which was referred to the com- mittee on finance, and after being occa- sionally but profusely debated till the 28th March 1834, was then carried by 28 votes to 18, as amended, that the Secretary of the Treasury's reasons for removing the de- posites were unsatisfactory and insufficient; and by 26 votes to 20, that the President, in relation to the public revenue, had as- sumed authority and powers not conferred by the Constitution, but in derogation of both; which resolutions of the Senate were rejected by the House of Kepresentatives on the 13th June 1834. On the 17th December 1833, the Presi- dent nominated Peter Wager, Heniy D. Gilpin, John T. Sullivan, and Hugh McBl- derry directors of the bank on the part of tiie government for the year 1834; together with James A. Bayard, who resigned, after being confirmed by the Senate. The four other nominees, after various proceedings in Senate, were rejected on the 27th Feb- ruary 1834. On the 11th of March 1834, the "President re-nominated them, with a letter to the Senate, explaining why, and stating that, if they were not confirmed, he would nominate no others. On the 1st of May, 1834, Mr. Tyler, from the committee of finance, reported arguments against con- fifination, and the nominees were again rejected by increased mt^orities. On the 24th of June, 1834, the Senate punished Mr. Taney by rejecting his nomination as Secretary of the Treasury. On the 28th of June, 1834, Mr. Woodbury was appointed Secretary of the Treasury; and eventually, Mr. Taney, first nominated in January 1835, to succeed Judge Duvall as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was confirmed on Jackson's nomi- nation as Chief Justice. Mr. Van Buren's election in 1835 to suc- ceed President Jackson, completing the bank's exclusion from national expecta- tions, on the 18th of February /1836, a fort- night before General Jackson ceased and Mr. Van Buren began to govern, it was re- chartered by the State of Pennsylvania. Next day, at Philadelphia, the stockhold- ers assembled at the bank, Benjamin W. Crowninshield, Secretary of the Navy during the latter part of the war of 1812, in the chair. Nicholas Biddle present- ed the charter, and recommended its ac- ceptance as stronger than that held of the United States. Mr. John Sergeant moved the resolutions, and expatiated on the happy auspices which, by Mr. Biddle's talents and virtues, shone upon a great institution, res- cued from destruction and revived to more than pristine credit, usefulness and influ- ence. Mr. Crowninshield moved, Mr. Ser- geant seconded, and it was unanimously resolved, that the directors be requested to cause to be prepared and presented to Nich- olas . Biddle, Esq., a splendid service of plat^, with suitable inscriptions, in token and commemoration of the gratitude of the stockholders for his faithful, zealous and fearless devotion to their interests. For sixteen years Mr. Biddle said he had been connected with the bank, for thirteen president, during which period the circula- tion increased from four to twenty-five mil- lions ; and in no country so extensive was the currency so sound as that furnished by this bank. Of its unfortunate partner, the federal government, he desired to speak with forbearance. During their strife, his efibrt had been to maintain the rights of the institution, and he thought it better that the bank should perish in the struggle than survive its independence. On the 23d of June, 1836, Congress, by large and eager majorities in both Houses, passed, and President Jackson approved, an act to regulate the deposites of the pnb- lic moneys in State banks. That fatal act superadded direction to deposite aU the surplus beyond five millions of dol- lars in the Treasury of the United States, on the first day of January 1837, with the States pledging their faith to keep safe and repay the said moneys from time to time whenever required, pursuant to which act thirty-seven millions of dollars, so called, that is, credits for ^at amount, were transferred from the national Treasury to commonwealths gree^ of gain, and who never will repay. By^e same act Congress required the Secretary of the Treasury to select and" employ such State banks for depositories of the money of the United States, as redeemed their notes Chap. XII.] JACKSON'S BANK PLAN. 283 in specie on demand, and issued none for less than five dollars. By that widest and wildest of all such departures from the spirit of the Federal Constitution, all experience and the whole science of' cur- rency, it was imagined that a better sub- stitute than the Bank of the United States was provided for those vital functions of national government for which the wise organic act of 1789 provided by the estab- lishment of the Treasury, and from which every departure since has proved calami- tous, even by national banks, but infi- nitely more so by State banks. Jack- son's farewell annual message to Congress breathed his ominous misgivings. For that illiterate but strong-minded man of impulses felt the deep conviction that coin is the only certain reliance, and that the Union is the only legitimate author of the circulation. In strong terms he declared the consequences he apprehended when the deposite bill of the prior session received his reluctant as- sent; and declared that the States had been advised unlawfully to use as a gift the fiiuds entrusted to them as a loan. His regret went' much further, for he added that such improbity was not the worst result. The State banks with whom the money was de- posited had proceeded to make loans of it, by which persuasion bank charters were multiplied and vicious speculation encou- raged. Reviewing at considerable length his controversy with the bank and the prin- ciples of circulation, he approached so near the original Treasury system, which bank commotions and general distress soon after forced a return to, as to vindicate his arbi- trary edict called the specie circular, wisely aimed at the western banks, by requiring payments in specie for the public lands sold, which from two or three millions a year had swelled to the unwholesome ex- tension of twenty-four miUions. Bank notes loaned to speculators, getting their own notes discounted by banks, were paid to the public receivers, who immediately returned them to the banks, to be forthwith reissued to other worthless borrowers. So that go- vernment got nothing but inconvertible bank credit from greedy speculators for the most valuable public lands, engrossed by distant, non-resident gamblers inlands and stocks, often members of Congress, exclud- ing the hardy and honest pioneers of the vmdemess from purchase or actual occupa- tion of the national domain. It was impossible that a man of Jackson's simple but superior instincts should be blind to the fatal and monstrous disorgan- ization inflicted on national currency by eight hundred State banks, to a selection of some of which he had nevertheless been prevailed upon to commit the public money. The following plan, therefore, of a national bank, which is nothing more than the much dreaded Treasury bank, as more dangerous than the bank destroyed, received the sanc- tion which, in his own hand-writing, signed with his initials, is margined upon the out- line, as the following printed copy from the original indicates. ' " Outline of a substitute for the United States Bank. " The objections to the present bank are : "1. It is uncotistitutional. "2. It is dangerous to liberty. " Yet, this bank renders important ser- vices to the government and the country. "It cheapens and facilitates all the fiscal operations of the government. " It tends to equalize domestic exchange, and produce a sound and uniform currency. "A substitute for the present bank is de- sired, which shall yield all its benefits and be obnoxious to none of its objections. " Banks do two kinds of business. " 1. They discount notes and bills, for which they give their own paper. •" 2. They deal in exchange. " These two kinds of business have no ne- cessary connection. There may be banks of exchange exclusively, and banks of discount exclusively. Both may be banks of depo- site. " The United States may establish a bank of exchange exclusively based on govern- ment and individual deposites. " This bank may have branches wherever the government may think necessary. "They may be clothed only with the power to sell exchange on each other ; and required to transmit government funds without charge. "They need only have such officers as their duties require, checked by frequent and rigid inspection. The whole may be placed under the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury, through a separate bureau. " The present bank is unconstitutional : " 1. Because it is a corporation which Congress has no constitutional power to establish. " 2. Because it withdraws the business of bank discounts and the property of private citizens from the operation of State laws, and particularly from the taxing power of the States in which it is employed. "3. Because it purchases lands and other real estate, within the States, without their consent, under an authority purporting to be derived from Congress, when the Gene- ral Government itself possesses no such constitutional power. " The proposed substitute would not be a corporation, but a branch of the Treasury department ; it would hold no property, real or personal, and would withdraw none from the operation of the State laws. " The present bank is dangerous to li- berty : " 1. Because, in the number, wealth and standing of its officers and stockholders, in its power to make loans or withhold them, 284 JACKSON'S BANK PLAN. to call oppressively upon its debtors or in- dulge them, build houses, rent lands and . houses, and make donations for political or other purposes, it embodies a fearful influ- ence, -which may be wielded for the aggran- dizement of a favorite individual, a particu- lar interest, or a separate party. "2. Because it concentrates in the hands of a few men, a power over the money of the country, which maybe perverted to the oppression of the people, and in times of publio calamity, to the embarrassment of the government. "3. Because much of its stock is owned by foreigners, through the management of which an avenue is opened to a foreign in- fluence in the most vital concerns of the republic. "4. Because it is always governed by in- terest, and will ever support him who sup- ports it. " An ambitious or dishonest President may thus always unite all its power and in- ^uence in his support, while an honest one who thwarts its views, will never fail to encounter the weight of its opposition. "5. It weakens i£e States and strengthens the General Government. " The proposed substitute would have few ofScers, and no stockhold- ers, make no loans, and have no debt- ors, build no houses, make no dona- tions, and would be entirely destitute of the influence which arises from the hopes, fears and avarice of thou- sands. It would oppress no man, and, being part of the government, would always aid its operations. It would have no stock, and could not be reached by foreign influence. It vrould afibrd less aid to a dishonest President than the present bank, and would never be opposed to an honest [one." " It would strengthen the States, by leav- ing to their banks the whole business of discounts and the -furnishing of the local .currency. It would strengthen the General Government less than the custom-house, immeasurably less than the post-office, and less than the present bank when it acts in concert with the national authorities. "The proposed substitute would cheapen and facilitate all the fiscal operations of the government as completely as the present bank. . " It would, in the same manner, tend to equalize the exchange. Until since the last annual message of the President, the pre- sent bank charged a premium on all ex- changes, except for government, public offi- cers, and members of Congress. This prac- Jice will, doubtless, be resumed, should that bank be rechartered. The profits of the exchange business heretofore done, was Bufficient, it is believed, to pay all the ex- penses of the bank. ■«Jh <1 d -4J -ts g 1 •a -s EQ -»s >-,a t-~* 9 g S .s S -»3 k P o bO '^ -^ p •g o J4 .§ § >< ,a [1836. "The proposed substitute may charge such a premium on all exchanges, excepting those for the government, as will suffice to pay its expenses. "■It might be made in the same manner, although not perhaps to the same degree, to operate upon the currency. Byt^ing the paper of such local banks in the vicini- ty as pay specie, it would restrain over- issues and tend to preserve the currency in a sound state. " The usual deposites of the government would be an ample capital for a bank of exchange. Independent of its capital, the bank would always have cash on hand equal to its outstanding bills of exchange. But it might not be at the right points, and a small capital would be necessary to meet unequal calls at those points until the equi- librium could be restored. , "Exchange works in a circle. It is against the west in favor of the east, against the east in favor of the souiii, and against the south in favor of the west. By constant interchange of information and judicious management, little funds would be wanted at either point, other than those that would be raised by selling exchange on another. "In time of war, the capacities of this bank might be increased by an act of Con- gress. " Such a bank would not be unconstitu- tional, nor dangerous to liberty, and would yield to the governfnent all the facilities afforded by the present bank. Further than this, perhaps the General Government ought not to look. But its incidental advantages to the country would scarcely be inferior to those afforded by the present bank, while it would destroy a favored monopoly." The annual report of the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Woodbury, in December, 1836, expatiated on the merits of State banks, though it acknowledged more than a million of dollars of whathad accumulated as unavailable funds in the treasury from worthless State bank notes. Still, the Secre- tary was willing to rely on the State banks for deposites, exchanges, pension agencies, and all other federal duties. If the States would all unite in repressing entirely the circulation of small notes, and add a few judicioiis limitations to the amounts of dis- counts, (the former contrary to the invete- rate practice of most of the States, the latter as little to be expected as that the explosion of a steam boiler should be limited to some harmless extent,) the Secretary, on those impracticable terms, was willing to capi- tulate the English bank parlor indefen- sible postulate of three dollars promissory bank notes for one convertible in coin. For confusion had not then enabled adversity to administer its hard philosophy, by starokes of tremendous warning, which came, how- ever, with the explosion of all the banks within less than pis months. Scarcely was Chap. XII.] . — t Mr. Van Buren's administration in charge of the government, sighing for repose from the commotions of Jackson's agitating reign, than the whole legion of State banks stopped payment the 9th of May, 1837, and demolished in one hour by one stroke, all reliance on them as places of safe public deposite, much diminishing confidence in them for keeping private funds. When the United States Bank ceased to be a national institution, and became a mere local corporation, with a capital too large for the whole United States, and unmanage- able as that of a mere private firm, it was no better, but worse thereby than all the other State banks ; and history of the United States need not follow its decline and catas- trophe, except cursorily, to rectify errors of public opinion concerning the American banking system, and the extraordinary indi- vidual to whom its fatal vices were imputed ; as though they were Nicholas Biddle's misdemeanors, not those of all the per- nicious banks by which American currency, finance, morality, law, and religion, are con- tinually debased and periodically disorgan- ized. Could any partnership manage pro- fitably thirty or forty millions of credit, called capital, for the benefit of others ? Without reference to the extensive nature of the trust, it must be impracticable to employ such funds advantageously ; and no individual sagacity or probity could redeem or explain the inevitable tendency of the American State banking system. From 1837 to 1841, all banks were bankrupt; with short fits of resuscitation, keeping the whole community in jeopardy. The entire banking host, presidents, directors, cashiers, and other officers, of however fair character and good intentions, fell under universal and exaggerated odium, with a system which no management could render honest. Spontaneous combustion of nearly a thou- sand privileged broker shops inflicted on public sufferance a terrible lesson ; call- ed suspension at the beginning, and of which nothing but perdition could be the end. The follies, frauds, and abominations of a monstrous system struck the commu- nity with dismay and disorder, without quite striking the scales of avaricious credulity from their eyes. Jackson, with immense popularity, might have in vain wielded an executive vigor beyond the law — vetoed charters, and torn away deposites. Scien- tific economy pleaded to no purpose. Ex- perience taught no lesson by occasional distress. Paper money required deeper and more dreadful inflictions for even its partial reform : shocking and calam- itous, universal and ruinous explosion, to rouse the country by a catastrophe, or^nic and inevitable, so obvious as to strike every woman and child ; to make the poor suffer in their poverty, and the rich in their abundance — ^to confound all but the BANK'S INSOLVENCY. 285 few who thrive on such disasters — by uni- versal distress. Such a manifestation was the end of the United States Bank of Penn- sylvania. The reputation -of Nicholas Biddle was magnified to financial renown. No Ameri- can had such European repute : Jack- son's was the only one comparable, and that far inferior to it. Flattered, caressed, extolled, idolized in America, Biddle was praised and respected in Europe, as the most sagacious and successful banker in the world. Governors, senators, legislators, judges, clergymen, ladies, thronged his bank parlor, and by fulsome adulation en- 1;reated his favors. His town house and his country house were the seats of elegant hospitality, in which he shone with the blandishments of a polished gentleman, amiable, witty, liberal; never harsh or oflfensive to antagonists : but spoiled by sy- cophants of the highest rank. Chambers of commerce, boards of brokers, and other representatives of trading associations — cities, corporations, and sovereign States courted his support and solicited his favors. The London Times, that vast engine of not . only English, but European, Asiatic, and American opinion, pronounced the bank of the United States the greatest and purest banking institution in the world. The fovemor of the Bank of England declared Ir. Biddle's banking operations in cotton and tobacco eminently judicious, honorable and praiseworthy. Like John Law and Robert Morris, Nicholas Biddle involved and lost his private fortune in splendid ex- penditures on the same highway to ruin they trod before him, to live vilified and persecuted, and die insolvent. His coun- try-seat, Andalusia, on the Delaware, was magnificently embellished, irrigated at princely outlays by artificial waters, and ornamented with sumptuous furniture. A colonnade on the Delaware front imitated that of the United States Bank, that the throng of travellers from all parts might behold his copy of the great original he had created. In mid career of these delusions, on the 29th March, 1839, it was unexpectedly published that Mr. Biddle had resigned; hap- - py, said his letter of resignation to the di- rectory, to leave the bank surviving all its conflicts, in th« highest state of prosperity, quietly pursuing its appropriate business. Kesolutions of the directory next day fol- lowed, eulogizing his unrivalled finance, in all respects deserving the gratitude of the stockholders, and respect of the whole country. But soon tribulation told the truth ; the whole system was rotten, and the bank ruined; no more, however, by Nicholas Biddle, than the Reign of Terror, in the French Revolution, was the work of Robes- pierre, who was but a feather in the tor- nado of destiny, which uprooted him with 286 NICHOLAS BIDDLE. [1842. the thousands of other victims he was ac- cused of immolating. Nicholas Biddle was Acteon, torn to pieces by the dogs that came at his call, crouched at his feet, licked his hands, and fawned on his foot- as he said himself, the slaves re- volted to destroy their master. Man- kind, who worship heroes, require victims They who as directors, counsellors, bor- rowers, and otherwise idolized in him the captivating incarnation of bank infirmity, became his merciless revilers, when the bubble burst. They turned their demigod into a demon, and held him answerable as a culprit for the offences they advised, sus- tained, and applauded ; they for lucre, but he for fame. All the tricks of the institution, long after Mr. Biddle ceased to be its head, were visited on him. They who kept his bust among their household deities, who watched him in the streets to admire, who coveted the pelf which he despised, turned on him as their stocks and notes fell, with furious and unmanly vituperation. Like Robert Mor- ris, in the same place, and under many similar circumstances, Nicholas Biddle was cast as a malefactor from the Tarpean rock, and crushed to death. Throughout America, and by his former idolaters, and in Europe, his extravagantly cele- brated name became a byword of re- proach. In Philadelphia, the theatre of his particular distinction, he was deserted, ex- ecrated and reviled with all the bitterness of upstart men and spiteful women, sud- denly reduced from wealth, or competency, to privation or want. As banker, as gentle- man, and as honest man, his position was reversed. His considerable private fortune was swallowed up in the ruin of insolvent stocks, in which he had ventured more than he was worth. Instead of being welcome in every house, the doors of neawy all were shut against him. Societies of which he was a favorite member, were annoyed if he intruded among them. His town residence, the scene of elegant hospitality, his colon- naded, decorated, and costly Andalusia, in- cumbered with mortgages, were both sold by the sheriff. Destitution, disgrace, and abuse, and insult, were the daSy fare of one so lately almost universally admired, feted, courted) and applauded. Most men vrould have withdrawn from such a storm of animosity. Many commit suicide from less cause, flee their country, or shut them- ' selves up from general observation. Mr. Biddle's defamation was so signal, that it needs no fanciful description; the simple truth is far more striking than any fiction. Like most of mankind, bearing with greater equanimity bad than good fortune,' his ap- pp,rent composure was Singularly undisturb- ed, and his firmness unabated. He went abroad as uBual, wrote in the newspapers ; there Was no change of aspect, manner^,. or behavior ; while he moved unnoticed and solitary in the crowd, once thronged with his followers. His case recalled that of Law, to which it bore some resemblance, but far outran its vicissitudes, and disas- trous celebrity. Law and Biddle resembled each other in being sensible, resolute, re- served, but daring men, fiilly impressed with the solidity of their banks, embarking and losing large private fortunes in them, care- less of gain, generous, gentlemanly, courted by the great, and admired by all — in these characteristics they were alike. Their vic- tims were more nearly so, for men in all ages, and countries, individuals and multitudes, princes and populace, rich and poor, are much alike when avarice levels all to the same low standard. The Duke of St. Simon, whom the Regent of France confidentially consulted about Law's scheme, says, that Law's chief anxiety was that he should not be forced to issue more notes than he had coin to answer for them. Biddle, likevfise, was a hard money man, who deemed con- vertibility indispensable. And in what do the princes, nobles, potentates, ladies, the gilded aristocracy of France, crouching at Lav»^s footstool, differ from the governors. Senators, lawyers, merchants, and others, of the American peerage, who fawned on Biddle, and flattered him to his downfall? But there the resemblance ceases. Nich- olas Biddle's fate was much harder than John Law's. A recent French historian, M. Blanc, vindicates Lavr's scheme from the aversion and contempt of Voltaire, and most others who describe it. Whatever its merits or demerits, its author retired from France, found in Italy refuge and repose. But Nicholas Biddle was tortured to death on the scene of his celebrity. After public indignation was heated to that feverish state which frequently seeks judicial re- dress, an individual of the many suf- ferers by the bank failure, laid his com- plaint, in January, 1842, before the Grand Juryof Philadelphia, who preseiited Nich- olas Biddle, with Cowperthwaite and Andrews, two of the bank oficers, as guilty of a conspiracy to cheat the stock- holders. This presentment was in due form laid before the prosecuting ofBcer, who prepared an indictment accordingly: He whom a few years before there was scarce a court of justice strong enough to restrain, was on the point of being crushed in one. A fundamental principle of Saxon jurisprudence was interposed, that the Grand Jury have no authority to instiiute prosecutions, by inquisitorial transactions ; that an accused has a right to be confronted with his accuser, in the first stage of prose- cution, to meet and contradict him before a magistrate. Instead of that.method, the Grand Jury, in the delirium of public ex- citement against the individual accused of all the ruin, as he oiace had-been extoUedfor Chap, XII.] TYLER'S VETOES, 287 all the prosperity, of the community, com- peUed some of the accused to ai)pear in their conclave, and after examining indicted them. That unlawful inquisition the court set aside, pronouncing an elaborate review of the circumstances, as vrell as the law in question. By the former it appeared to the court that the bank directors were more censurable than Mr. Biddle and the other bank ofBcers ; for all was done by authority of the directors, who allowed, and indeed encouraged, every one to borrow of the bank, by way of employing its unwieldy capital. Nicholas Biddle was as iron nerved as his great antagonist, Andrew Jackson, loved his country not less, and money as little. On the 27th of February, 1844, at Andalusia, in the bosom of an affec- tionate family, he died of a broken heart, the issue of a wounded spirit, when com- plaint, seclusion, or flight, might have pro- longed his life and relieved his sufferings. Born on the 8th January, which his great antagonist rendered a national hohday, fifty-eight years before, he left the world with the great merit of dying poor when he could have lived rich. After midnight, in the tumultuous close of the first session of the twenty-eighth Congress, on the 17th June, 1844, by one of those rapid, sometimes imperceptible enactments by which great changes are often made by law, the banking house of the late Bank of the United States became the Custom House of Philadelphia. An appropriation of two hundred and twenty- five thousand dollars to purchase it of the bank assignees for that purpose, inserted by the Senate, was voted, without opposition in the hall where so many protracted con- troversies concerning the bank had wearied the patience of Congress, and excited the controversial spirit of the country : and the marble palace of the ruined bank of the United States was turned into a custom- house. Some time before, a fire insurance com- pany of Philadelphia, lucky in its risks, and rich in its Stocks, estabfished in an old house, which, from its location, might be sold to advantage, smit with the love of show, disposed of a good building in order, with the proceeds, to build an elegant in- surance office elsewhere. The clerk, and two or three managers of the nominal and accredited directors, in the vanity of imagi- nary opulence, selected a spot, and erected an edifice commensurate with their sup- posed wealth. A splendid mansion, re- plete with every elegant convenience, a residence for a prince, was prepared for a little corporate body, infected •mthi the malady of stock riches and its common infirmity of extravagant ostentation; and the new house, surrounded by high walls to extensive appurtenances, was equipped with luxurious accommodations. Reverses soon reduced the means of the insurance company, and the noble mansion was be- yond them. Too extensive and expensive for a private dwelling, the palace was let as a boarding-house ; some of its apart- ments were occupied as such, others for the insurance company, and a few small rooms rented for the impoverished remains of the once mighty bank of the United States ; bank and building altogether monu- ments of the incurable proneness to those perilous ways of wealth and ruin which are the common highways of the vain haste to become rich. At the first (or extra) session of the twenty-seventh Congress, acting President Tyler veteod two bank biUs, one originated in the Senate, and another in the House of Representatives ; and it is not probable that a further attempt will be made. The cur- rency of the United States is the offspring of repudiation of a national debt of more than two hundred and sixty millions of dollars in continental notes, the wages of independence. But that revolutionary pa- per money, sometimes a thousand in paper to one dollar in coin, at least pretended to convertibility. English unqualified repu- diation from 1797 to 1823, and consequent anti-bullion opinions asserted by eminent persons, revealed to this imitative and ex- aggerating country the fatal secret that pa- Eer may be made money without metal, ince then convertibility, like certain legal forms adopted from English jurispru- dence, has become an authorized fiction, and nearly a thousand banks, great and small, spawned by State laws with enor- mous privileges, pullulate small notes by monstrous increase of paper money. Peel's bill of 1821, vrith terrible suffering, restored coin in England; and his bill of 1844 restricts bank issues with great difficulty. But in that, as in some other modern re- formations, England is far in advance of us. When the first Secretary, and organ- izer of our excellent treasury, Hamilton, allowed a State bank note to pass at a cus- tom-house, the note represented specie, dol- lar for dollar, and the sufferance was but momentary : for Hamilton had no concep- tion of an inconvertible bank note, and his, the first United States bank was created to prevent them. But since that first slight freedom with the chastity of currency, what a career of prostitution has followed one backsliding! Even the national banks ve- toed by Mr. Tyler were degenerations to- ward paper money; and a United States bank, unless endowed with metal to control State banks, does but add fuel to the con- suming fire. One of Jackson's presiden- tial pupils was sacrificed to the glorious martyrdom of divorcing government from banks, and another has united it with coin. Whether avarice and party will suffer this 288 •TREAT? OF GHENT. consummation to endure, and money to re- main what and where it was settled by, and at, the Constitution, is the most important [1842. American problem, on whose solution de- pend the wealth, morals, and general wel- fare of the United States. CHAPTEK Xni. TREATY OF GHENT. It is not intended to treat here the nego- tiations at Ghent, or the character and con- sequences of the peace made there ; all of which important topics, with the entire foreign relations of tne United States, are reserved for another volume '• but to sketch in this chapter merely certain extrinsic circumstances of that collateral part of the contest belonging to the period to which this volume is appropriated. When the Emperor of Russia agreeably surprised Madison's administration, and somewhat disagreeably perplexed Castle- reagh's, by a sincere, politic, generous, and imposing proffer of Russian mediation, Mr. Gallatin turned at onee from a dilapidated treasury, a Congress neither unterrified nor harmonious, and disastrous commence- ment of hostilities at home, to go in search of peace abroad under foreign auspices. Whether the administration or Congress was most to blame for the want of energy and forecast which each iinputed to the other, at all events relief was much wanted. Mr. Gallatin was confident that peace was attainable by Russian intervention, within a few months ; and that for so short a pe- riod, the war might limp along on borrow- ed funds without taxes. Although doubts of the nation, and the war, and hopes of foreign succor, were all disappointed, and some of us, with Mr. Clay, condemned any but warlike ways to peace, for which the American successes of the year 1814 proved the -principal English inducement, yet th« mission which, from St. Petersburg to Got- tenburg, and finally at Ghent, with visits of some of its members to London, Paris, Am- sterdam and other European capitals, ac- complished peace on fair and reasonable terms, was a fortunate close to American tri- umphs. It constituted a sort of permanent American Congress in Europe, from which this country was almost entirely cut off by British maritime sway, ready at any moment, withoutfrequent instructions from Washing- ton, to seize the -first' English inclination to put a stop to the conterst. President Madison tad thought, of Rufus King or Harrison Gfray Otis for the Federal member of the oommission, to join Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Adams ; but finally chose James A. Bayard, an eminent lawyer, for twenty years a con- spicuous member of both houses of Congress, pronounced in his Federal politics, resolute and honorable, as he had proved in the re- markable conflict between Jefferson and Burr devolved on the House of Representa- tives for the presidency. Till Mr. Clay and Mr. Russel were added to the legation, the war party was without a representative in it ; and when they were appointed, it was supposed that Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Bay- ard were coming home, after the English rejection of Russian mediation. The Havy agent at Philadelphia, Mr. George Harrison, a gentleman remarkable for his elegant hospitalities, sumptuously provisioned the ship Neptune with princely profusion of luxuries and comforts for the mission by varieties of the richest wines and abundance of other ma-terial assuage- ments of the life of landsmen at sea. — Mr. Gallatin.with a suite, consisting of President Madison's step-son, Mr: Payne Tod; the present Vice-President of the United States, Mr. George M. Dallas ; and Mr. James GaUcc- tin, Mr. Bayard, with Mr. George MiUigan ; the four younger members attached as se- cretaries, without salaries ; accompanied by- several friends from Philadelphia to New' Castle ; there embarked for St. Petersburg, where they found the Emperor gone to his - armies, but his- prime minister, Eomantzoff, ready to receive them. Moreau^ who, it was said, confidentially informed Mr. Gallatin that he was going by request of the Emperor of Russia to command the allied forces, pro- mised his co-operation to bring about peace- between England and the United States ; and Lafayette's intervention was also engaged, through La Harpe, the Emperor Alexan- der's Swiss preceptor, who imbued his ma- jesty's education with such liberal ideas that he told Levitt Harris he would have been a democrat if not bom an Emperor. In po- sition to deal with crowned heads, Lafay- ette wrote to Alexander, entreating for the American republic, that he would pursue the noble patli he had entered upon for the new werla. Thrice did the autocrat earnestly proffer Chap. XIII.] ST. PETERSBURG. 289 his imperial mediation, when his union, al- most one and indivisible with Great Britain for the overthrow of Napoleon, was perfectly harmonious. But Russian interference was Constantly and pertinaciously, however re- spectfully, refused by England, who would not suffer the great northern maritime power, that headed the armed neutrality, to superintend settlement of naval pretensions with their transatlantic champion: nor would England suffer any settlement at all till the United States renounced what they declared war for, resistance to English right to impress British born subjects. Yet to obviate Kussian umbrage at the British refusal of mediation, it was deemed prudent by the cabinet of St. James, to signify to both Russia and America that, declining the former's intervention, England had no ob- jection to treat directly with the latter. What less could be said, unless war was to be perpetual ? But the intangible mari- time rights of Great Britain to impress men from American vessels,- must be acknow- ledged before England would treat at all ; and while treating, she would inflict the punishment incurred by untimely and un- pardonable American armament against England when least able to defend herself, and defending America, with all the rest of the world, against France. The mediation thus ended at the same time that Mr. Gallatin's appointment to treat under it was rejected by the Senate, and the attempt to evade war without fighting was condemned by that large portion of the war party, who had been strengthened by nearly every election after its declaration. They insisted that the people were willing and able to carry on the war as the right way to durable peace, which, if made by missions and me- diations, would be no better than uneasy truce, by mere suspension of hostilities. Mr. Gfallatin was not without reason for confidence that the mediation of a potentate so commanding as the Russian Emperor, closely allied with England, would be accepted, and the Russian monarch was gratified by republican solicitation for im- perial intervention. The St. Petersburg Gazette of the 19th October 1813, published by authority, that, on the preceding Sunday, "the Empress granted audience to Messrs. Adams,Bayard and Gallatin, in the quality of Envoys Extraordinair and Ministers Pleni- potentiary from the United States of Ame- rica: and that the mission caused univer- sal satisfaction there. Its complete success was desired, that the re-establishment of peace between his Britannic Majesty and the Republic of the United States may free - the navigation and commerce of the Russian Empire from the only restraint which it could experience since the renewal of 4t8 ties of the strictest friendship with Eng- land. . The striking proof of friendship and Xt7 confidence which the Republic of the United States had given to the Emperor, and tho distinguished selection it made of plenipo- tentiaries," the Court Gazette added, "are much applauded here." As the French Bourbon monarchs have always proved more friendly to the American Republic than either the French Republic, the Con- sular, Imperial or Royal Orleans Govern- ments, and the Tories of England more so than the Whigs, so, as the Emperor Nicho- las told the American Minister Mr. Dallas, the single sovereignty of an individual over all the Russias, sympathized with the mul- titudinous sovereignty of a whole people in America; unmixed democratic with un- mixed imperial sovereignty — both, said: Nicholas, equally absolute and intelligible.. "While allusion, however gentle, to freeing; the commerce and navigation of Russia from the only restraint which it could experience, was unwelcome to England, though accompanied by assurances of ties of the strictest friendship, yet so strong- was Mr. Adams' hope that the Russian, mediation would be accepted by England,, that he -wrote, as was understood at the time, to Reuben Beasley, American agent for prisoners in England, and to Ameri- can merchants in London, that negotia- tions were in train, and peace would speed- ily take place. And in a strain of fervent, perhaps politic flattery, he proclaimed the Emperor Alexander the modem Titus, de- light and blessing of mankind. But after a flattering but fruitless re- ception, the Asiatic magnificence of the Russian metropolis was all that remain- ed to compensate the- disappointment of the American ministers. Poor, studious, ambitious and secluded, Mr. Adams lived there on the narrow basis of the parch- ment of his commission, respected for learning and talents, but little given to the costly entertainments of an opulent and. ostentatious court circle: his mind bent on the much higher gratification of succeeding his father in the presidency of the United States, as he conressed at St. Petersburg. Authorized by the usage of American foreign missions to increase the scanty al- lowance of his salary by drawing for it, whenever the rate of exchange was profit- able, and living frugally, withdrawn from all but indispensable parade, Mr. Adams, laid the basis of a modest competency for his return to America, whose official acqui- sition American republican parsimony in- duces, if not justifies. But the extraordi- nary mission could afford and was entitled to more expensive circulation in the splen- did palaces of a magnificent city, inhabit- ed by the owners of 4ousands of serfs, and some of them of Ural mountains containing mines of gold. In the society in St. Peters- burg, more luxurious than in the smaller residences of Xondon aristocracy, or the less 290 PARIS. [1813- frequent hospitalities of Paris, the Ameri- can ministers were entertained, particularly the President's son, whose simple position in America was exaggerated by European mistake to princely position. Architecture, ■furniture, painting, statuary, luxury and comfort, combined their attractions in pa- laces warmed by double windows and heated air flues to the temperature of delightful summer weather, while -the cold without is intense and destructive. 'Costumes of ori- ental richness, precious ornaments, fars of excessive price, and labor so low that large retinues and costly equipages are the least expensive outlays of noble households^ dis- tinguish crowds of menials from imperi- ous masters. Peaches, pineapples, grapes, strawberries, the most delicious fruits from hot-houses, far fetched game of the wild- est flavor, tea by land carriage in cara- vans, transported five thousand miles from iChina, incomparably better and much ■dearer than the costly sea-born and sea- sweated beverage so much sought in Ame- rica and England; the purest coffee of _Mocha; wines ofevery wine-growing region, Asiatic and European, are the common fare of the entertainments of Russian nobles of countless riclies and continual fetes, where much -more numerous assemblies than elsewhere meet in the freedom of so- ■cial enjoyments, to counteract the rigors of •climate, and from the terrible severities ■of despotic' government seek tha-t solace by which almost every mortal privation is some- low compensated. The younger members of the American mission found in such 'enjoyments compensation for its politi- cal failure, while their seniors, contrary to impressions industriously circulated by the press, English and ^Ajnerican, were treated with imperial and general atten- tion. Count Pahlen, the Emperor's first miivister to the United States, and son of his father's chief murderer, was then in iSouth America, but his secretary, Poletica, vras at St. Petersburg, to exhibit a grateful Tecollection of the hospitalities he received in America. The Emperor of the French betrayed liis jealousy of the Russian intervention iby a paragraph, which was piiblished in ■tho Journal de L'Empire the 16th De- •cpmber, 1813, concerning the Empress' reception of the American envoys. " The Qazette of St. Petersburg exults in the -peace" which would be negotiated by Russia between the United States and lingland, ■because that peace would remove the im- piediments which hostilities between those two powets placed in JJie way of Russian commerce and navigation. By that we may jilidge of tiie importance attacaed in Russia tQ we navigation of the United States, and the. consternation which English r^'ection of Russian mediation will occasion in Bus- Bia,. ■ The Jwirnal de L'Emjiir^ vj^as so rigorously official, that the Emperor Napo- leon himself often dictated, and. sometimes wrote, its editorial articles. The paragraph just quoted from it shows -that he was he- ginning to be aroused by American naval successes to the importance of the United States as a check to the arrogant, turbulent, and inaccessible shop-keepers, whom alone, of all Europe, he strove in vain either to overcome or despise, and in whose perfidi- ous custody he was doomed soon to fret his life out. But no Russian consternation broke forth when their good offices were declined, to which, from first to last, Eng- land showed invincible repugnance. Ab early as the 8th July, 1813, an English Journal, the London Star, stated "The American envoys have arrived at Oopenr hagen to excite animosities against -Great Britain and the cause of Ewrope. We can- not flatter ourselves with any prospect of peace from them since they have com- menced their 'diplomatic visit at Copen- hagen. It is reported that Lord Keith is ordered to command in America in place of Admiral Warren, recalled because he gave the American Commissioners permis- sion to proceed to Russia :" indications of British aversion almost amounting to con- sternation at any foreign interference witibi the resolution, at all hazards to maintain their dominion of the seas, and to punish American rebellion against it. Never vrere the character and prospects of the country of Nortii American republi- can experiments so low, since the acknow- ledgment of its independence, which at that time seemed to De in jeopardy. It was the nadir of Americau, the zenith of British power. Of the hundred and twenty years from the English revolution of 1668, till the second conflict of Great Britain witii her American offspring in 1812, the mi^ty islanders, veterans in war, had spent naif that period in waging and learning its arts. The vastest of all Tier prodigious conquests was the last of her many successes over France, to whom.her officers, civiland mili- tary, dictated in their splendid capital the hard terms of ignominious subjugation. At the head of all the monarchs of Europe her stipendiaries, England, having conquered France, turned with vindictive confidence from all mediation, and interposal to the in- finitely easier conquest of America. On the 7th of June^ 1814, the cartel This- tle arrived from Hajtifax.at Boston,]^ seven days, bringing the first news of those asto- nishing reverses : Napoleon, in the British frigate Undaunted, goue into banishment at, Elba, a little island, in the Mediterranean, of which few in America had ever heturd; Louis the XVIU. propped on the thro»9 of his ancestors by fopeign Armies, -oomnis^d- ed by the MarquiSj thereupon created Dukfl. of W^llingtQo, oocupyipg F»onoe. re9»ce4 fsom th« j^pire cf ISlf ^ m> SbtgdiHsci Chap. XIII.} ENGLISH VENGEANCE. - 291 oif 1792. Glorying, as well they might, in the close of a gigantic struggle with the constitutional monarchy, the bloody anarchy and the enormous empire of France, Eng- land had nothing to fear from, but her own terms of submission to impose on, the, poor, distracted Republic of America. The most considerate Englishmen questioned whether nominal independence or complete subjuga- tion would be best for that refractory and ungrateful, abandoned and forlorn child of rebellion. Restricted frontiers, surrounded and tormented by revengeful savages, with sovereignty within the States to prey on their vitals, no colonial trade, no fisheries, no free ships making free goods, no denial of impressment, paper blockade, or any other of the maritime rights of Great Bri- tain, were among the postulates of the mo- derate Lord Liverpool, the resolves of the imperious Lord Castlereagh, and the orders of the magnificent Prince Regent. "If the food old king could be restored to his senses, ow his pious trust in ultimate justice would be soothed and rewarded," was the common saw of loyal Englishmen. "A very general expectation," said a London journal of the 25th of April, 1814, '"appears to be enter- tained that the Americans, when apprised ef the recent changes in Europe, will cashier Mr. Madison. It is even anticipated ih the ministeriail circles as not a very improbable event, that the Americans may follow the example of France still further, and return to the protection of their former sovereign. A memorial has been presented to Lord Liverpool, and favorably received, the ob- ject of which is to prevent the Americans from conducting the fishing trade as here- tofore on the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. It is said to be the intention of government to prevent this branch of our commerce from all intrusion by the citizens of the United States, under any arrange- ment that may be made with that power." Simultaneously with these English specu- lations, the Gazette of France published, " The delightful name of peace is heard on all sides. Europe is awakened to the en- joyment of its benefits. Negotiations have also been opened to bring about the esta- blishment of a good understanding between England and the United States, which has only been disturbed by the effect of the dis- ordered system adopted by Napoleon. It is knOwn that the plenipotentiaries of the two powers are to meet in Gottenburg, per- haps even they may negotiate at London. We have learned with pleasure that the chief of one of the first tribunals in France invited to his house Lord Castlerearfi and Mr. Crawford, the Minister of the United States., Several persons of consideration •WferB present, both French and English. It rtaa remarked that the two ministers, on seeing each other for the first time, did not behave with any distance of manner. The toast of universal peace was proposed to them, and they replied to it accordingly." But in Holland, the Leyden Gazette of the 22d of May, 1814, stated that, "accordingto advices from Vienna, England was about to conclude a secret convention with the al- lies, by which they are not to intermeddle, after the pacification of the continent, with the aflfairs of North America, and to stipu- late by the peace that France shall not take any part." When Crawford met Castlereagh at the French entertainment, heralded in the court gazette, the polished, placid, reckless pre- mier of Great Britain, paymaster of Europe, commander of Wellington, controller of herds of dethroned and impoverished po- tentates and princes, rabid for restorations to demolished thrones, meditated the pun- ishment as well as conquest of the Ameri- can instruments of French usurpation; Ma- dison deposed like Bonaparte ; America humbled like France; Washington captured like Paris ; bloody dreams of English re- venge; Europe to stand aloof while the mother scourged her unnatural ofFspring, if not back to re-colonization, at 'any rate to bitter repentance and humble submission. Castlereagh and his asso- ciates of the Tory ministry were of the school whose lessons were the doctrines of that moral philosopher and favorite of the pious George the III., the great teacher of English language and dogmas in polities and ethics, Doctor Johnson, who said, vindi- cating the outrages of British revolutionary hostihties in America, " Sir, let me tell you these are but the whippings of children. I would have set fire to and burned every town, nay, every house, on their coast, and roasted the rebels, men, wonlen and chil- dren, in the flames of their rebeUiou." In the inherited spirit of that maternity, Eng- lish journals in 1814 called on the British troops embarking from France for America, to "carry birch rods to whip the froward children of Columbia, who cry for what they know not what, who profit so little by the lessons of experience." In an admiralty order of the 30th April, 1814, the Irish Secretary Croker regretted that "the unjust and unprovoked aggression of the Ame- rican government in declaring war after aU the causes of the original complaints had been removed, did not permit the reduc- tion of the fleet at once to a peace establish- ment, but left the issue for the maintenance of those maritime rights which are the sure foundation of our national glory. Their lordships hope that the valor of his majes- ty's fleet and armies IviU speedily bring the American contest to a conclusion honorable to the British arms, safe for British inte- rests, and conducive to the lasting repose of the civilized world." In that spirit of barbarous infatuation was war reinvigorated and infuriated, and 292 MR. GALLATIN AND MK. BAT^RD IN ENaLAND. [1814. peace procrastinated for near twelve months after aU cause of war ceased. London, Paris, Vienna, Leyden, the capitals of all Europe were either aroused or neutralized for hostilities by which Great Britain, with- out a European enemy, was to crush Ame- rica without an ally in the world. Just after the conquerors of "France marched into Pa- ris, on the 2d of April, 1814, Vice Admiral Cochrane from Bermuda, by the first of his diabolical proclamations, announced the hor- rors of the most dreadful of all strife, servile, worse than civil or savage, war — war which, whenever kindled in the Roman dominions, never ceased to rage till, after years of ha- voc and extermination, every slave was butchered; and which from"St. Domingo peopled this country with victims. That official manifesto was, — "Whereas, many persons have expressed a desire to withdraw from the United States, vrith a view of en- tering into his majesty's service, on being received as Jree settlers in some of his ma- jesty's colonies, this is therefore to give no- tice that all disposed to emigrate wul be re- ceived on board his majesty's ships-of-war, or at military posts on the poast of the United States, vrith the choice of entering into his majesty's sea or land forces, or be- ing sent as free settlers to the British pos- sessions in North America or the West In- dies, where they vrill meet with all due en- couragement." The Russian mediation having failed, Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Bayard were con- strained to take leave of St. Petersburg on their way homeward ; but determined to try one more, and that an humble effort. Eor that purpose Mr. Dallas was sent to England, in October, 1813, under the pass- port of a Russian courier, with confidential and highly important dispatches to Prince Lieven, the Russian ambassador in London, and Alexander Baring, the constant friend of this country and of peace. With the dispatches so fast sewed to bis clothes that ii ,was impossible to take them from bim without stepping him by corporal violence, and imperatively ordered to deliver them in person to Prince Lieven and Mr. Baring, Mr. Dallas journeyed expeditiouslythrough the northern parts of Europe, by Hamburg to Harwich, and reached London the 28th November, 1813. The forlorn mission was then almost desperate. Still Mr. GaUatin neither despaired nor ceased to. strive, per- severing almost against hope to the end. The day after Mr. Dallas' arrival in London, Lord (^tlereagh angrily said in the House of Commons, that one of the American Commissioners for peace had had the teme- rity to proceed from Russia to England, q,Qd was then actually in London. Mr. Bering, however, to quiet the premier's dis- pleasure, held himself responsible for Mr. DaJtlas' conduct and object, -and to obviate all offence, put in Lord Castlereagh's hands the. letter he (Mr. Baring) had received from Mr. Gallatin. Mr. DtSlas was suffered to remain in England tUl joined there, in the spring of 1814, by Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Bayard. On what conditions or ex- fectations they were received in England, am not aware, when lingering hopes of peace induced them to go. Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Baring were, I believe, of Franklin's opinion, that any peace is better than any war, and that all war is unnecessary. In their charge peace was well cared for, and of the negotiations at Ghent, which Mr. Gallatin so sedulously labored to conclude by peace, he had reason io be proud. The winter journey of the American envoys from Russia to England, perform-; ed when Prussia and Holland, countries through which they travelled, were in the. ferment of resistance to France, and the restoration of their own monarchs', was. continual demonstration of the approaching end of all republican government. Amster- dam, where they stopped some weeks, was the head of the Dutch revolution that repelled the French from Holland, and restored the House of Orange, not as stadt-. holders, but kings. Orange bovem was the cry which everywhere, saluted their ears^ The old stadtholder, long in exile from. Holland, and resident of London, was just brought home to the kingdom, placed at his disposition. His son had been educated in England. Holland was almost an Eng- lish province ; and, as we have seen in another part of this sketch, the London press complained of the King of Holland for sending a minister to this rebellious country, which there was reason, it insisted, to believe would, like Holland, return to. the paternal rule of its legitimate monarch. A journey through Europe at that time was, to Americans, warning that government by revolution was to be no more, and republics no longer to disturb mankind. After the representatives of American independence thus traversed Europe, from Cronstadt to the Dutch capital, reminded- by every intimation, that there was no ' power in Europe to check the vengeance of Great Britain, soon to be inflicted on the United States, they crossed the German Sea, and landed in England, at Harwich, in April, 1814. By that time the triumph of England over all her foes, save one, was complete. Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Bayard, unnoticed and disconsolate, made their humiliated entry into London, blazing with light streaming from every house, throughout its narrow streets and dreary immensitv, by the illumination ordered and gladly kindled for the capture of Paris. Napoleon was a captive. The,- Bourbons of both branches, long by Engv lish inexpugnable safe-keeping protected- Chap. XIII.] MR. GALLATIN'S LONDON LETTERS. 293 from French harm, were to be transferred to the throne of their ancestors. London had dictated peace in Paris ; Europe was to be reconstructed as before the French Re- volution, offspring of the American. All Christendom, after twenty years of dreadful strife and convulsions, was to be recon- structed as of yore. All Christendom was at peace and exulting, except the Ameri- can hemisphere, where alone North Ame- rica was disturbed by unnatural war, and South America by revolutions, whose con- tagion was taken, like a pestilential dis- temper, from the odious and unpardonable North American rebels against English sway. About the time that Parliament, both Houses without a dissenting voice, voted "Wellington, then promoted to the highest honors of British peerage, two and a-half millions of dollars, Mr. Gallatin, on the 9th May, 1814, wrote from London to a friend in New York: "The public feeling is strong here against us, and the prosecution of the war would be popular with the nation. The overthrow of Bona- parte is a blessing for mankind ; but it is a matter of regret that our affairs were not arranged before the restoration of a general European peace. This leaves a formidable land and naval force at the dis- posal of government ; and you must expect that a portion will be sent this summer against us. This makes me still more de- sirous of being with you ; and if I find the negotiation likely to fail or to be protracted, I will not wait the final issue. In the mean- while, I beg you to make yourself as com- fortable as you can. I would feel more easy if I knew you to be at Philadelphia than New York." His apprehension was that the city of New York was in danger: at any rate, that it might be attacked. In the same letter he added that he had been kindly treated in London, met some old friends and made new ones there. But ministerial countenance could not be open- ly bestowed on the American envoys so- liciting peace in London, while Madarie de Stael, then in exile there, extended her useful as well as agreeable society to Mr. Gallatin. Mr. Foster, British minister in the United States when war was declared, meeting Mr. Payne Tod in the street, condescended to invite a President's son to Devonshire house, but had not the manli- ness to notice the American envoys, nor the good breeding to visit gentlemen, whose civilities he had enjoyed during ten years' residence at Washington. There is not much besides mere official, which of course is reserved, correspondence from the American envoys at that time in the department of state. The following significant letter was sent disguised in cipher; when, owing to the common de- lays and extraordinary interruptions of the seas, of which Great Britain was post-mas- ter, it was perilous to. trust dispatches so liable to capture. When it was received does not appear ; but probably when con- fidence in London and alarm in Washington were, as events soon showed, equally un- founded: London, IZth June, 1814. Honorable James Moneoe, Secretary of State. Sir: — The armament fitted against Ame- rica will enable the British, besides pro- viding for Canada, to land at least 15 to 20,000 men on the Atlantic coast. Whether the ministry be nevertheless disposed for peace, a few weeks will determine. It may be intended to continue the war for the purpose of effecting a separation of the iJnion, or with a view of promoting the election of a President of the Federal party, or in the hope of imposing conditions which win curtail the territory, the fisheries, and diminish the commerce of the United States ; but even vrith the intention of a speedy and equal peace, the pride and vindictive pas- sions of the nation would be highly grati- fied. — ^What they would consider a glorious termination of the war, as an expedient that may console them for the mortification of naval defeats, retrieve the disgrace of the campaign in the Chesapeake, and crip- ple the naval and commercial resources, as well as the growing manufactures, of the United States. To use their own language, they mean to inflict on America a chastise- ment that will teach her that war is not to be declared with impxtnity against Great Britain. This is a very general sentiment in the nation, and that such are the opin- ions and intentions of the ministry was strongly impressed on the mind of , by a conversation he had with Lord Castle- reagh. Admiral Warren also told Levitt Harris, with whom he was intimate at St. Petersburg, that he was sorry to say that the instructions given to his successor on the American station were very different from those under which he had acted ; and that he apprehended that very serious in- jury would be inflicted on America. Know- ing the species of warfare practiced under him, and that he was blamed for the inef- ficiency, and not on account of the nature, of his operations, you may infer what is now intended. Without pretending to cor- rect information respecting the plan of cam- paign, I think it probable that Washington and New York are the places, the capture of which would gratify the enemy, and that Norfolk, Baltimore, and the collected manu- facturing establishments of Brandywine and Rhode Island are also in danger. The ostensible object everywhere will be the destruction of the public naval magazines and arsenals, and of all the shipping, whe- ther public or private, but heavy contribu- tions, plunder, and whatever marks a pre- ^atory -warfaxe, must be expected : onleaa the ultimate object be to sever the Union, demanda cession of territory, &c., in which case the more permanent occupancy of New York, or of some other important tenable point, will probably be attempted instead of mere destruction. Whatever may be the object and duration of the war, America must rely on her resources alone. From Europe no assistance can, for some time, be expected. British pride b^ins, indeed, to produce its usual effect. Seeds of dissension are not wanting. Russia and England may, at the approaching Congress of ¥ienna; be at variance on importaiit subjects, particularly respecting the ag- grandizement of Austria. But questions ef maritime rights are not yet attended to, and America, is generally overlooked by the European sovereigns, or viewed vrith suspicion. Above all, tiiere is nowhere any navy in existence, and years of peace ijiust elapse before the means of rewsting with effect the sea power of Great Britain can again be created. In a word, Europe wants peace, and neither wiU nor can at this time make war against Great Britain, The friendly disposition of the. Emperor Alexander, and a. just view of the. subject, make him sincerely wish that peace should be restored to the United- States. He may fl,se his endeavors for that purpose : beyond t]hat he will not go, and in the it is. not probable he will succeed. I have also tiie most perfect conviction, that, under the existing uupropitious circumstances of the world, America, cannot, by. a continuance of the war, compel Great Britain to yield any maritime points in dispute, and par- ticularly to agree to any satisfiictory ar- rangement on the Bulpect of impressment : that the most favorable terms of peace that can. be expected are the status ante bellum: a postponeinent of the questions of block- ade, impressment, and all other points which in time of- European peace are not particularly injurious ; but, with firmness and perseverance, those terms, though per- haps unattainable, at this moment, will ultimately be obt9ined, provided you can a'tand the shock of this campaign, and pro- vided the people will remain and show themselves united : this nation and govern- ment vrill be tired of a war without object, and which must become unpopular, when the passions of the day wiU have subsided, a;nd when the - country sees clearly that America asks nothing from Great Britain. It is desirable that the negotiations of Ghent, if not productive of immediate p^eace, should at least afford the satisfactory prpof of this last point. I might have ad- duced several facts and collateral ciroum- sf^EUices iQ .support of the opinions contained in this letter, but you know I would not risk them on slight grounds. You may rest as^fured of, the ^sj^ersi hostile spirit of tiie LONDON. [1814. nation, and of its wish to inflict serious in- jury on the United States ; that no assist- anee can be expected from Europe; and that no better terms of peace will be ob- tained than the status ante bellum, &c., as above stated. I am less positive, though I fear not mistaken, with respect 'to the views of the ministry, to the object of the armament, to the failure of the Emperor'a interference, and to the consequent impron bability of peace before the conclusion of this year's campaign. 1 have the honor to be. With great respect,, Your obediMit servant^ Albebt Gallatin. That letter of Mr. Gallatin, expressive of well-founded apprehensions for New York and Washington, particularly, and little anticipating the American tnumphs that accompanied and strengthened ibe negotia:' tions at Giient, contemplated nothing bet^ ter- tiian the mere Fabian policy of delay ; enduring British hostilities till their frenzy, should be. exhausted, and trusting to the mere chapter of accidents for- saving the United States from dismemberment and, subjugation. A few days after, with Le? vitt Harris, who accompanied the envoys, from St. Petersburgh to London, Mr. GaJlatia had the honor of an. interview there, with the. Emperor Alexander. Admiral Cochrane's proclamation of April, 1814,, inviting the slaves of the Southern States, to revolt, was soon followed by his official- letter of August, to Mr. Monroe, announo-: ing, but not tiH after their perpetration; at Washington, the barbarous devastationa. there committed, and to be repeated where- ever British fleets and armies could strike. The only question was, as Mr. Gallatin wrote,, between predatory hostilities of uncivilized, atrocity and permanent conquest. To one or the other of these inflictions Great Bri-. tain resolved that America should submit. In the fever of that fell spirit, the Ameri- can envoys, in London, sought an interview- with the only person, who might possibly avert or mitigate the blows. In the midst of the tumultuous exulta- tions of London, large embarkations of. troops for America took place, of whom the Duke of Wellington, Lord Hill, Marshal Beresford, and Sir Thomas Picton were reported as leaders. After settling the. Bourbons on the precarious French t£rone, their imperial and royal guardians"proceed- ed, the 6th June, 1814, on a visit to.London. The Emperor Alexander and King of Prus- sia, with their suites, a large concourse of, illustrious princes, generals, and nobles, the modern Knighthood of most of Europe, for whose reception, great preparation^- were made ; for never in the glorious annals of Great Britain, since Henry YIII. and Henry ly. met at Calais, on the cloth of gold, ha^. CHAi-. XIII.] LONDON FESTIVAL. 295 such guests been her visitors; In considera- tion of the leading part England had acted, the invaluable succors she had given, the still more important example she had set, the only kingdom unsubdued or unterrified, the only one that had not acknowledged aot only the usurper emperor, but all his tributary kings and princely parasites, it was said that the Congress for general peace was to be held in the British metro- polis, the largest city of Christendom, and that the treaty should bear the name of London in all future generations and his- tories. The 18th June, 1814, by felicitous anticipation of the coming battle of Wa- terloo next year, was fixed as ihe day when the City of London, in a magnificent entertainment, should invite the chivalry of England, Scotland, and Ireland, to meet those of Bussia, Austria, Prussia, France, and all the other powers of Europe, at Guildhall, the ancient seat of British jus- tice, the chosen place of the banquet, for which a grand Grothic hall, with superbly painted windows, was gorgeously equipped. The walls were tapestried with bright crimson cloth, festooned into arcades, in <4ie recesses of which were tables loaded with all the city plate from the Mansion House, and that of many noblemen, gentle- men, and' companies proffered for the occa- sion; sumptuous in display of gold and silver, magnificent candelabra, epergnes, tureens, ewers, cups, dishes, glaciers, and other richly wrought ornaments, all select- ed for the purpose. Illuminated by chan- deliers of beautiful cut glass, redoubled by mirrors, reflected by cordons of lamps, the royal and city banners of the twelve prin- cipal corporations were displayed in gal- leries terminated at the monuments of Chatham' and his son, William Pitt, one tiiB great author of modem British com- mercial renown, the other of its utmost development. Bands of military music, and orchestras of vocal performers, by turns enlivened the scene. The Prince Regent, with the Emperor of Russia on his right and King of Prussia on his left, sat on an elevated platform, in massive gUt chairs, covered and canopied with crimson velvet, fringed with gold and tied with golden ropes: the sword, sceptre, and crown flittering above their august heads. The oor in front of the regal table was terraced with a profusion of the rarest and costliest aromatic shrubs, flowers, and exotic plants. The city council, courts of law. Lord Mayor, and nobles, galleries crowded with ladies in fiill dress, waving white handkerchiefs, within, and innumerable populace without, were back-grounds of a splendid frontis- piece. The streets from Temple Bar, where the procession entered' the city, were spread over with bright gravel, and the crowd kept off by posts and bars. The only turiJe that could be procured- was presented by a West India merchantman, whose name is gratefully preserved for history. A large baron of fibe roast beef of Old England, with the royal standard, was placed on a stage at the upper end of the hall, in view of the royal table, attended by the sergeant carvers, and one of the principal cooks,' in proper costume. France was represented at the festival by the Duke of Orleans, since the first elected and last dethroned king of that country: England, by the prince regent and his brothers, the dukes of York and Kent, and their cousin, the Duke of Gloucester. The future William the Fourth, then Duke of Clarence, was too poor and insignificant to be present ; and the Duke of Sussex, too liberal to be tole- rated in his regent brother's presence. Met- ternioh ; Nesselrode ; the Cossack Hetman Platoff; Hardenberg; the Duke of Saxe Weimar, who afterwards visited the United States; Blucher; Bulow; Humboldt; Ad- miral Warren ; Castlereagh ; Peel ; with long lists of English and other European noblemen, 'princesses, ladies, and distin- guished, but not historical personages, at- tended. The day of that entertainment by the city, was appointed by the Emperor Alex- ander ; and the hour before he left the place of his residence, in Leicesterfields, to pro- ceed to Guildhall, as the time for Mr. Gal- latin's reception, whose associate on the occasion was Levitt Harris, long kno'wn to the Emperor of Bussia as American consul, and the only public functionary near his court; recommended there by that well- educated monarch's good feelings towards American institutions, his •wish to culti- vate American commercial relations, the lively amenity and European tastes con- tracted by Mr. Harris during many years' residence in St. Petersburg. The streets of London that afternoon, near the imperial residence, bright 'with summer daylight, swarmed with tens of thousands of elegant carriages ; more than a considerable army of opulent gentlemen on fine horses, at- tended by as many well-mounted grooms, in all the admirable and unequaled display of English equestrian splendor ; perfect in equipages, liveries, and equipments ; an im- mense parade of beautiful women, stout men and richly-dressed servants ; surrounded by hundreds of thousands of brawny populace ; all assembled to see, cheer, and admire the continental heroes, who, in their pay, and under their control, had at last conquered their most formidable foe, and sung Rule Britannia in the capital of subjugated France. Through as much of thalt concourse of Britons in all their glory, acknowledged the masters of the world, as a mean and soli- tary hackney coach, with a permit, could work its despicable way, hooted and reviled, the American representatives, suffered- with 296 MR. GALLATIN AND THE EMPEROR ALEXANDER. [1814. difficulty to proceed, sloVly moved in strik- ing contrast with the surrounding magni- ficence of impediments, wonder, and con- tempt. No people axe more intolerant of all othprs, scarcely the Chinese or Japan- ese, than the English, toto orbe dimsos; no populace more insolent to their own supe- riors; the former from insularity, the lat- ter from uneducated popular freedom ; no mob more derisory or insulting; no soli- tude more disheartening than the vast crowds of his kin, and like thronging the' interminable ways of London, to an Ame- rican, who finds them strangers, distant, contemptuous, and censorious of every- thing transatlantic. Mr. Gallatin, who, if recognized as such, might have been grossly insulted, escaped with nothing worse than volleys of jeers at his foreign aspect, and sometimes being hailed as old Blucher. A few years afterwards, when American piinister in France, the King, Louis the Eighteenth, whose long exile in England perfected his familiarity with the English language, but who dishked an "able Gene- van, whom he looked upon as almost one of his own subjects representing a foreign nation at his court, said, "Mr. Gallatin, you speak French perfectly." Bowing to the compliment, the American minister did not anticipate its sarcastic sequel, when the king added, " but I think my English is better than yours." Few Americans ^srould visit London or Paris, with less of the bodily characteristics of this country than the now venerable statesman, who, though perhaps more anxious to prevent and avert war than some other Americans, and soliciting peace with extreme entreaty, was always, whether at St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, London, Paris, or Ghent, one of the truest advocates of the rights of the adopted country he so long and faithfully serves still. Alexander's reception of the American courtiers of his mediation, was what Mr. Clay might have enjoyed more than Mr. Gallatin. In the strong, coarse diction not uncommon to sovereigns and the great, French words equivalent to "keep a stiff upper lip," were his imperial majesty's expressive advice. To the solicitor of peace, the autocrat's wise counsel was, not to be discouraged, but, with manly resist- ance to put on the port of resolution, and at least assume a virtue, oven if we had it not. "Verily, Jonathan," said Cobbett's Register just then, " if you repose in vain hopes, you are on your last legs. You have negotiators in Europe, whofhave a great opinion of their jiowers of speech. We here do not make long diplomatic speeches, but use more laconic -arguments of much greater force. You have lately seen what a shilly shally state the powers of the con- tinent were in, till our Lord Castlereagh got among their counsellors. You have seen the result; isifter that, rely, if you will, on the superior powers of talhing. Perhaps you may take it into your heads that, negotiators chosen from among our friends, me Federalists, those ' Burkes of the western hemisphere,' of whom the Times newspaper speaks, perhaps it may come into your noddle, that negotiators picked out from among those 'mends of social order, and regular government,' vrill be likely to succeed better than those who were not for open war against Napoleon. Tryj then, Jonathan, and be sure to fix on gen- tlemen who think themselves clever, and love to hear themselves talk. Try, in aU manner ^of ways, the powers of talking. Alas I to* be serious witn you, your safety lies now in the forbearance, the magnani- mity, and compassion of his royal highness, the prince regent. You did not like the Emperor Napoleon. One party amongst you abused lum, and the other disclaimed all desire to aid his views. Volumes did your negotiators write to convince us that you did nothing to favor him. You have got into a nice litue independent war of your own. You have put your little iv^Upendemt war as a sort of an episode to the great drama. You may, I hope, rely on the moderation and magnanimity of our prince regent. But I do assure you, if you were rooted out to the last man, you would excite but little commiseration in Europe. It is in vain to talk ; a disease of the mind, of which nations are never cured, but at 'the cannon's mouth." The philosopher of Botley, as Cobbett began to be styled, from his strong Saxon writings in the Political Register, which he edited from a farm near th^t village in Hampshire, did not stop at writing; but, completely converted from extreme hatred of, to a great preference for, American in- stitutions, atoned for some of his abuse of them, while conducting Peter Porcupine's Gazette in Philadelphia, by a remarkable visit and communication to Mr. Bayard, at London. As that gentleman, and Mr. Christopher Hughes, the secretary of the legation, were breakfasting one morning at their lodgings, in Albemarle Street, the card of WilUam Cobbett was brought froiai the door, followed by a big, burly, rough- looking, coarse-dressed, elderly man, en- tering with a large oak stick in his hand, the image of a sturdy Briton. " I am come," said he, "to warn you Americans against this cabal, caucus you- might call it in America, of crowned heads now in London, whose objects must be sinister, and, as I believe, bode your republic no good. The republican spirit is to be put out, the light of liberty extinguished, and your countoy, the candlestick in which it how flickers, broken to pieces, that it may blaze no more. Our old king, you know, is mad ; confined to 'rooms padded with cushions along tb$ Chap. XIII.] walls, so that he cannot knock his brains out, or hurt himself, and filled with pianos for him to soothe his insanity by music, of which %e is fond. His hopeful heir appa- rent Ib a mere voluptuary, whose only de- sire is to dress, drink, and wench when he is able. But old Queen Charlotte is smit with lust of power as well as wealth ; and she wants to make the greatest dolt of her seven stupid sons, the Duke of York, what do you think, sirs ? nothing less than king of North America. They tried to make a bishop of him, then a general, and failed at both ; but hope he may do for a king, who, by law, can do no wrong ; and what brings all these potentates from Paris to London, with Metternich and others to represent the absent royalties ? Certainly, to plot the overthrow of the only republic that stares them in the face. Depend on it, Mr. Bayard, thatCastlereagh and Arthur, as the prince regent calls the new Duke of Wel- lington, have assembled these monarchs here to organize a Cossack force, like the Hessian, to be sent to , America to crush you. Old Charlotte is full of it, as I learn ; and all your begging peace will come to nothing. If you cannot fight, you must be conquered. There are men enough well armed and dis- ciplined, ships enough all ready to carry them ; fools enough like the old queen, to urge the enterprise ; ministers enough like Castlereagh and Metternich, to recommend it." Cobbett's visit and communication were received by Mr. Bayard, who had known him in Pluladelphia, with silent at- tention. Encouraged by the Emperor Alexander as to the indispensable necessity and wis- dom of relying on warlike virtues and measures, as the only way to peace, the American envoys soon after left London for Paris. During their occasional visits and their suites to Paris, in the summer of 1814, preceding their settlement at Ghent, for the negotiations conducted there, a circum- stance made known from Paris to Wash- ington, through one of the unofficial at- tendants of the legation, deserves to be mentioned, importing that scarcely was Ferdinand the Seventh on the throne of Spain once more, before his ministers conceived a design of dispossessing the United States of New Orleans. Mid- way between English and Spanish Ame- rica, it was considered the head-quar- ters of the insurrections and revolutions, exemplified and inculcated by the former to the latter, of which the furnace at New Orleans, occupied by Spanish forces, might be made the most convenient extinguisher. Whether the English expedition to Louis- iana had any connection with that design, I am not informed. A former French charge d'afiaires' in this country, directed to pre- vent the marriage of Jerome Bonaparte to an NEW ORLEANS AND CUBA. 297 American wife, Pichon, not succeeding in that undertaking, incurred the displeasure of Napoleon, and from that estrangement became gradually alienated, till at last he threw himself under the protection of thg Bourbons. By his disclosure to one of the attendants of the Ghent mission, our go- vernment was given to understand that the Spanish applied to the French Bour- bons for co-operation in the project of dis- possessing the United States of New Or- leans, and establishing there a centre of counteraction against all further South American and Mexican revolutions. The French government, however, did not feel strong enough to espouse so expensive and precarious a contest, and it was relin- quished. I cannot assert that such a Spanish de- sign was entertained in 1814; and am not aware that Mr. Madison's administration was advised of it by any of his ministers at the time in France ; my information coming from another source. But of the know- ledge and assent of that administration to another, as it had reason to believe, Spanish design on Louisiana, I am so well assured as to append it to that first mentioned, though it did not occur till shortly after the period of my narrative, in the autumn of 1816. While General Jackson was commander of the South Western military division of the United States, with his head quarters near Nashville, and Colonel Jessup, stationed at Baton Rouge, with the first regiment and parts of some others, in immediate military command of New Orleans, and the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, a respectable Roman Catholic clergyman, Father Antoine, and Col. Peire, who commanded the seventh regi- ment of United States infantry at the battles of New Orleans, confidentially informed Colonel Jessup that a Spanish attempt was on foot for the forcible seizure of that city, by an army to be conveyed from Cuba with that intent. The Spanish population of Louisiana, supposed to be still attached to Spain, were sounded, through some of whom Father Antoine obtained and communicated the information. With General Jackson's approbation, and without President Madi- son's disapproval, measures were therefore taken by the American local commanders, in concert with Governor Claiborne, of Lou- isiana, Governor Holmes, of the Mississippi Territory, and Commodore Patterson, who commanded that naval station, to counteract the threatened Spanish invasion, by simulta- neous seizure of the island of Cuba. While the militia were to defend Louisiana from the Spanish invasion, all the regular forces of the army and navy that could be col- lected, twenty-five hundred volunteers, un- der General Hinds, from Mississippi, and the same number from Louisiana, so as to constitute an army t«n thousand strong, 29S were to be embarked for Havana, when- ever there was reason to believe thai the Spanish army of invasion was coming from Cuba. Secret agents were sent to Havana, who brought back precise accounts of the state of the troops and fortifications there, of which the most accurate details were in possession of the American officers. Their condition was believed to be such as that they must fall an easy prey to ike force in- tended to seize them. Shotild Spain invade Louisiana, it was deemed constitutional and politic to repel, by simultaneous seizure of the place of Spanish armament and depar- ture, as Scipio defended Kome by carrying the war into Africa. President Madison was officially informed of the apprehended Spanish invasion, and intended American counteraction, and did not forbid it. It ^ay have been his opinion, that the Execu- tive may lawfully repel invasion when im- minent, by counter invasion, without an act ef Congress declaring war. It was a dream of Jefferson's fai^sighted genius that all North America, from Davis' Straits to tiia Isthmus of Darien, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, including all the West Indies, wUl eventually compose republican Fnited States, under the same federal head, with perfectly free trade amon^ all, by :whioh means American war would cease, with the most prolific causes of it. Hamil- ton likewise contemplated vast extent for ■this country. Much and marvelously has been aiiesbdy realized, and in no instance has extension of American territory been the result of a mere spirit of aggrandize- ment or conqu«st.. Louisiana, Florida, Texas, New Mexico, "and California, have not been incorporated with these Fnited States, without hostile European occasionfor it. Spain, by transactions in Florida, and designs on Louisiana, has done much more to jilstify American attraction of Cuba,.than this country' has to disturb Spanish sove- reignty there. 'FheKussian mediation being unexpected- ly rejected by England, but with an intima- tion that she would listen to terms of peace not inconsistent with what w«re called, and too generally conceded, to be her maritime rights, elsewhere than at St. Petersburg, Got- tenburg was suggested as a convenient place, and" the King of Sweden, Charles the Thirteenth, was nattered that his terri- tory was to be the place of negotiation. He had previously commissioned a minister, Kantsow,, to the United States, whom Pre- sident Madison endeavored to reciprocate by nominating Joiiathan Busaell as envoy etxtraordinary to Sweden; but the Senate re- jected that nomination. In January, 1814; when it was believed tha ters, the American consul there, Levitt Harris, was commissioned secretary of the legation. When that was no longer to be the place, but Mr. Adams still wa« to be a member of the mission,. Mr. Harris,, by dir- rection of the President, was appointed charge d'affaires in. Russia, during Mr. Adams' absence from that country, and Mr. Christopher Hughes was- appointed secrer tary of the legation. On the 27& Februaw, 1814,. Mr. _Clajf and Mr. Russell, with Mr. H-ughes-, accom- panied by William Shaler, as a confidential and secret agent of government, andH«nry^ CarroU, as unofficial secretary or companion of Mr. Clay, sailed from New York in the John Adams sloop-of-war. After a tempest- uous passage in that frail vessel, and inhos- pitable reception in the Texel, where theji first made Europe, theylanded at Gottenburg, to be fi:rst informed there of the prodigious- successes of Great Briton and her tSlies-, which took place after they left Americay in' the capture and peace of Paris-. Hearing; at London, of the arrival' of an American shipr with peace commissioners at Gottenburgv- Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Bayard sent Mr. Bay- ard's unofficial secretary, George MiUigan,. to ascertain whether it was so, and what were- their instructions, with- whom Mr. Hughes) repaired to London, taking the new com- missions of the envoys there. The peace commission then consisted of ihe five gen- tlemen, Mr. Adams, Mr. Bayard, Mr. Clay,.. Mr. RusseU and Mr. Gallatin; attended- by> the President's step-son^ Mr. Payne Tod,. Mr. George Dallas, George ' MiUigan and" Henry Carroll ; British- commissioners- be- ing appointed, and Ghent selected as tli» place' of meeting.. Ghent, a. Belgian city of some seventy- or- eighty thousand inhabitants, between tha- rivers Scheldt aiid Lys, not far from the sea», was then occupied by British troopsj com- manded by Sir Edward Lyons, whose only; knowledge of America was that his fathec was killed in the battle of Bunker-hill.. The American ministers had been there-, some timO) waiting for'the En^sh, who did; not arrive till after ih^ir coming vras long- anxiously expected. Admiral Lord Gam- bier, the chief of the mission, was a retired) naval officer, of navery marked character.. William Adams was an admiralty lawyer,, with all the preconceived opinions, and not; much more than ihe learning, of Doctors'' Commons. Mr. Henry Gouldburn, tie only publicist of that side^was a young man, con-' nected with a noble family, taraiaing to states- manship, since Chancellorof the Exchequer. . The feeling in England toward. this oauntry Chap. XIII.] I was almost universal anger,, aversion and contempt, well represented by the English mission at Ghent, which seemed to be chos- en not from any distinguished capacity, experience or fitness for their functions, but because the ministry were resolved to con- duct the negotiations themselves, from Lon- don, and to open them arbitrarily and in- flexibly, with such lofty demands- as con- sisted with universal English sentiment, that such demands might be dictated through any agents, and would be at once unhesitatingly conceded. The secretary of the British legation, Anthony St. John Baker, was the consul-general detected in the distribution of trading licenses at Washington, when war was declared. On the other hand, the United States fortified themselves for the negotia- tion by some of their ablest men ; Mr. Adams, educated and practiced in diplom- acy, Mr. Gallatin, familiar with the mari- time and commercial questions to be dis- cussed, Mr. Bayard and Mr. Clay, distin- guished and experienced members of Con- gress, and Mr. Russell, who, as charge d'afiaires, first at Paris, when so left there by General Armstrong, and afterwards at London, when war was declared, had com- mended himself to respect by the adroit- ness, firmness, and manliness with which he performed his delicate and difficult offices; Having been appointed minister plenipotentiary to Sweden, he visited Stock- holm, and presented his credentials there prior to joining- his colleagues at Ghent. Of such antagonists in the discussions to be entered upon, it needs no American pre- judice to aver, what the Marquis of Wel- lesley mentioned in the House of Lords, that the correspondence of the American commissioners was obviously superior to that of the English; which was stated when he must have known that the Eng- lish commissioners were kept always ad- vised by the cabinet in London, and uniformly waited for instructions across the Channel before they ventilred to an- swer any American letter: which was the invariable course of the negotiations. The ministers of both parties met together at a place and time appointed, orally made their suggestions and objections as either one thought proper, which were minuted by the secretaries, Mr. Hughes and Mr. Baker, and followed by letters as deemed expedi- ent ; but no American letter was answered till after the interval necessary for the En- glish commissionprs to send it to London, and get the answer there given by the cabinet. The American envoys had no such advantage. Three, thousand miles from their government^ they were obliged to act on such original instructions as were taken with them, or wait many vreeks for further orders when indispensable. But it was one of the- beneficial results of Ameri- oam transatlantic distance s^d wi^kness. THE COMMISSIONERS. 299 both before and soon after n-ational inde- pendence, when the United States were more dependent on reason than strength, and the pen was a more available instru- ment than the sword, it was indispen- sable to send none but superior men to Europe on foreign missions. , Wherefore Franklin, John Adams, Jay and Jefferson were employed to institute that excellent American diplomacy, which for many years distinguished the united States; lengthy and argumentative, as is the method of those whose state papers are subjected to popular judgment, but arguments in which the vindication of nations is couched. By putting off peace from April, 1814, when by the cessation of war in Europe all cause for it in America ceased likewise, till March, 1815, nearly eleven months given to vengeance, conquest and aggrandize- ment, thus deferring the treaty of Ghent,. Great Britain provoked the triumphs of American negotiations in Europe as signal as those of American arms at the same time in America. The palm of victory which was not denied at Plattsburg, New Orleans, and other fields of military glory, was con- ceded also in Westminster to that of diplo- macy at Ghent,, and the retribution of such successes, intellectual and martial, of the weak over the strong, is one of the most memorable occurrences of that year; the European effect of which has been enjoyed in such American peace and prosperity as no peace could have occasioned without such triumj)hs. It is debcate and invidious- truth to add, that of the five American commissioners, there was probably only one inflexibly re- solved on yielding nothing. It should not disparage Mr.. Adams, Mr. Gallatin, Mr.. Bayard and Mr. Russell, to say, that,.imbued as they werefrom residence and associations- with the commercial deferences of this country for England, no lack of spirit,, pa- triotism or wisdom is imputable to any one of them who, on some of the questions to be passed upon, might incline to- compromise with what seemed inevitable to save their country from OTeat distress and calamity. Mr. Gallatin's London letter of May, 1814,. shows that he did not expect any British concession, though no one, as will appear,, was more prompt or determined to reject in- tolerable exaction. Mr. Adams, equally te- nacious of American rights, was neverthe- less apprehensive of American inability to. maintain them, as betrayed by his letter from', Ghent to Levitt Harris at St. Petersburg,, which despondingly inquired, " with three, frigates for a navy and five regiments for an army, what can be expected but defeat and disgrace?" Mr. Bayard on all occa- sions evinced his strong .Ajnerican feelings ;, and Mr. Russell, not only of the war and administration party,, was resolute to main- tain, thepositiou which.alone conld^ve tliem , 300 ENGLISH IGNORANeE OF AMERICA. from disgrace. But all those gentlemen were under the Atlantic influences of a commer- cial nation, which seldom tend to the loftiest patriotism. There was no member of the American legation who did not despise the capitulation of the Boston press, quoted in another part of this sketch, that the British terms first dictated sine qua non would and ought to be acquiesced in, and that it was Fourth of July fustian to treat them as insulting. No member of the legation hesitated to reject, to repel and to resent degrading terins. But there was one alone with ultramontane; transalleghenian in- stincts of uncompromising resistance to any British exaction, as several years after- wards partially appeared in print; that One, as Lord Castlereagh called him, was the Kentuckian, Mr. Clay, whose social independence that polished, iron-nerved and elegant courtier is said to have pre- ferred, when after peace he entertained them all in London, to the endowments of his more cultivated and accomplished col- leagues. For as for war, so for diplomacy, for oratory, even for society, there is ge- nius which outstrips the endowments of culture. Bom on the Atlantic shore, and bred in seaports, where with every im- postatio'n come, like ship-fevers, unwhole- some influences, let us confess that beyond the mountains man becomes a nobler re- publican, ruder perhaps of speech, garb and manner, but patriot as women are chaste, not by xeason or education, but by instinct. ■ Not tiU the 3d of August, 1814, when the British forces,- expedited from France, Spain, England and Ireland, had arrived in great numbers in America, and the three armies destined to defeat at -Baltimore, Plattsburg and New Orleans, were far on their way to anticipated conquests, besides that of the Penobscot, then also in opera- tion, did the British legation leave London for Ghent. Their departure, when British invasions of America were all in the ecsta- sies of achievement, was thus heralded by tiie London' Courier, the official paper, of 1st August, 1814. "Fpon prospects of peace with America, we are not so san- guine as some of our cotemporaries. The American commission was first issued upon designs of chicanery. It first sought the mediation of Russia, or rather its pro- tection to the principle that free bottoms make free goods, hoping to draw the Court of St. Petersburg into a quarrel with us upon the old question of neutral bottoms, wnich Russia and the northern powers espoused so zealously thirty years ago. This was a trick of Bonaparte's, who em- ployed America to embroil Russia and England at the moment he made his grand attack upon the former, two years ago. The Emperor of Russia referred the over^ 't^res to- England, which oould do no less [1814. than express a desire of peace 'with Ame- rica ; neither could the Ajneriean commis- sioners do less than express a similar desire^ Hence arose a proposed meeting of negoti- ators on each side, which was but bttle attended to by either, each knowing that nothing could follow from it, and the Ame- ricans being chagrined at the failure of their insidious designs. Now that America is stripped of all nope of assistance, now that the Corsican is annihilated, the same- com- mission of negotiators may at last be earnest, if they are provided with sufficient powers. But however magnanimous it may be in the Regent to declare his wish for peace on terms honorable to both parties, we hope it will not be made on terms ejuoWy honora* ble to both parties. Let the guilty pay some forfeit for their offence. We look ra- ther to the prosecution of the war with vigor." The stolid ignorance of leading English statesmen concerning this countiy needed defeat to' make them wiser, as much as we did to render us independent of their influence. In the debate in the House of Lords, vindicating the capture of Wash- ington, the Earl of Liverpool, long the substantial and most reliable minister of the crown, said that he had "seen much' stronger justification of the conduct of his majesty's forces at Washington, pub- lished in America, than any that had been published even in England. Not only were the Americans not more hostile to us," said his lordship to the peers of Great -Britain, "since that event, but the reverse is the case. In places where the British arms have been successful, the people have shown themselves in our favor, and seemed well disposed to put themselves under our pro- tection." Such slander of nearly all the American nation was taught the English government by the pusillanimous neglect or determination of the government of Massachusetts respecting the eastern part of that State, conquered and held by Bri- ~ tish masters, from a community too well described by Lord Liverpool as " well dis- posed to put themselves under British pjo- tection." It was credibly reported at Paris that, when informed of the burning of Wash- ington, Lord Castlereagh said that was not the oaly American town to be taken and perhaps burned; that several others, and among them New Orleans, must pass under the yoke, and the Americans be so environed by British troops, from the mouth of the Mississippi to the falls of Niagara, as to be little better than prisoners at large in their own deserts. One of the lords of the ad- miralty, Sir Joseph Torke, was reported by the London journals, to the great delight of nearly all Englaiid, to have said in the House of Commons, " We have President Madison to depose before we can. lay down- our arms." "Peace," said the Times news- Chap. XIII.] BRITISH JOURNALS. SOI pajjer, " between Great Britain and . the United States can nowhere be properly made but in 'America. The conferences must be carried on at New York or Phila- delphia, having previously fixed there the .head-quarters of a Picton or a HiU." " The war," said Cobbett, "is almost universally popular. It is the war of the Times and the Courier. The press has worked up the people to the war pitch, and there it keeps them." After Madison exposed their first demands at Ghent, which the Times called " the means of uniting the whole American people against us," Cobbett replied, " You ass! they were united before, except a handful of Serene Highnesses and Cossacks in Massachusetts, the acquaintances of John Henry." Intoxicated by Napoleon's down- fall and the subjugation of France, the mo- narch of the British press, the London Times, proclaimed " No peace with Madison as with Bonaparte. Part of our army in France will be immediately transferred to America, to finish the war there with the same glory as in Europe, and to place the peace on a footing equally firm and strong. Now that the tyrant Bonaparte has been consigned to infamy, there is no feeling stronger in this country than indignation against the Americans. The American government is as much of a tyranny as his was. Hatred of England is the fun- damental point of Madison's policy; the ostensible organ. of a party, all whose thoughts and feelings are guided by that master key. He himself, on the occasion of Jay's treaty, laid it down as an axiom that no treaty should be made with the enemy of France. Young as is the Ame- rican Republic, it already has indulged in dreams of great ambition, and dreads any power that stands in the way of universal ambition. Their design in this war was to sap the foundation of our na- tional greatness by denying the allegiance of our sailors, seize on our American colo- nies, and thus pave the way to our West India possessions. Now that the republic has lost her French buckler, Napoleon, shall we have the folly to let her off? We have wrested the dagger from the assassin, shall we give it back to him to sheathe ? No. In his very last speech Madison has furnished us with a rule of conduct, viz. not only to chastise the savages into permanent peace, but make a lasting impression on their fears. [Applied by the President to Jack- son's conquest of the Creek Indians.] The Eastern, which are the most moral, intelli- gent, and respectable States, are reduced to complete thraldom by the Southern. The small States, said Fisher Ames, are in vas- salage to the rod .of Virginia. Th« Consti- tution sleeps vrith Washington, with no mourners but . the virtuous, or monument but 'history. If that was true before the acquisition of LoTusiana, how much more so now, since that addition has broken down the balance between the States, and poured an irresistible stream of corrupt influence into the executive channel. And this South- ern preponderance is made by slaves. The slave owner is generally a democrat, and democrats are the most servile supporters of tyrants. The free and honest States must then be separated from the treacherous individual who has dragged them reluctantly into this war. When we speak of Madison, however, we mean his whole faction. Gal- latin may be more artful, Clay more furious, Jefferson more malignant. There is a fe- rocious banditti of them, of whom, perhaps, Madison himself stands in awe : Irish trait- ors, fugitive bankrupts and swindlers, ex- ceeding the native Americans in rancor against Great Britain. There are some respectable Americans. Fisher Ames, lit- tle known on this side of the Atlantic, was an American Burke.. Madison's Generals Dearborn, Wilkinson, and Hampton, by their ridiculous blunders, have thrown ridi- cule on the conquest of Canada. Then comes the overthrow of his great patron, attended with the execration and scorn of all Europe. A vigorous effort on our part will annihilate a faction alike hostile to Britain and fatal to America. Is not the time propitious for uniting at least the sounder and better part of the Americans to a union of interests with the country from which they sprung?" In such universal strain of malicious prejudice and stupid ignorance, the Bri- tish press and Parliament counseled war, stripped of all its humanizing mitigations, naked and ferocious war, to reconquer the United States by divisions and invasion; war of principles and institutions ; civil war in its worst outrages ; and servile war with all its Roman horrors : In which atrocious instigations is perceptible not only the English design of that day, but the English influence which still prevails throughout New England, inflaming it, under the disguise of negrophUism, to un- natural and suicidal antipathies against Southern fellow-countrymen. Just then an English renegade, once an English common soldier, then American journalist, vUifying everything American, whose Porcupine shafts were continually aimed at Mr. Gallatin, from flaming loyalist, become furious radical, Cobbett, stood up in the midst of Hampshire, in the heart of Eng- land, a volunteer American champion, when there was no American inducemeflt to his vehement espousal of our cause. With the superior knowledge, derived from long residence, of the institutions, people and resources of this country, he wielded coarse, pure, Saxon English, with the force of Swift or Paine, in American vindica- tion, striking- with a pen like a sledge- hammer, and always tutting in the right 302 place. Ktt, Percival, and afterwards Casr tlereagh, successive English premiers, ■who all died by political excesses, once ob- jects of his excessive applause, became butts of his withering ridicule, and marks of his deadly blows, America erst abomi- nated, at last his delight ; sturdy English volunteer, proclaiming the justice of our cause, tiie fortitude of our people,' their re- publican attachments and unconquerable union in spite of prefatory reverses, super- ficial and party divisions. When the Bour- bon restoration was a fact accomplished, and the Times and other EngUsh journals pro- claimed that twenty-five thousand of Wel- lington's veteran troops were to be trans- ferred to America, to finish the war as in France, and with the same glory, Cobbett, &om his rustic sequestration, rebuked them in tones of contemptuous defiance, which reverberated throughout the four comers of this wide confederacy.. "Our quarrel," said he, "with America, ceases with the war. [Orders in Council repealed, and no occa- sion or pretext, if even pretended, right of impressment in time of peace.] But the American' government and President are bad, and must be put down. For that the war is to be continued, and no peace till then. I ackno'wledge that a 'war to recolo- nize America vrill be the most popular ever waged, at least for a vriiile. Peace and re- duction of our forces 'will ruin so many, who are all, men, families, women and children, clergymen and all for war, as un- dertakers are for deaths, and -with as little malice in their motives. The farmers are for war, Ijeoause they think it makes corn dear. The land-owners, generally, because ttey think it keeps up rents. The ship- O'wners and navigation interest, because in peace the Americans rival them -with cheap- er shipping. The manufacturers expect a monopoly instead of rivalship of American manufactures, if the United States are re- covered by Great Britain. The Stockholm ers hope to make America contribute to pay the national debt. Politicians see in America a dangerous maritime rital grow- ing, like their Indian com, prodigiously yet imperceptibly. And fifty fallen Napoleons cannot wash out the shame of their losing auch colonies. English high-minded par triots cling to Great Britain's supremacy as mistress of the seas. Other Englishmen hate America, because free, and the asylum for tibe oppressed' of this and other coun- faies ; tt country -without sinecures, pensions, tithes, aifd hardly any taxes ^ where corrup- tion and bribery are unkno'wn, and putting a criminal to death as rare as an eclipse ' tyzbema. Th«y dread what they deem the diaorgaaiiziiig princ^tles of Anterioa. 3^y COBBETT. [1814 have the press in their tands, and conttbl the prejudices and passions. For these self- ish reasons, I believe [said Cobbett} tilie war -will be popular. But whether it -wifl suc- ceed, is a very different question: and! warn miniefters and the -Prince Regent against being warped by such notions, proceeding from the selfishness of some and rage of others. I confess the time is propitious. Not only have we the best army- in the world, made of the best stuff, commanded by the best ofScers; hut we do ru>t know what to do with them; and for a year they mast' cost as much in peace ar war. We have more than ships of wivr enough to carry them all over the Atlantic, without employ- ing a single transport. In the whole world there is no fleet but ours: and France, Spain and Holland have enough to do at home for some years. We can lay waste the American sea coasts, and at fir^t beat them in every rencontre, demolish some of their towns, and force Congress to change ■ their quarters. But the fa^ of Napoleon, the language, threats and attempt of En- gland will unite the Americans of all par- ties in resistance to us. When their go- vernment is to be forcibly subverted, as ad- vertised in the Times and other English journals, the Americans, instead of being divided, as those journals predict, -will be alarmed and united. They do not want to see what has taken place in France, under our arms, a restoration. Fisher Ames is complimented by the Times as the Burke of America. I dare say he would like to get a good pension. Poor driveling hank- erer after aristocracy, his piarty ■wished to establish a sort of petty noblesse. But the people took the alarm and put them outof power, since when they have been trying to tear the vitals out of their country. The fall of Napoleon ■will leave them nothing to scold about: and the American people ■will be roused, when they hear that their go- - vemment is to be treated like his. Look here, Jefferson's followers will say, the first fruit of French' overthrow is to be that of this country. If all parties unite there, ten such armies as we may send, the bravest and best di'scijdined, will fail. We may destroy their corn-fields, factories, mills, shipping, and no doubt tear the coun'try a good deal to pieces. Yet even by adding another eight hundred millions to our debt, I do not believe that we can gain a single colony from the United States of America. Napo- leon's was no representative or popvilsr go- vernment as the Americans' is : and to put theirs down ■wUl cost us more blood,^ trea- sure and time than his. For all our sacri- fices, his enemies promised us durable peaee whenever he was putdo^wn. But no sooner is he down tiban they propose another Wat, a causeless -war, a ■wax to cost more and last longer 'Oiiuji his. 'It may bring in its train many jdaoes ibt tb^e crown to dispose of. Chap. XIII.] OVERTURE OF NEGOTIATIONS. 303 Yet I warn the Prince Regent and his mi- nisters against the consequences." 3j such popular caustic appeals and pre- dictions were the apostate Irish premier Castlereagh, and his apostate master the Prince Regent, admonished by an English apostate hating everything Irish, even to the potatoe on which the poor Irish subsisted, which Cobbett pronounced an unwholesome vegetable, and recommended as its substi- tute the Indian com, which, while I write this paragraph, has been supplied by Ame- rica to Ireland, in large quantities, to take the place of the potatoe, failing by in- explicable rot, so that Indian corn has be- come at least the temporary substitute. Upon the extension of British suffrage by the reform of 1830, Cobbett ended his long eareer as a member, of Parliament, where, however, he made -no impression or figure, either from advanced age or inaptitude for parliamentary contention. When least to be expected, an unsought and unrewarded champion, he rose up, and fought with fierce intrepidity the battle of a people whom, when among them, he contemned, and from whose borders he absconded. Not only Ghent but Vienna, where the great European Confess assembled in Sep- tember, 1814, and Paris, and St. Peters- burg, where there was no disposition, after putting down the continental tyrant, to raise a sea despot to succeed him, and Dearly all maritime Europe, united with Washington, rejoicing in Plattsburg and Baltimore, to curb Great Britain, and veri- fy, even by European jealousies of her domination, Cobhett's auguries of its Ameri- can defiance. Mr. Adams and Mr. Russell, with Mr. Hughes, went to Ghent in the John Adams, Mr. Clay by land from Gottenburg. Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Bayard joined them from London. The five American commissioners, with their secretary of legation and four junior assistants, established in a consider- able hotel, kept house together, in the un- common ease and dignity, for American foreign niinisters, afforded by a hundred thousand dollars a year ; the amount of iheir united five outfits and salaries. The city authorities of Ghent received them with respec^ and an exchange of hos- pitalities. Entertainments, dinners, and balls, at which Mr. Adams was the only dancing member of the mission, civilities extended by the British commander. Gene- ral Lyons, to the mercurial and gallant secretary of th^ American legation, Mr. Hughes, diverted the time during which they were all kept waiting the arrival of their English opponents, who, leaving Lon- don the 3d, arrived at Ghent on Saturday the 6th of August, 1814. As Sherbrooke invaded Penobscot, and Prevostwas prepar- ing, pursuant to a plan of operations sent Mm from London, to enter ISew York from Plattsburg, and Ross to capture Washing- ton, and the forces of which, on Ross' death, Pakenham was appointed commander, were organizing for the attack of New Orleans, when the only question of the British government and people was, whether it should be war of territorial conquest or coast depredation — just then, the insigni- ficant agents of ministerial vengeance car- ried inadmissible demands from Lond#n to be dictated at Ghent. But the very first step of the negotiation, in the mere form- alities of meeting, indicated the American spirit, and perhaps the English. Mr. Adams by long service, and Mr. Russell by some, were versed in those ceremo- nies of diplomatic intercourse which, in the Old World, are treated as substantial, in the New as trifling, observances. Sun- day noon, the 7th August, when all the gentlemen of our mission were absent ex- cept Mr. Bayard, the secretary of the British legation, Mr. Baker, called at the American hotel, to fix a time and place of meeting to enter on the business of the mission, and, with Mr. Bayard, arranged it for next day, at the British hotel. Mr. Bayard, inexperienced in forms and in- different to ceremonies, made no objection to the suggestion of that place by the British secretary, but at once acquiesced in it. As soon, however, as his colleagues returned, and were apprised of what was an untoward outset of the trans- action, Mr. Adams instantly and warmly refused to comply with it. " Meet," said he, "the English ministers, who have kept us here so long waiting the condescension of their coming, in the face of aU Ghent, meet them at their bidding, at their own hotel, to be the laughing-stock of this city, of London, and of Europe I" " Never I never 1" repeated Mr. Gallatin, "I would rather break up the mission and go home." " But," said Mr. Bayard, " the arrangement has been made, and we are promised to it." "Not at all," replied Mr. Adams, "you may be, not I, nor we. It would be a submissipn to English encroachment to which, for one, I will not submit." By unanimous and animated reversal, the understanding was annulled, and the secretary, Mr. Hughes, employed in his first essay, with instruc- tions reduced to writing by Mr. Adams, to call on Mr. Baker and have the place of meeting changed, and it was accordingly changed to another, where the legations afterwards met each other, their first ses- sion being fixed for the 8,th August. Ghent was full of persons to wateh the negotiations fbi commercial speculations ; several American and many English mer- chants and others. There were also Ameri- cans there, attracted by the interesting na- ture of the issue ; among the rest Mr. Churchill C. Gambreleng, afterwards distin- gtdshed in the public service, both legislative. 304 FIRST CONFERENCE. and diplomatic, of the- United States; Mr. (jJeorge Emlen, who was to have accompa- nied Mr. Russell as secretary of legation to Sweden ; and Captain William Shaler, expert as a linguist, seaman, merchant, and a democrat in advance of his day, employed by our government as a confidential attend- ant of 3ie American mission, whom it was at one time intended to send on a secret errand of observation to Vienna during the Congress of sovereigns there, whose proceedings might considerably affect those at Ghent. American staples were also doing their work in the pending nego- tiations. Tobacco, a weed, nad its weight in the scales of peace ; and cotton, then sixty cents a pound, supplanting iron, once the standard of English national wealth and refinement, was rapidly pro- ducing that complete revolution of the re- lations between this country of produc- tion, and England the country of artificial wealth, by which the mother country may be said to be colonized to her former colo^ nies. Commercial letters from Liverpool, dated early in September, 1814, and received at Savannah, stated that it was "extremely .probable that, during the vrinter, we shall take possession of some American districts, from whence supplies of cotton may be brought;" referring, no doubt, to the con- temj^ated invasion of Louisiana. . "To such a pitch," said a London journal of the 10th September, 1814, "has the spirit of speculation on the insignificant negotia- tions at Ghent been carried, that it is not saying too much to assert, that the whole fundea property of the British empire takes its relative value &om the varying prices of tobacco. If you want to know t£e price of stocks, it is first necessary to ascertain the price of rappee. How comes it that such importance is attached to American affairs, when we have ©nly America to drub into honesty and peace, to which, at a period of our being engaged in a controversy a thousand times of greater magnitude, was scarcely paid the sughtest regard? That the rise and fall of tobacco by Yankee speculation from Ghent, should have so great an effect on our money market, is the eight of folly." On Monday, the 8th August, 1814, " the place having been agreed upon," as the of&cial dispatch of the American commis- sioners stated, the Congress at Ghent had their first conference, exchanged their powers, and the British sine mia non re- specting. Indians and boundaries was launched at once. Our commissioners hav- ing no instructions or idea to treat such claims, the English commissioners .asked for time to communicafe with their govern- ment; and excepting another meeting on the:.9th, to settle a protocol of the terms proposed on the 8tn, there was no fur- ther conference till the 19th, when the [1814. English, on the morning of that day, called for another meeting the same af- ternoon, impelled by a great event that had occurred at Ghent. The day before,' on the 18th August, Lord Castlereagh arrived there, with ' a suite of twenty car- riages, in all the pride and circumstance of British might and splendor, on his way to the Congress of sovereigns at Vienna. Lord Gambler and his colleagues had, there- fore, the oral commands as well as vrritten instructions of the great paymaster of their royal European stipendiaries, who, at his" bidding, and under his brother Sir Charles Stewart's personal superintendence, had waged the immense hostilities by which' Great Britain conducted in triumph her Russian, Prussian, Austrian, and the other coalesced dependents on her loans, and imi- tators of her fortitude, to the capital of their former conqueror. The fearless states- man, who, at Chatillon, had so recently been foremost to refuse Napoleon terms, and order the Marquis of Wellingl^n, vrithout hesitation, to march on Paris — could he pause or compromise with the- American republicans in his power and their ministers at his feet? No. That was no moment, Castleireagh was the last man," to forbear to punish America and Madison as he had subjugated France and cas- tigated Bonaparte ; and if his Irish bowels had betrayed any yearnings of compas- sion, the three kingdoms, England, Scot- land and Ireland, king, lords and commons, army, navy and clergy, would have risen up against such puling tenderness, yielding more than enough vrhen dictating less than absolute surrender of American independ- ence. As to the islands in the Bay of Passamaquoddy, just then by bloodless and unresisted, if not to Massachusetts grateful subjugation, vnrested from the United States, when pur commissioners asked what were the British views con- cerning them, the insolent reply was, to keep them, without discussion, for they be- long to Great Britain, and are no more subject of negotiation than Northampton- shire. At the conference of the 19th August, ' 1814, therefore, not only was the Indian sine mta non repeated, but our relinquishment demanded of the lakes, on all of which we had then superior squadrons, and with them surrender of territories, much larger than England, together with the fisheries and the navigation of the Mississippi. Of such demands' the ofScial advice of our commissioners, laid by the President through' Congress before the nation and the world, was, "We need, hardly say the de- mands of Great Britain ■vvill receive from us a unanimous and decided negative. We do not deem it necessary to detmn the John Adams, for the purpose of transmitting to^ you the official note, which may pass on the' subject and close the negotiation. And we Chap. XIII.] BRITISH BLUNDEB. 305 have felt it our duty immediately to ap- prise you, by this hasty but correct sketch, of our last conference, that there is not, at present, any hope of peace." A private letter from Mr. GaUatin, dated at Ghent, the 20th August, to Mr. Dallas (Secretary of the Treasury when it arrived), carried by his son with the official report, in terms still more explicit and honorable to Mr. GaUatin, made known his impression. "Our negotiations may be considered at an end. Some official notes may yet pass, but the nature of the demands of the Bri- tish, made also as a preliminary sine qua nan, to be admitted as a basis before a dis- cussion, is such that there can be no doubt of a speedy rupture of our conferences, and that we will have no peace. Great Britain wants war in order to cripple us: she, wants aggrandizement, at our expense : she may have ulterior objects : no resource is left but in union and vigorous prosecution of the war. When her terms are known, it ap- pears to me impossible that all America should not unite in defence of her rights, of her territory, I may say of her independ- ence." The peace commission was brought near- ly to an end by that huge British blunder, which, by our commissioners at Ghent, by the President, in Congress, and through- out the country, was received witii nearly universal indignation, Mr. Clay accepted Mr. Crawford's invitation to visit him in Paris, Mr. Adams was about to return to St Petersburg, Mr. Eussell to repair to his mission at Stockholm, the ship KTeptune-was prepared at Brest to bring home Mr. Bayard and Mr. Gallatin. Mr. George Dallas, on tibe 31st of August, sailed from the Texel in the John Adams, with the white flag of a cartel at her mast head, to convey to Washington the entire failure cf any effort to put a stop to the war, by mediation, negodation or solicitation in Europe; and assurance that war alone was xhe way to peace. Mr. George Emlen returned with Mr. Dallas in the John Adams. The London Courier, of the 14th of August reported proceedings at Ghent, thus: — "Yesterday, government received dispatches from Lord Gambler. We under- stand that the first meeting between tiie English and American commissioners at Ghent was held on Monday last, when their respective credentials were exhibited. A second meetingis stated to have taken place on Wednesday, when some discussion en- sued between the plenipotentiaries on the interests of their respective governments, but of too general a nature to admit any certain conclusion to be drawn from it It is rumored, however, that the Bepubllcan eommissioDers were extremely-reserved and slow in the disclosure of their pretensions. Ministeis expect to receive fiurther dis- patches and- of a less indecisive character 20 to-morrow. Connected with this subject is a report, which was circulated last night, but for the truth of which we do not pledge ourselves, that the expedition fitted out at Portsmouth, under Lord Hill, had been suspended, and all the preparations for it discontinued." ■ That publication, not less than semi- official, indicated that the ministers sup- posed their terms would be submitted t«, without the necessi^ of sending more troops to America. The London Courier of the next day, 15th of September, 1814, resuming the topic, thus rebuked the oppo- sition for stating that "the American com- missioners assume a high tone- What fives them a right to assume that tone? Fe deny that the Ghent negotiation is either broken up or broken off. And is it t\iei justice of their cause or briMiancy of their success that emboldens them? We must have no high tone from America. We owe it to ourselves and to posterity in this unprovoked war, undertaken for the most unjust purposes, to make such an impres- sion on their fears as shall curb the desire of aggression and conquest for many years to come.- America ought in this contest, to be fully and explicitly taughtthat a false neutrality, and subservience to an ignorant but violent populace, are crimes in a govern- ment, which, though they may promise an immediate advaaitage, must nevertheless be followed -by merited chastisement, and the loss of those just interests tiiey might have permanently secured, had they not in the spirit of rapine grasped at that which justice had closed as the right and property of another." Thus semi-official ministerial oracles, stupidly ignorant of the country they caademned and were to chas- tise, fomented the brutish credulity of the English populace. The same paragraph in a Plymouth newspaper, which announced Major-General Keene's arrival at Ports- mouth, to emba,rk for America, with inhu- man delight, enumerated, in the list of his equipments, -"ten thousand suits of cloth- ing, supposed to befor the North American Indians, and an immense quantity of war- like instruments adapted for their use." Not only the English impression at Lon- don, but that made by their agents at Ghent, was that LordCastlereagh had settled matters there as at Chatillon, by the same bold tc>ne of ennobled upstart Irish auda- city. The Ghent Gazette, of the 22d of Augusli 1814, published: " Since the con- versation which Lord Castlereagh, the first minister of his British Majes^, has had with the American envOTs, and after the return of a courier from London, the nego- tiations of the Congress have recommenced, wiieh had been suspended, and are con- tinued vriih aetivtty. Mr. Dallas, one of the secretaries of the .American legation, went' yesterday to the Texel with dispatches for' 306 AMERICAN EEACTION. his government; and ia to embark on board an American ship for America. There is every hope that the conferences will have a speedy and favorable issue." As Ghent -was then garrisoned by British troogs, and General Sir Edward Lyons regulated public sentiment, which, even frithout the police of a British garrison, ■yras not freely imparted by the press, unless sanctioned by authority, it is plain, from the London and Ghent official paragraphs, that the English ministerial calculation then was, that the United States would acquiesce in the terms dictated by Great Britain, and not only so, but readily, if not gratefully. Why not ? They vrereby no means as hard terms as those just imposed by the same masters on France, and hailed there with acclamations of delight. The thousands of travelers who now journey fronrvBoston or New York to New Orleans, by that belt of the American Union, the Lakes and Chicar go, can form some notion of the state of English opinion, or information, when all those familiar interior American highways were demanded as the price of peace, re- luctantly to be panted by Great Britain to grateful America. Lmpressment, iU^al blockade, indemnity for unauthorized cap- tures, to redress which war was undertaken, were, and only a few of them, scarcely al- lowed to be intimated by our liiinisters, and by'the British not so much as noticed. ' English history, printed travels, such as that of Basil HaU, and the press generally of that country, have attempted to apologize for their reverses here by the false assertion that, absorbed with the mightier European contest. Great Britain had not time, and did not feel sufficiently interested, to attend to that with America, But from and after the 1st of April, 1814, there was no war in Europe, and the whole prodigious prepara- tions of England for that year, flushed with vonderful successes and impelled by an ex- asperated^ enthusiastic nation, were turned against the United States. Precisely then it was that their American reverses began; those who conquered in Europe were defeat- ed in America. And no barometer indicates the weather more sensitively than American victories did English change of sentiment. The London press, ministerial and inde- pendent, which,, throughout April and from ^at time tiU the middle of October, caU- od vehemently iot unmerciful hostilities against this counti^, then began to quail, as from Erie and Champlain, Washington and Baltimore, a constant stream of amaz- ing American triumphs, with one signally disgraceful British,confounded them ; when at length a London journal published,, "instructions have gone to Ghent of so pacifla a nature as to induce a confident hope thalt the negotiations will terminate E^cpessfuUy:" as they did, by Great Britain's •withdrawing all her imperious terms of _ [1814. August sine qua ndn, and sinking; in De- cember, to the level of uti possidetis. In Washington and throughout the United States, and thence by reverberation in Lon- don and all England, till the impiessioB reached Vienna and every other seat of European influence. Lord Castlereagh's to- tal misapprehension of the American tem- per and condition, thinking he had but to command obedience, his dictation at Ghent proved a foolish and fatal mistake. As soon as the John Adams made the American coast, Mr. George Dallas, hastening vnth dispatch- es which our envoys were confident would unite the country, got into a gunboat to ex- pedite his landing at New York, took an ex- press stage, and stopping but one hour in Philadelphia, to see his ramily, after being three days and nights without rest, reached Washington with his important intelligence. On the fOth of October, 1814, the House of Representatives received from the Senate their joint resolution of thanks to Captain Macdonough, his officers, seamen, and the infantry acting as marines in the squadron on Lake Champlain ; and we were in com- mittee of the whole, Mr. Macon in the chair, on the resolutions from' our military com- mittee, expressive of the sense of Congress' of the gallant conduct of Generals Brown, Scott, Gaines and Macomb — ^we were revel- ling in victories, when .Edward Coles, the President's secretary, brought a message from him, which proved instantaneously a master-stroke ^of bold American policy. He laid before Congress "communications- from the Plenipotentiaries of the United States, charged with Negotiating a peace with Great Britain, sTunmng the conditions on which alone that ffovemment was willing to put an end to the war;" adding that he would send likewise his instructions to the commissioners. The committee rose at once to hear the mes8age,which, read in the House, electrified all parties. The message and correspondence were referred to the committee on foreign af- fairs ; and on John Forsyth's motion for five, amended by Alexander Hanson's motion doubling the number, ten thousand copies were ordered to be printed. On Friday, the 14th October, we got the instructions which were also referred to the committee on fo- reign affairs. Exposure by official |»iblica- tion of those hostile exactions was faintiy complained of in England as contraary to di- plomatic usage and governmental delicacy ;. the British ministry being surprised, an- noyed and confounded by it, throughout that country as weU as this put palpa- bly in the wrong. The London Sun, of the 3a of August, 1814, before the negotiations began, stated that their requirement was our surrender of the fisheries, of the whole of Lakes Erie and Ontario : all northern military posts, and aU the country north of the Ohio to the Indians. When to such ej> Cbap. XIII,] EXPOSURE OF BRITISH DEMANDS. 807 actions equally impolitic on their part and in- sufferable on ours, were superadded the fish- eries to rouse New England, with the lakes onwhichwehad conquered British fleets, and the Indian haunts whence our frontiers were desolated,'the American nation closed its ranks, and at once, almost to a man breath- ing war, uttered defiance, while considerate Englishmen, and the opposition there joined in condemnation of such wanton pretexts for protracted and interminable hostilities. One-third of the present State of Maine (since disgracefully given up by the treaty of Washington,) all the State of Michigan, one- third of the State of Ohio, aU Illinois, and Indiana, tracts of country larger than Eng- land, Ireland, Wales and Scotland ; an in- dependent savage power within the States, no American armed vessel on the lakes or the many great rivers their confluents, the fisheries on the Grand Bank and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and navigation of the Mississippi, were concessions which the Executive had no constitutional power to make, which the entire Union was equally interested and resolved to prevent, and which it was flagrant, must dismember, degrade and nearly destroy the American Union. Madison, Monroe and Dallas were then completely and earnestly united in the con- viction, that nothing less than the whole re- sources of the United States called forth for war would give them peace. The instan- taneous exposure of the British demands, by a bold and novel but just and politic in- novation on the common routine of interna- tional negotiations, was the first great move- ment; and not only was that innovation wise for the occasion, but as an exemplary appeal, on all such conjunctures, to a nation and the world as the best resort. It was a salient precedent of republican American independent departure from the clandestine mystifications of selfish superannuated Eu- ropean monarchical diplomacy. Such offi- cial and executive invocation of popular intelligence and sentiment asking advice of the right feeling community, whose gene- rous impulses are often wiser than cabinet ministers, and always less selfish, instead of the short-sighted motives and limited understanding of a few secret negotiators, appeals to the multitude of counsellors, in whom there is most safety, and submits to the whole world what much concerns it altogether. Treaties would not be so often unjust and so often broken, if na- tions were consulted about their stipu- lations, which are contrived by a few, always selfish, and often venal ministers, and not promulgated till irrevocably binding on their numerous constituents. Although negotia- tion cannot always be transacted by num- bers in public, yet publicity is often as beneficial to negotiation as to legislation. Seldom has this feature in the open as- pect of republicanism been more attractive or more commanding than in that instance, so opportune and well managed. The Cana- dian victories by land and water, the Balti- more repulse, the barbarian desolation of Washington, the tide of fortune and of war turning in our favor, concurred with Bri- tish enormity of demand and American promptitude of its exposure, to rally this country and disabuse all others. In Con- gress the effect was instantaneous and ob- vious. Sitting in the only public building left standing by the ruthless invaders, oppo- sition in Congress to the war and the ad- ministration was discountenanced, and their supporters, in augmented numbers, encou- raged to unanimous approval of whatever strength of measures and severity of endur- ance might prove necessary to avoid the ig- nominious conditions of peace demanded by insolent and defeated foes. So much improved was public sentiment, that, when the House fell to work, as it did earnestly, on providing the supplies, the National In- telligencer-of the 23d of October, announced it with striking gratification. "The House of Kepresentatives, with whom aU the reve- nue biUs must originate, has entered on the consideration of the ways and means for the ensuing year ; and a general dispo- sition appears to prevail to vote the neces- sary supplies. A large majority of the Fe- deralists in Congress will unite vrith the Republicans in providing the means for carrying on the war, which, all nice distinc- tions bemg out of the question, is acknow- ledged to be a defensive war. If this Union lasts, the United States will be what they would have been long ago, had it earlier been victorious over all their enemies at all points." "We are glad," said the New York Gazette, a Federal journal, "to find the fol- lowing American sentiments in the George- town Federal Republican. A message was yesterday received from the President trans- mitting dispatches from our commissioners at Ghent, which give no encouragement to expect a favorable termination of the nego- tiation. The terms on which the enemy offers peace, are such as no American will hesi- tate in rejecting as degrading and humi-- Hating in the extreme." The despicable ebullition of a Boston journal, the only part of the country where such a senti- ment would have been conceived or endur- ed, has been already cited that the terms proposed by the enemy at Ghent were not unreasonable, and therefore must be submitted to. In the whole United States from New York included to Louisiana, there was hardly a man of that unworthy spirit. A distant relative ofthe present President of the United States, an officer of the Revo- lution, William Polk, a Federalist of North Carolina, at an early period of the war ten- dered a brigadier-generalship in the regular army, whicn he declined, published At Ra- 808 PARLIAMENT. [1814. feigh, on the 17tii of October, 1814, a letter to Governor Hawkme,of that State, denounc- ing "the degrading conditions demanded by the British commissioners from the American government as the price of peace, conditions as new as humiliating, inadmis- sible under circumstances far more perilous than the present, and such as no Americaji ought to submit to. While these t^ms are contended for, and made the sine qua non of an adjustment of our difficulties, I hesitate not to declare my intention to unite with and support the government in such a system as shall compel the enemy to respect our rights, and bring the war to an honor-, able termination. The crisis has arrived when it would be useless to inquire what were the causes, or who were the authors of the misfortunes which have overtaken the country. It is enough to know that diahonorahle conditions-h.a.xe been demand- ed, and that danger exists. It behooves us to show the world tiiat there is firmness enough to reject the one and spirit enough to meet the other." While such was the nearly universal feel- ing in America, that of England suddenly veered toward justification of our defensive and condemnation of their aggressive hostili- ties. Exposurfe of their demauds.and inva- sion, after all cause of war was at an end by the peace of Europe, illustrated by a career of American victories, turned public sentiment and belligerent operations altogether in our fevor. Madison'sabrupt publication of the conditions of peace worked like Jackson's instantaneous surprise of the British as soon as landed below New Orleans ; mas- ter-strokes of policy and strategy. Oppo- eition was proclaimed in the British Par- Uament itself (both houses) against a war of vengeance, territorial aggrandizement, and rutfless invasion. On the 11th November, 1814, the Prince Regent's speech to Parlia- ment was equivocal, by no means menacing, if not ^elcung; for "it regretted the large expenditure which must be met that year, the war sjbill subsisting with Ainerica, rendering the continuance of great exer- tions indispensable." Opposition forthwith planted their batteries on such manifest tendei> and there it keeps them. But that fell sj)irit sunk before the campaign of the Niagara, tjie discomfiture at Plattsburg, and the devastation of Washing- ton, changing the m.ind'Of all Europe,, and oompleteif by the abortion of Ghent. PublL- oation of those dispatches, the Timesoonfes- sed, "hfts been made the means of uniting against W the whpl^ Ameriotm y^oplg. Chap. XIII.] CHANGE OF TONE. 309 Cobbett, reeking from the twelve months' imprisonment, and smarting under the thou- sand pounds fine inflicted on an alleged li- bellous publication, as vehemently Ameri- can in England as he had been English in America, with redoubled violence repeated his attacks on the ministry and their press- es. Victorious arms and negotiations, with unusual, but wise and just publicity, call- ing the whole world to witness American rights and admire American victories, made a platform on which English good sense and European justice took a stand with us, while that of the American apologists of England fell from under them. Disunion nearly disappeared from America, and discord rose in England, with a prevailing sense of the justice and moderation of our cause. The negotiations and peace of Ghent, whereof the acknowledgment by treaty, like perfect health, indicative of mere absence of disease and distress, have not enjoyed the merit the arrangement deserves, because importing no more than cessation of hos- tilities, seemingly without settlement of the cause of conflict. But while uniform and universal success attended the American arms, what more was wanting than such pacification, begun and closed by two re- markable and fortunate coincidences? In a letter, dated the 24th of August, 1814, the American ministers, while the British invaders were burning 'Washington, after an admirable refutation of the British let- ter which it answei-ed, presented that modest and reasonable basis of peace, which the British cabinet finally adopted and engrafted into the treaty. For the whole negotiation was with the British cabinet, conducted by American envoys, three thousand miles from their constitu- ents, and, as will be presently shown, under vexatious interruptions of their advices from Washington, while their antagonists receiv- ed theirs regularly and promptly from Lon- don. Notwithstanding such disadvantages, fortunately presenting the adopted terms of peace, the very day of the greatest outrage of hostile vengeance, without being aware of it, the uniformly dignified and superior terms of the American communications be- came, after knowledge of that disgrace to their country, and indeed to both countries, and continued, constantly more stern, un- yielding, and unterrified to the end; and that end was another remarkable and for- tunate coincidence. Allowing for the change of time between Ghent and New Orleans, the treaty was signed at Ghent just as Jackson defeated the first detachment of the British army, on the night of the 23d December, 1814; so that negotiation began in disaster and closed in triumph. The treaty of Ghent, without our north- em victories, might not have made honor- able peace. But, unless signed before the southern victories could be known in Eng- land, would there have been any treaty of peace at all? Fortunately for this country when our fortune seemed to be in- variable, the proud and mighty empire it waged war with, was eager to come to an accommodation before it knew of a great discomfiture. For New Orleans might have prevented peace, till restoration in arms, as many English declared indispensable even without that defeat, of the tarnished renown of Great Britain. On the 25th November, 1814, the cartel schooner Chauncey arrived at New York from Ostend in the then uncommonly short passage of twenty-five days, bringing Mr. John Connell, a merchant of Phuadel- phia, with further and more favorable dispatches from Ghent. That vessel eu' tered the noble harbor of New York, garrisoned by twelve thousand soldiers, that day under arms, celebrating the an- niversary of its evacuation by the British army at the close of the Revolution. From Boston to New Orleans, the Atlantic cities, real cities, not nominal capitals like Wash- ington, warned by its fate, Cochrane's slave and devastation official notices, were pre- pared, like Baltimore, to defend themselves, while government was straining every nerve to carry the war into British Ame- rica, with rational confidence that the cam- paign of 1815 would much surpass that of 1814. Boston was fortified and armed by the most violent opponents, forced to be- come supporters, of the war. The National Intelligencer of the 30th November, 1814, adverting to the dispatches brought by the Chauncey, stated, semi-officially, that "it would be highly injudicious for our go- vernment or people to calculate on any advantages to result to our interests from events to happen across the Atlantic." The American spirit of resistance to Bri- tish demand had become national; when a little spiteful infliction of hostile ill- temper terminated our intercourse with Ghent. The naval commander-in-chief, Cochrane, refused our government a flag of truce to take the last dispatches to Ghent, so that there was no alternative but to let them run the gauntlet of the innumerable British cruisers vexing the Atlantic from New York to the Texel. The brig Transit was therefore employed to carry George Boyd, one of the clerks at Washington, and brother-in-law of Mr. Adams, with two sets of confidential dispatches, one containing, besides the public instructions, such private advices as were deemed unfit for the ene- my's information, and which the bearer was to throw overboard whenever about to be overtaken by a British vessel. The other package, enveloped to the American minis- ters, was accompanied by an open letter from Mr. Monroe to Lord Castlereagh, stating that Admiral Cochrane, having re- 310 TREATY SIGNED. [1814. fused a flag of truce, the President had no means of conveying further instructions to his ministers at Ghent, than bj committing them to the honor of the British secretary, ■which was appealed to for the safe and speedy transmission, unopened, to their destination, of advices important to peace. The Transit met, fortunately, with no Bri- tish vessel, but arrived safely in Europe, at that period of uninterrupted American good luck. Lord Castlereagh's magnanimity was not tried when Admiral Cochrane refused the cartel. But such barbarism was con- sistent with his orders to proclainx and execute devastations, and with British con- tempt for America. On Christmas eve, Saturday the 24th December, 1814, the treaty was signed, in several copies, of which, as the secretary, Mr. Hughes, could not inake all the re- quired numbers as soon as desired, Mr. Clay kindly contributed one in his excel- lent hand-writing, and a Polish exiled count, afterwards killed on Miranda's expedition to Mexico, whom Mr. Hughes generously employed, copiedanother. It is the usage, on such occasions, for the ministers of each nation to sign first their own copy of the treaty, and for the signatures of the other party to be placed beneath. But at Ghent, the British ministers overreaching such alternation, signed their names first, before the Americans, to all the copies, ours as well as theirs. As soon as the copies were all signed, Mr. Carroll was dispatched with One copy to be taken to America, by the way of England, and Mr. Hughes, with another by the way of France. The Ghent Journal announced the treaty as "an ar- rangement of which the terms were un- known, but presumed to be equally honor- able to both nations," adding, in the midst of the British garrison, that "the peace was glorious recompense for the efforts and patriotism of the Americans." The city authorities of Ghent, in a body, paid- their respects personally, and congratulated both the American and British legations, and found nothing in the admiral, the admiralty proctor, or the future chancellor of the ex- chequer, superior in conversational attrac- tion or personal intercourse, as in negotia^ tion, to the representatives of the New World. Mr. Hughes posted the same night to Paris, to embark at Bourdeaux in the Transit. Notwithstanding the speed of his winter journey, day and night, a British courier, better provided with means of rapid transport, preceded him, and he found the American minister in Prance, Crawford, in possession of the news some hours before . Mr. Hughes flattered himself that he should be its first communicant. The Duke of Wellington, who, from the head of his con- quering army, had been appointed to suc- ceed Lord, Castlereagh as Britisli ambas- sador at Paris, was the first person there to receive an official account by Estafette of the signature of the treaty, of which, by a prompt note of gracious congratulation, he immediately informed Mr. Crawford; so that Mr. Hughes, as soon as he reached Mr. Crawford's residence, instead of im- parting, was informed by him of the good news. In the afternoon, they went together to wait on the Duke of Wellington, vrhicb was the commencement of personal inter- course, flatteringly forwarded by the puis- sant British ambassador, breaking through the forms and delays that official ceremonies might have interposed. The Journal of Paris, of the 31st December, 1814, noticed Mr. Hughes' arrival, his errand, and his fine qualities highly appreciated at Ghent. Not finding the Duke at his residence when Mr. Hughes called there with Mr. Crawford, Mr. Hughes returned the same evening, and was courteously received by that great cap- tain, then in the flower of ms age, and many victories, to be completed next summer by one still more glorious jthan all the rest. His intimacy had then begun vrith the three American sisters, of Maryland, Mr. Hughes' State, one of whom married a member of the Duke's military family; and another, his elder brother, uirough whose, as well as his own merits, Mr. Hughes, courteously wel- comed by the Duke of Wellington, was told by him tnat he rejoiced in the termination of what he called an unnatural and useless war. The polite circles of Paris abounded with volunteer and influential advocates of the brave young Republic, to undervalue whose weignt in the world, Sir James Mack- intosh taught circles, both French and Eng^ lish, of political, social and literary emi- nence, as that war and peace established, was an English error. Madame de Stael, Lafayette, Dupont de Nemours, and many other champions, vindicated America. Tal- leyrand cast it, a golden apple of dis- cord, into the Congress of Vienna, where that experienced cultivator "of many in- tractable fields sowed dissension to check the aggrandizement of Great Britain, and through the maritime states of Europe, operate on the Ghent negotiation. Ame- ricans, in Paris found it necessary to wear eagles in their hats to distinguish them from Englishmen, against whom French vitupera- tion was as natural as admiration of Ameri- cans. Madam ede Stael told Mr. Hughes that the Duke of Wellington had been asked if he would lead an expedition to restore the dilapidated fortunes of European warfare beyond the Atlantic : to whichne answered, that if commanded, his function was to obey, and do what he could ; but that he should regret the undertaking. A letter from Paris, published in Ameri- can newspapers soon after the treaty of Ghent, stated that the politicians of Paris connected with England there, doubted its Chap. XIII.] PEACE. 311 ratification at Washington ; because it was •whispered among diplomatists that Spain had ceded Louisiana and the Floridas to England for her services in Spain: that Pakenham's great armada was to take Sossession of New Orleans ; and then from few Orleans treat for peace with the Unit- ed States. Stipulation by the treaty to re- store all territory, places and possessions taken from either party by the other during the war, might not be inconsistent with holding New Orleans ; because, argued the Paris letters, the American title to Louis- iana being doubtful, Spain never having voluntarily transferred that province to France, Bonaparte had no right to sell it to Jefierson. After the peace of 1783, En- gland withheld the frontier posts in spite of its terms urged long in vain by Washing- ton's administration. There was in 1815 as much magic in the name of Bonaparte to annul, as in 1803 there was to establish, his acts ; and his alleged fraudulent transfer of Louisiana could be pleaded with better grace than many of those establishments anni- hilated by his conquerors. On the 6th of January 1815, the Transit sailed from Bourdeaux with Mr. Hughes' copy of the treaty, and Mr. Eussell and Mr. Shaler his companions, on board that vessel, which did not land her passengers tiU the first of March, at New London. On Monday, the 26th of December 1814, the treaty left Ghent for London ; the Eng- lish copy taken by Mr. Baker, the English secretary ; the American counterpart by Henry Carroll, son of Charles Carroll of Bellevue, near Georgetown, before men- tioned as one of the intimates of Madison and Monroe. At Loudon the treaty was so far altered in cabinet council as to put off peace till it was ratified in America ; with a view no doubt to military operations, as to which relative distances would give the American government advantages such as the British had for negotiations so near them at Ghent. A sloop of war called the Favorite, her amiable name said to in- fluence the selection, was commissioned, equipped, her sails bent, water and provi- sions shipped, all within sixteen hours after her orders for sailing, and dispatched to transport Mr. Baker, with orders to receive the American ratification, and thereupon announce peace, with a cessation of hostili- ties, to the British commanders of fleets and armies in America. On the 2d of January, 1815, the Favorite sailed from England, and on the 11th of February, Saturday evening, landed her passengers at New York, whence Mr. Carroll immedi- ately hastened to Washington. On the 12th of February he left New York, and on Tues- day evening the 13th, delivered the treaty to the President. Not an inch ceded or lost, were the first words we heard at Washing- ton of the treaty. At the distance then of America from Europe, thrice what it is now, since the two continents have, by substituting steam for sail, been removed, as it were, near to each other, there was something mysterious in the inexplicable transmission of intelli- gence, anticipated sometimes by either con- jecture or rumor, with marvellous exacti- tude. The Brason sloop of war. Captain Sterling, sailed from Portsmouth the 30th of December, 1814, with peace dispatches for the British authorities in America ; arrived at Port Royal, Jamaica, the 3d of Februa- ry 1815, and sailed thence the fifth of that month, communicating with Admiral Coch- rane off Louisiana before the 18th of Feb- ruary 1815, who that day made known the fact of peace to Edward Livingston, visit- ing his ship, the Tonuant, from New Orleans by General Jackson's orders, under a flag of truce, for an exchange of prisoners. But early in and throughout February, 1815, the impression of peace prevailed at Washington, brought there from various, mostly English, sources of information. The first tidings were on the 2d of Februa- ry from Castine, then a British possession in constant intercourse with Halifax, where a vessel arrived the 31st of December 1814, only one week after the treaty was signed, and when cis- Atlantic knowledge of it was impossible, which vessel left England the ninth of December, two weeks before the signature of the treaty, reporting that im- mediate peace was daily expected. Com- mercial letters received from England at Halifax, and officers of the Maidstone fri- gate just arrived there, confirmed the re- port, against which, when published at Washington, the National Intelligencer in vain semi-officiaUy warned Congress, from the first reception of the altered British demands, supinely credulous that the war would soon be over, and that nothing fur- ther was wanted but a bank to cure the currency, which was the absorbing conside- ration. On the 8th of February, 1815, the privateer Harpy, eluding, as so many of our vessels, private and public, did, the British swarming on the wintry coast, got safe into Boston, with English reports and surmises, as late as Christmas, that peace was certainly at hand, the Prince Regent's speech not havingdiscountenanced it, and petitions for it from upwards of sixty manufacturing places having been presented to Pairliament. At Washington, with a constant belief that it was at hand, there was a feeling of such national, ad- ministrative, and war party confidence, after Jackson's success, that peace, though desired, was much less longed for : and the terms Jackson had rendered almost mat- ter of indifference. We could not possi- bly lose anything but the part of Massa- chusetts which disgracefully accepted the yoke ; and its representative in the House ' 312 THE TREATY IN -ENGLAND. was the only member of Congress having cause for disquiet ; that part of his district having been insisted on at Ghent as British, as 1 much as Northamptonshire, But war is an onerous and uneasy state, against which, like death, the wishes atid prayers of mankind are perpetually operating on their feelings, so that almost any peace is welcome ; as passengers landed after a long and dangerous sea voyage are transported by certainty that disquiet is succeeded by safety. Monday evening, the 13th of Feb- ruary 1815, it was currently reported at Washington that one of the secretaries of the Ghent mission had arrived at New York with preliminaries of peace. Next morning the ,rumor jTas inprint '^at Mr. Carroll had kd^4d4Mii£[{J&Bk^im them, and on Mofft^!^ the 15th ofn hia, extremely fabulous life of Napoleon, also misre^esents as but few reliable, while the veterans remained in America. If so, not only the militia of Vermont and Tennessee defeated the best British soldiers at Platts- burg and New Orleans, but the worst Bri- tish soldiers defeated the French at Water- loo. But the latter is not the fact. As soon as peace was ratified, the British armies in America began their return to England and arrived at Waterloo. General Lambert, on whom the command devolved, after Pa- kenham and Gibbs were killed, and Keene wounded at New Orleans, and General Kempt, who served with Prevost in Canada, are officially applauded by Wellington fot their services at Waterloo, to which battle Chap. XIII.] THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA. 317 Admirals Cockbum, Malcolm and Codring- ton, taken from the Chesapeake and Missis- sippi, are also mentioned as naval contribu- tors. Without the peace of Ghent, espe- cially after their discomfiture at New Or- leans, all those troops, with the whole navy, must have remained in America, and pro- bably the death of Ross, Pakenham and Qibbs have required the great Captain's presence on this side of the Atlantic. For the military character of Great Britain demanded that to her first military talents should be committed the task of retrieving the honor of British arms, and satisfying the exasperated passions of the British na- tion. Where, then, on the irruption of Na- poleon in March, 1815, would have been the British troops, which, by a train of for- tunate circumstances, were enabled, under Wellington, to make a timely stand during four hours and a half on the 18th of June, 1815, against the assaults of the French, and sustain their shock till the Prussians came to British relief? Overpowered Na- poleon might have ultimately been; but English agency in efiecting that result must have been insignificant, and her chance of either glory or profit by itproportionably slight. If Napoleon had not reappeared, English difficulties, almost insuperable at Vienna, had become more intractable from a belief there and everywhere that she was too much engrossed and pressed by the Ameri- can war to be able to sustain adequately her lofty and seMsh hold upon the spoUs of European conquests. All she could do or attempt, after disengaging her right (the naval) arm, was to divide the allied powers by secret league with the Bourbons, whom, as was well said, she contracted one-half her national debt to build up, and then the other half to pull dovni. Sending more British troops either across the British Channel, or the Atlantic, was out of the question, in the condition shown to have been that of her own metropolis, when its tranquillity was maintained by military force only. Without the peace of Ghent the condition of the United States would have been anx- ious and critical, no doubt, but involved no lasting or terrible distress of the country or danger to the Union. English armies, led by Wellington, might have perpetrated severe inflictions, perhaps captured some places, more like cities than Washington, and turned the spirit of the rising genera- tion more completely from pacific to military pursuits. , But no considerate person can suppose that what failed in 1777, could have succeeded in 1815. Predatory and profitless mischief, what would it do, but unite this country, disgust all others, and mortify the British people themselves? And this his- ' torical sketch, exhuming facts and reviving recollections, is no appeal to English fear, but memory; not to provoke, but prevent another war, by telling the truth of the last, when in all probability another campaign would have expelled Great Britain forever from North America. END OP VOL. II. CATALOGUE or MISCELLANEOUS BOOKS, PUBLISHED BY LEA AND BLANCHAED, PHILADELPHU: AXTD SOI.D BT AI.X. BOOKSEZiXiEBS. LEA & BLANCHARD'S PUBLICATIONS. ILLUSTRATED SERIES OF SCIENTIFIC WORKS, NOW PUBLISHING BY L^JA & BLAJfOHARD. This series comprises works of the hifrhesi character on ihe various branches of practical science, la their illusiraiion und mechaiiical execution they are prepared without regard to expense, and the publishers presrni ihein as etjual, if not superior, lo anything as yet executed. Each volume is enperiniended by a compfteni editor, who makes such additions as the progress of science in this country ma^ require, and at the f^amf time oorreciB eu^h errors as may have escaped ihe prets in London. The publishers, therefore, hope ihat these works may atiragt the approbation of the scientific pnblic by their intrinsic value, the cor- rectness of the text, the beautiful tiyle in which they are produced, and the extremely low rate at which thjey are furnished. THE FIRST VOLUME IS PRINCIPLES OF PHYSICS & METEOROLOGY. BY J. MULLER, Professor of Physics at the University of Freiburg. WITH ADDITIONS AND ALTERATIONS BY THE AMERICAN EDITOR. ILLUSTRATED WITH IfEARLT FITE HtTI7D&£D AND FIFTY ENGHAVINGS OH WOOD, AWD TWO COL'D FLATXS. In One large Octavo Volume. , ■ The Phyaics of MuUer is a work superb, complete, unique : ihe greatest want known to English Science could not have been heuer Bupplied. The work is of surpassing interest. The value of this contribution to the scientific records of this country may be estimated by the fact that the cost of the original drawings and engruviiigs alone has exceeded the sum of £2 000.— Lancet. The st> le in which the volume is published is in the highest degree creditable to the enterprise of the pub- lishers. It contains nearly si'X hundred engravings executed in a style of extraordinary elegance We commend the book to general favor, his the best ofils kind we haveeverseen.—iV. Y Courier ij; Enquirer, ^ye can safely saj. that, if the forthcoming works be of equal merit, and produced in similar style, the series will prove one of a very invaluable character, which cannot fail to be in universal request — North American. From Wm. H. Bartlett, Esq., Professor of Natural and Experimmtal PhUos(^hy, U. S. Military Academy, West Point. I (teem this work a most valuable addition to the edircational facilities of the coantiy, and a rich sooree of information to the general render, as it is truly an elegan^t specimen of typo- graphy. West Poiitt, March 15th, 1848. THE 'SECOND VOLUME IS PRINCIPLES OF THE MECHANICS OF MACHINERY AND ENGINEERING. BY PROF. JULIUS WEISBACH. Edited BY PROPESSOR W. R. JOHNSON, OF PHILADELPHIA. Voli^e I., now ready, containing about 600 pages, and five hundred and fifty wood-cots. , Volume II., completiag.the work, will he shortly ready, of about the same size and appearance. The most valuable contribution to practical science that has yet appeared in this country. The work em- braces not'only the subjects of :^tatiC8 and Dynainics, but also Uydroslatics, Hydraulics and Pneumatics — each treated in sufficient detail for every pra'cticafpurpose, and no demonstration calling. in the aid of higher mathematics than elementary .geometry and algebra. The work is beautifully got up as to letterpress and Hlustrations, the tliagrams being the most picturesque that we have seen. — London AAentxum, From Professor Elia* Loorms of the New Tork Unwertity. I have examined Weisbach's Mechanics and Engineering with consideraI>Ie attention, and 7 am m uch pleased with it. It is a work prepared with great care and jndgment. The Prin- ciples of Mechanics are stated in a form which is clear, concise, and easily nnderstood; -they are reduced lo precise rules or formuls, and are abundantly illustrated with numerical examples. The diagrams are numerous, neat, and well calculaied to convey clear ideas. — The portion treating of the dynamics of fluid bodies is particularly rich, and the results both of theory and experiment are given in a briel and perspicuous form. The entire treatise is intelligible to one who is only familiar with the lower mathematics, and it ihusc become a standard work wilb mechanics and engineers. New Yobk, May6lh, 1848. From Henry Vethake, Esq., Professor of Mathematics in the Vnivertity of Penmyhania. I have examined, wiih some care, Ihe first volume of " Weisbach's Principles of the Me- chanics of Machinery and Engineering," and I have been not a little gratified in doing so. It is the most comprehensive, accurate, and best executed work, on the subject of which it treats, .with which I am acquainted in the English language; and the labors of the American editor have considerably enhanced its original value. Let me say, too, that by presenting it, as well as the other volumes of the series of which it is a part, to the American public, you will, in my opinion, contribute largely to raise the standard of scholarship in our country, especially in respect to the applications .of science to the mechanical and chemical arts. Philadelphia, May 26th, 1848. LEA & BLANCHARD'S PUBLICATIONS. Illustrated Series of Scientific Works— Oontiiiued. THE THIRD VOLUME IS TECHNOLOGY; OR, CHEMISTRY AS APPLIED TO THE ARTS AND TO MANUFACTURES. BY F. KNAPP. TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY DR. EDMUND RONALDS, AND DR. THOMAS RICHARDSON, [Lecturer on Chemistry at the Middlesex Hospital.] [Of Newcastle.] Revised, with American AdditionSi by. PROFESSOR WALTER R. JOHNSON, OF PHILADELPHIA. WITH NUMEROUS BEAUTIFUL WOOD-CUTS. Volume I., now ready, containing about 500 pages, and 214 beautiful wood engravings. Vol. II., preparing, of a similar size and appearance. This volume contains complete monographs on the subjects of Combustion and Heating, Tllumination and Lighting, Manufactures from Sulphur, Manufacture of Common Salt, Soda, Alkalimetry, Boracic Acid Ma- nufacture, Saltpetre Manufacture, Gunpowder Manufacture, Nitric Acid Manufacture, and Manufacture of Soap, together with an appendix containing various miscellaneous improvements concerning the foregoing subjects. The object of this work is purely practical, presenting in each topic, a clear and condensed view of the present state of the manufacture, with all the improvements suggested by the discoveries of science ; the whole illustrated with numerous large and well executed engravings of apparatus, machinery, processes, &.C. Sec. One of the best works of modern times —IV. Y. Commercial^ June 1848. The original treatise is one of great value ; it has been carefully translated by gentlemen themselves well versed in the processes it describes, .and consequently familiar with their technical lan^age— and it has received from them numerous im[>ortant additions in which are described the most recent improvements in the various chem ical arts as practised in this coaniry. —Medieo'CkiruTgical Review. When we saythat this volume begins another of the superb "Library of llluairated Books," republished from the London series by Lea& Blunchard, of which Muller's Physics and Meteorology, and Weisbach's Mechanics and Engineering, (the first volume of the latter) have already appeared; that the present work is on a subject coming home to the business and bosoms, because to the economic interests of Americans ; that its American editor is Prof. Walter R. Johnson, who has enriched it with numerous valuable additions, the results of his own industrious researches in the technological sciences ; and that it is illustrated and printed in the same superb style which marked the previous worJcs;— we have sufficiently explained to our readers the value of a work w^hich will not need any other commendation.— iVortA ATrtfiricarty June 1848. To be followed by works on PHARMACY, CHEMISTRY, ASTRONOMY, HEAT, HYDRAU- LICS, METALLURGY, PATHOLOGICAL ANATOMY, RURAL ECONOMY, &c. fitc. Speeimena may be had on application to th* Puhliahert, BIHD'S ZJATX7HAI. PHIZ.OSOPH7. ITO'W HEAD7. ELEMENTS OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, BEING AN EXPERIMENTAL INTRODUCTION TO THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES. ILLUSTRATED WITH NEARLY FOUR HUNDRED WOOD-CUTS. BY GOLDING BIED, M.D., A&sistant Physician to Gay's Hospital. FROM THE THIRD LONDON EDITION. IN ONE NEAT DUODECIMO VOLCTME. Containing about 400 pages and 372 Wood-cots. This work is confidently presented lo students in Natural Philosophy as a text-book, uniting advantages scarcely possessed by any other._ By the use of clear small type, a very large amount of matter has been compressed into the limits of a single low priced duodecimo volume, embracing in a concise but intelligiblii. manner the eleraenu of all that is known on the subjects of Statics, Dynamics, Hydrostatics, Pneumoslatics, Hydrodynamics, Acoustics, Magnetism, Electricity, Vollaism, Electro-dynamics, Thermo-eleclricily. Gal- vanism, Unpolarized Light, Polarized Light, The Eye and Optical Apparatus, Thermotics, and Photography. "This book is written in a most pleasing style, and gives the results of abstruse researches in a form adapt- ed to the comprehension of the common reader. It appears to have been specially designed to meet the wants of medical students, whose circumstances often forbid the study of more complete treatises; and it must prove highly acceptable and valuable 10 all who seek acquaintance with Natural Philosophy, but have not the leisure or the inclination to devote much time to the mathematics " „ Elias Looitas, Prl. 8vo. Taylor on Poisons, by Griffith, a new and very complete wtork, in one large octavo volume. Traill's Outlines of Medical Jurisprudence, one small vol. Svo., cloth. Thomson's Domestic Management of the Sick Room, 1 vol. ISmo., extra cloth. ( Tokeah, by Sealsfield, price 25 cents. Tucker's Life of Thomas Jefferson, 2 vols, large 8vo., cloth. Virgilii Carmina, 1 neat ISmo. vol., extra cloth, being vol. II. of Schmitz and Zumpt's Classical Series. Now Ready. Walpole's Letters, in 4 large vols. 8yo., ex. cloth. Walpole's New Letters to Sir Horace Mann, 2 vols. Svo. Walpole's Memoirs of George the Third, 2 vols, Svo. 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The numeroaa subscribers who have been waiting the completion of this volume can now perfect their sets, and all who want A REGISTER OF TJIE EVENTS OF THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS, FOR THE WHOLE WORLD, can obtain this volume separately; price Two Dollars ^nncut in cloth, or Two Dollars and Fifty Cents in leather, to match the styles in which the publishers have been selling sets. Subscribers in the large cities can be supplied on application at any of tbe principal bookstores ; and persons residmg in the country can have their sets matched by sending a volume in charge of friends visitmg the city. Complete sets furnished at very low prices in various bindings. ** The pnblishen^ of the £ac;cIopadia Jlmericaiui conferred an obligation on the public when* fourteen years agOi they iscoed the thirteen Tolomes from thdr presi. They contained a wonder- fol omonnt of information, npon alMosIf ererf snbject which would be likely to occapy public attention^ or be the theme of conTeraation in the private (drde. Whaterer one would «iah to inquire about, it seemed only necessai? to dip into the 'Encyclopedia Americana, and there the - outline, at least, would be found, and reference made to those worbs which treat at lai^ npm the •ubject At was not stnmge, therefore, ttiat the work was popnlar. Bat Ip foutteeir-yean, great events occur. Theiast' fourteen years have been fall of tlient, and great dWiTeries have been made in sdencee'andthe arts ; and great men haTe, by iipaih, commended their names and deeds to the fidelity of the biographer, so that the Encydopsdia that approached perfection in 1832, might fall considerably behind in 1846. To bring up the work, and keep it at the present point, has been a task assumed by Professor Yethake, of the Pennsylvtmia University, a gentleman entirely competent to such an undertaking; and with a disposition to do a good woiic, hd has san>Ued a supplementary volume to the main work, corresponding in size and arrangements therewith, and becoming, indeed, a foorteenth volume. The author hfl^ been exceedingly industrious, and VBiy fortunate in discovering and selecting materials, using all that Germany has presented, and resort* ing to eveiyspedes of information of evento coqnected with the jtlan of the work, since the pub- lication o|||be thirteen volumes. He has continued articles that were oonmienced in that work* and added new articles upon science, biography, histwy, and get^iaphy, so as to make the present volume a necessary appendage m completing facta to the other. The publishen deserve the thanks of the readers of the volume, for the handsome Qrpe, and clear white paper they l^ave used in the publication.**— C^ntted State* Gazette, ** This volume is worth owning, by itselC as a most convenient and reliable compend of recent His* toiy, Biography, Statistics, Ac, Ac The entire votk forms the dieapest and probably now the most desirable Encrclopsedia published for popular nse.'^Nn* Tbrik 7V£&i«e. " The Conversations Lexicon (EncyclopBdia Americana) hBsl>ecome a household book in all the intelligent families in America, and is undoubtedly the best ^epantory of biographical, historical, geographical and political information of that kind which discriminating readers require.** — SSb' wuxn's JovrnaL **Tfais volume of the Eneyclopsdia !s a Westminster Abbey of American reputatkm. What names are on the roll since. 1633 T— ^. T. Litenay World. ** The work to which this volume forms a supplement, is one of the most important contrrantions that has ever been made . to the literature of oar countiy. Besides condensing into a compan- tivdy narrow compass, the substance of larger works of the satne kind which had preceded It, it ^ contains a vast amount of information that is not elsewhere to be found, and is distinguished, not less for its admirable arrangement, tbA& for the varied of knbjects of which it treats The present volume, which, is edited by one of the most disUnguished scholars of our countiy, b worthy to follow in the train of those which have preceded it. It fs a r^narkably felicitous condensation of the more recent improvements lit science and the arts, besides forming a very important addi- tion to UA department of Biography, the general progress of. society, &a» Ac**— iiOonar ^^iW* LEA AND BLANCHARD'S PUBLICATIONS. LAW BOOKS. SPBSrCE'S EQTT ITir J PRISDICTIOIT. THE EQUITABLE JURISDICTION OF THE COURT OF CHANCERF, COMPRISINO ITS RISE, PROGRESS AND FINAL ESTABLISHMENT. TO WHICH IS PREFIXED. WITH A VIEW TO THE ELUCIDATION OF THE MAIN SUB- JECT, A. -CONCISE ACCOUNT OF THE LEADING DOCTRINES OF THE CO»1MON LAW, AND OF THE COURSE OF PROCEDURE IN THE COURTS OF COM- MON LAW, WITH REGARD TO CIVIL RIGHTS; WITH AN ATTEMPT TO TRACE. THEM TO THEIR SOURCES : AND IN WHICH THE VARIOUS ALTERATIONS MADE BY THE LEGISLATURE DOWN TO THE PRESENT DAV ARE NOTICED. B7 GEORGE SPENOE, ESQ., One of her M^esty's CounseL IN TWO OCTAVO VOLUMES. Volume I, embracioe; the Principles, is now ready. Volume IL is rapidly preparing and will appear early in 1848. It is based upon the work of Mr. Mad THE PRACTICE OF COURTS-MARTIAI., WITH SUGGESTIONS FOR THEIR IMPJIOTEMENT. BT JOHN O'BRIEK, UEUTUBAltT UBITKD 6TA.TES iJlTIXXXIT. In one octaTo volume, extra clotb, or law iheep. ** Thia work stands relatirely to American SGUtaiy Law in the same positicni that Blat^kstone's Commentaries stand to Commtm Iaw.**-— U. & OaxetU, CAMPBELL'S LORD CHANCELLORS. LIVES OF THE LORD CHANCELLORS AND KEEPERS OF THE GREAT SEAL OF ENGLAND, FROM TBE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE REiaiT OF KDla QEORQE IT., BY JOHN LORD CAMPBELL, A.M.,^r.R.S.E. FIRST SBRIES, In three neat denjj octavo rolomes, extra doth, BRINGINO THE WORE TO THE TIME OF JAMES IL, JUST ISSUED. FBEFABIirS, SECOND SBRIBS, - In tbnr TOlomes^ to match,. CONTAININO FROM JAUES U. TO GEORQE IT. '; LYNCH' S DEAD SEA EXPE DITION. LE^ Sr BLANCHARB HAVE NOW READY THE DEAD SEA AND RIYER JORDAN, BEING A NARRATITE OF THE U. S. EXPEDITIOX. BY W. F. LYNCH, U.S.N. s COMMANDER OF THE EXPEDITION. ILLUSTRATED WITH MAPS AND NUMEROUS BEAUTIFUL PLATES. In one very handsome octavo volume of 450 pages. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Map of the Dead Sea. 1 On a large scale from Map of the River Jordax. J actual surveys. PLATES. Camp on the River Belus. 'Akil Aga. Sherlf of Mecca. Caravan of the Expedition. Tiberias. Ruined Bridge of Semakh. Jum'ah, of the Tribe El Hassee. SherSf Maaa'ad, Emir Nassir and Beni Sukr Scheikh. View on the Jordan. Pilgrims Bathing in the Jordan. Ain Jidy. Shore of the Dead Sea. A Ta'amirah. Pillar of Salt at Usdom, (Sodom.) Mustafa, the Cook. Masada. Christian Arabs of Kerak. Scheikh of Mezra'a. Wady Mojeb. Source of the Jordan. Tombs in the Valley of Jehosaphat. Fountain of Nazareth. Tomb of Absalom. Greek Priest at A'azareth. Garden of Gethsemane. Great Scheikh of the Anazee Tribe. Baalbec. Besides the interest which this worlt will have for the general reader, as the official account of an e.icpedition which has attracted so much attention, it will present especial claims on all inte- reBted' in Biblical History, as determining many hitherto doubtful points, and as giving a more accurate account of that portion of the Holy Land than any previous volume. No pains or expense has been spared to render the volume worthy of its national character, and it will be found one of the most beautiful works of the kind yet issued in the United States. fflSTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. OUTLINES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. BY THOMAS B. SHAW, M. A. In one large and handsome volume of 434 pages, royal 12mo., extra cloth. " Supplies a want long and severely felt." — Southern Literary Gazette. " An admirable work — graphic and delightful." — Femisylvanian. " The best publication of its size upon English Literature that we have ever met with." — NeaPs Saturday Gazette, " Eminently readable." — City Item. " A judicious epitome — well adapted for a class book, and at the same time worthy a place in any library." — Pennsylvania Inquirer. " A valuable and very interesting volume, which, for various merits, will gradually find its way into all libraries." — N. Y. Knickerbocker. " Traces our literary history with remarkable zest, fairness and intelligence." — N. Y. Home Journal. ZOOLOGICAL RECREATIONS. BY W. J. BRODERIP, ESQ., F.R.S., &c. In one neat volume of 376 pages, royal 12mo., extra cloth. " This is one of those delightful books which are made up of description, narrative, and senti- ment all mingled together, in that easy, off-hand, readable style which results from the author's habits as a student of nature, and his extensive reading in general literature, together with a lively, good-nalured, genial spirit, which is so important to a writer who would effectually gain our good will. We have seen no book to be compared with it since the publication of * Water- ton's Wanderings.' " — Weekly Messenger. JUST PUBLISHED BY LEA A ND BLANCHARD. WILKES'S CALIFORNIA. ■WESTERN~AMERICA, INCLUDING OREGON AND CALIFORNIA. With Maps of those Regions and of the Sacramento Valley. B V CHAKIiIiS ^(ai.KZ:S, V. S. ST. Commander of the United States Exploring Expedition. Octavo. Price 75 cents. This is the most desirable publication we have yet had on the new regions opened by the Mexi- can war on the Pacific ; indeed, it is indispensable to a just appreciation of the geography and phy- sical capabilities of the country. It supplies, what all the other accounts are deficient in, a com- plete, systematic, scientific view of the whole land, in its individual parts, and in their general rplations. It is written in sympathy with the latest developments of Physical Geography and Ethnology. — What we get in books like those of Brynnt or Thornton, is a personal record of par- tial observation or adventure, which supplies us with an important but easily misunderstood view of the region. Captain Wilkes, in this opportune work, maps out faithfully the whole, and his work accordingly, with its minute and accurate bearings, is worthy of constant reference in read- ing the fragments commuuicated in the newspapers, the discussions in Congress, or the more ambitious books of travellers. Though published at the low price of seventy-five cents, it con- tains no less than sixteen chapters, embracing an original and comprehensive geographical view of Western America, particular sketches of California and Oregon, with separate considerations of the valleys, rivers, mountains, harbors, their agricultural and mineral wealth, the government, the routes of communication with the Atlantic, &c., with three neatly executed maps. The chapter on the Indian Tribes contains much interesting matter from Mr. Hale's Ethnographical volume of the Exploring Expedition, of which, as yet, only one hundred copies have been printed by Govern- ment, We recommend this work as one of high utility for present use and constant future refer- ence. — N. y. Literary World. SCHMITZ & ZUMPT'S CLASSICAL SERIES FOR SCHOOLS. VOLUME II. (Lately issued.) P. VIRGILII MARONIS CAR M IN A, With an Introduction, and Notes in Englisli, in one Handsome Royal ISmo. Volume, E. Cloth Price 75 cents. VOLUME III. 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TRANSLATED BY PROFESSOR GORDON, And Edited by Professor Walter R.Johnson. Handsome 8vo., with 350 Wood Engravings. Vol. I., with 550 Wood Engravings, lately published. Preparing for Publication. MEMOIR OF THK LIFE OF WILLIAM WIRT, BY JOHN P. KENNEDY, ESQ. WITH A PORTRAIT. In Two Handsome Octavo Volumes. XifEAKI.'S' KSABV. MOORE'S IRISH MELODIES, J, . U.'l BEAUTIFULLV ILLUSTRATKD ON STEEL. ,i '-,.^.^0 With an Autobiographical Preface. • ,• , »V i-jwi In one Splendid Folio Volume, with Ten Exquisito Steel Plates. *, . , This will be one oC liic most iitliaciive pK^-^LMiiniiuri book'- fur llie coming srn^^S'^i;