University of Virginia Library

878. BONAPARTE (N.), Policy toward United States.—

As to Bonaparte, I
should not doubt the revocation of his edicts,
were he governed by reason. But his policy
is so crooked that it eludes conjecture.
I fear his first object now is to dry up
the sources of British prosperity by excluding
her manufactures from the continent.
He may fear that opening the
ports of Europe to our vessels will open them
to an inundation of British wares. He ought

to be satisfied with having forced her to revoke
the orders [in council] on which he
pretended to retaliate, and to be particularly
satisfied with us, by whose unyielding adherence
to principle she has been forced into
the revocation. He ought the more to conciliate
our good will, as we can be such an
obstacle to the new career opening on him
in the Spanish Colonies. That he would give
us the Floridas to withhold intercourse with
the residue of those colonies, cannot be
doubted. But that is no price; because they
are ours in the first moment of the first war;
and until a war they are of no particular necessity
to us. But, although with difficulty,
he will consent to our receiving Cuba into
our Union, to prevent our aid to Mexico and
the other provinces. That would be a price,
and I would immediately erect a column on
the southernmost limit of Cuba, and inscribe
on it a ne plus ultra as to us in that direction.
We should then only have to include the
North in our Confederacy, which would be of
course in the first war, and we should have
such an empire for liberty as she has never
surveyed since the creation; and I am persuaded
no Constitution was ever before so
well calculated as ours for extensive empire
and self-government.—
To President Madison. Washington ed. v, 444.
(M. April. 1809)