The writings of James Madison, comprising his public papers and his private correspondence, including numerous letters and documents now for the first time printed. |
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SPECIAL MESSAGE TO CONGRESS. |
 | The writings of James Madison, |  |
SPECIAL MESSAGE TO CONGRESS.
To the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States:
I communicate to Congress certain documents, being a continuation
of those heretofore laid before them on the subject
of our affairs with Great Britain.
Without going back beyond the renewal in 1803 of the war
in which Great Britain is engaged, and omitting unrepaired
wrongs of inferior magnitude, the conduct of her Government
presents a series of acts hostile to the United States as an
independent and neutral nation.
British cruisers have been in the continued practice of violating
the American flag on the great highway of nations, and
of seizing and carrying off persons sailing under it, not in the
exercise of a belligerent right founded on the law of nations
against an enemy, but of a municipal prerogative over British
vessels in a situation where no laws can operate but the law of
nations and the laws of the country to which the vessels belong,
and a self-redress is assumed which, if British subjects were
wrongfully detained and alone concerned, is that substitution
of force for a resort to the responsible sovereign which falls
within the definition of war. Could the seizure of British
subjects in such cases be regarded as within the exercise of
a belligerent right, the acknowledged laws of war, which forbid
an article of captured property to be adjudged without a regular
investigation before a competent tribunal, would imperiously
demand the fairest trial where the sacred rights of persons
were at issue. In place of such a trial these rights are subjected
to the will of every petty commander.
The practice, hence, is so far from affecting British subjects
alone that, under the pretext of searching for these, thousands
of American citizens, under the safeguard of public law and
of their national flag, have been torn from their country and
from everything dear to them; have been dragged on board
ships of war of a foreign nation and exposed, under the severities
of their discipline, to be exiled to the most distant and
deadly climes, to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors,
and to be the melancholy instruments of taking away
those of their own brethren.
Against this crying enormity, which Great Britain would
be so prompt to avenge if committed against herself, the
United States have in vain exhausted remonstrances and expostulations,
and that no proof might be wanting of their
conciliatory dispositions, and no pretext left for a continuance
of the practice, the British Government was formally assured
of the readiness of the United States to enter into arrangements
such as could not be rejected if the recovery of British
subjects were the real and the sole object. The communication
passed without effect.
British cruisers have been in the practice also of violating
the rights and the peace of our coasts. They hover over and
insulting pretensions they have added the most lawless proceedings
in our very harbors, and have wantonly spilt American
blood within the sanctuary of our territorial jurisdiction.
The principles and rules enforced by that nation, when a
neutral nation, against armed vessels of belligerents hovering
near her coasts and disturbing her commerce are well known.
When called on, nevertheless, by the United States to punish
the greater offenses committed by her own vessels, her Government
has bestowed on their commanders additional marks of
honor and confidence.
Under pretended blockades, without the presence of an adequate
force and sometimes without the practicability of
applying one, our commerce has been plundered in every sea,
the great staples of our country have been cut off from their
legitimate markets, and a destructive blow aimed at our agricultural
and maritime interests. In aggravation of these
predatory measures they have been considered as in force from
the dates of their notification, a retrospective effect being
thus added, as has been done in other important cases, to the
unlawfulness of the course pursued. And to render the outrage
the more signal these mock blockades have been reiterated
and enforced in the face of official communications from the
British Government declaring as the true definition of a legal
blockade "that particular ports must be actually invested
and previous warning given to vessels bound to them not to
enter."
Not content with these occasional expedients for laying
waste our neutral trade, the cabinet of Britain resorted at
length to the sweeping system of blockades, under the name
of orders in council, which has been molded and managed as
might best suit its political views, its commercial jealousies,
or the avidity of British cruisers.
To our remonstrances against the complicated and transcendent
injustice of this innovation the first reply was that the
orders were reluctantly adopted by Great Britain as a necessary
blockade of the British Isles at a time when the naval force
of that enemy dared not issue from his own ports. She was
reminded without effect that her own prior blockades, unsupported
by an adequate naval force actually applied and continued,
were a bar to this plea; that executed edicts against
millions of our property could not be retaliation on edicts
confessedly impossible to be executed; that retaliation, to be
just, should fall on the party setting the guilty example, not
on an innocent party which was not even chargeable with an
acquiescence in it.
When deprived of this flimsy veil for a prohibition of our
trade with her enemy by the repeal of his prohibition of our
trade with Great Britain, her cabinet, instead of a corresponding
repeal or a practical discontinuance of its orders, formally
avowed a determination to persist in them against the United
States until the markets of her enemy should be laid open to
British products, thus asserting an obligation on a neutral
power to require one belligerent to encourage by its internal
regulations the trade of another belligerent, contradicting
her own practice toward all nations, in peace as well as in war,
and betraying the insincerity of those professions which inculcated
a belief that, having resorted to her orders with regret,
she was anxious to find an occasion for putting an end to them.
Abandoning still more all respect for the neutral rights of
the United States and for its own consistency, the British Government
now demands as prerequisites to a repeal of its orders
as they relate to the United States that a formality should
be observed in the repeal of the French decrees nowise necessary
to their termination nor exemplified by British usage,
and that the French repeal, besides including that portion of
the decrees which operates within a territorial jurisdiction, as
well as that which operates on the high seas, against the commerce
of the United States should not be a single and special
repeal in relation to the United States, but should be extended
to whatever other neutral nations unconnected with them
they are called on for a formal disavowal of conditions and
pretensions advanced by the French Government for which
the United States are so far from having made themselves
responsible that, in official explanations which have been published
to the world, and in a correspondence of the American
minister at London with the British minister for foreign
affairs such a responsibility was explicitly and emphatically
disclaimed.
It has become, indeed, sufficiently certain that the commerce
of the United States is to be sacrificed, not as interfering with
the belligerent rights of Great Britain; not as supplying the
wants of her enemies, which she herself supplies; but as interfering
with the monopoly which she covets for her own commerce
and navigation. She carries on a war against the lawful
commerce of a friend that she may the better carry on a
commerce with an enemy—a commerce polluted by the
forgeries and perjuries which are for the most part the only
passports by which it can succeed.
Anxious to make every experiment short of the last resort
of injured nations, the United States have withheld from Great
Britain, under successive modifications, the benefits of a free
intercourse with their market, the loss of which could not but
outweigh the profits accruing from her restrictions of our commerce
with other nations. And to entitle these experiments
to the more favorable consideration they were so framed as to
enable her to place her adversary under the exclusive operation
of them. To these appeals her Government has been equally
inflexible, as if willing to make sacrifices of every sort rather
than yield to the claims of justice or renounce the errors of a
false pride. Nay, so far were the attempts carried to overcome
the attachment of the British cabinet to its unjust edicts that
it received every encouragement within the competency of the
executive branch of our Government to expect that a repeal
of them would be followed by a war between the United States
and France, unless the French edicts should also be repealed.
of a disposition in the United States to acquiesce in those edicts
originally the sole plea for them, received no attention.
If no other proof existed of a predetermination of the British
Government against a repeal of its orders, it might be found
in the correspondence of the minister plenipotentiary of the
United States at London and the British secretary for foreign
affairs in 1810, on the question whether the blockade of May,
1806, was considered as in force or as not in force. It had
been ascertained that the French Government, which urged
this blockade as the ground of its Berlin decree, was willing
in the event of its removal, to repeal that decree, which, being
followed by alternate repeals of the other offensive edicts,
might abolish the whole system on both sides. This inviting
opportunity for accomplishing an object so important to the
United States, and professed so often to be the desire of both
the belligerents, was made known to the British Government.
As that Government admits that an actual application of an
adequate force is necessary to the existence of a legal blockade,
and it was notorious that if such a force had ever been applied
its long discontinuance had annulled the blockade in question,
there could be no sufficient objection on the part of Great
Britain to a formal revocation of it, and no imaginable objection
to a declaration of the fact that the blockade did not
exist. The declaration would have been consistent with her
avowed principles of blockade, and would have enabled the
United States to demand from France the pledged repeal
of her decrees, either with success, in which case the way
would have been opened for a general repeal of the belligerent
edicts, or without success, in which case the United
States would have been justified in turning their measures
exclusively against France. The British Government would,
however, neither rescind the blockade nor declare its nonexistence,
nor permit its non-existence to be inferred and affirmed
by the American plenipotentiary. On the contrary, by representing
the blockade to be comprehended in the orders in
their subsequent proceedings.
There was a period when a favorable change in the policy of
the British cabinet was justly considered as established. The
minister plenipotentiary of His Britannic Majesty here proposed
an adjustment of the differences more immediately
endangering the harmony of the two countries. The proposition
was accepted with the promptitude and cordiality corresponding
with the invariable professions of this Government.
A foundation appeared to be laid for a sincere and lasting
reconciliation. The prospect, however, quickly vanished.
The whole proceeding was disavowed by the British Government
without any explanations which could at that time repress
the belief that the disavowal proceeded from a spirit of
hostility to the commercial rights and prosperity of the United
States; and it has since come into proof that at the very moment
when the public minister was holding the language of
friendship and inspiring confidence in the sincerity of the
negotiation with which he was charged a secret agent of his
Government was employed in intrigues having for their object
a subversion of our Government and a dismemberment of our
happy union.
In reviewing the conduct of Great Britain toward the United
States our attention is necessarily drawn to the warfare just
renewed by the savages on one of our extensive frontiers—a
warfare which is known to spare neither age nor sex and to be
distinguished by features peculiarly shocking to humanity.
It is difficult to account for the activity and combinations
which have for some time been developing themselves among
tribes in constant intercourse with British traders and garrisons
without connecting their hostility with that influence
and without recollecting the authenticated examples of such
interpositions heretofore furnished by the officers and agents
of that Government.
Such is the spectacle of injuries and indignities which have
been heaped on our country, and such the crisis which its unexampled
able to avert. It might at least have been expected that an enlightened
nation, if less urged by moral obligations or invited
by friendly dispositions on the part of the United States, would
have found its true interest alone a sufficient motive to respect
their rights and their tranquillity on the high seas; that an
enlarged policy would have favored that free and general circulation
of commerce in which the British nation is at all times
interested, and which in times of war is the best alleviation of
its calamities to herself as well as to other belligerents; and
more especially that the British cabinet would not, for the
sake of a precarious and surreptitious intercourse with hostile
markets, have persevered in a course of measures which necessarily
put at hazard the invaluable market of a great and growing
country, disposed to cultivate the mutual advantages of
an active commerce.
Other counsels have prevailed. Our moderation and conciliation
have had no other effect than to encourage perseverance
and to enlarge pretensions. We behold our seafaring
citizens still the daily victims of lawless violence, committed
on the great common and highway of nations, even within
sight of the country which owes them protection. We behold
our vessels, freighted with the products of our soil and industry,
or returning with the honest proceeds of them, wrested
from their lawful destinations, confiscated by prize courts no
longer the organs of public law but the instruments of arbitrary
edicts, and their unfortunate crews dispersed and lost, or
forced or inveigled in British ports into British fleets, whilst
arguments are employed in support of these aggressions
which have no foundation but in a principle equally supporting
a claim to regulate our external commerce in all cases
whatsoever.
We behold, in fine, on the side of Great Britain, a state of
war against the United States, and on the side of the United
States a state of peace toward Great Britain.
Whether the United States shall continue passive under
or, opposing force to force in defense of their national rights,
shall commit a just cause into the hands of the Almighty Disposer
of Events, avoiding all connections which might entangle
it in the contest or views of other powers, and preserving
a constant readiness to concur in an honorable re-establishment
of peace and friendship, is a solemn question which the
Constitution wisely confides to the legislative department of
the Government. In recommending it to their early deliberations
I am happy in the assurance that the decision will be
worthy the enlightened and patriotic councils of a virtuous,
a free, and a powerful nation.
Having presented this view of the relations of the United
States with Great Britain and of the solemn alternative growing
out of them, I proceed to remark that the communications
last made to Congress on the subject of our relations with
France will have shewn that since the revocation of her decrees,
as they violated the neutral rights of the United States, her
Government has authorized illegal captures by its privateers
and public ships, and that other outrages have been practised
on our vessels and our citizens. It will have been seen also
that no indemnity had been provided or satisfactorily pledged
for the extensive spoliations committed under the violent and
retrospective orders of the French Government against the
property of our citizens seized within the jurisdiction of
France. I abstain at this time from recommending to the
consideration of Congress definitive measures with respect to
that nation, in the expectation that the result of unclosed
discussions between our minister plenipotentiary at Paris and
the French Government will speedily enable Congress to decide
with greater advantage on the course due to the rights,
the interests, and the honor of our country.
"More than six months had passed since Congress met, and the
question of actual war was still in suspense. At length, after private
conference, a deputation of Members of Congress, with Mr. Clay at
their head, waited upon the President, and upon the representations of
the readiness of a majority of Congress to vote the war if recommended,
the Presdnt, on the first Monday in June, transmitted to Congress his
message submitting that question to their decision."—Joseph Gale's
account, Am. Hist. Rev., xiii, 309. Here is the true account of the
visit to Madison, which has been so often represented as the occasion
when he was promised a renomination for the Presidency if he would
send Congress a war message. See Hildreth, vi., 298; McMaster, iii.,
445; Von Holst, i., 230; Gay's Madison, 308. The message being
referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House, John C.
Calhoun brought in the famous war manifesto June 3, but this paper
had really been written by James Monroe. See Joseph Gales on the
"War Manifesto of 1812," Am. Hist. Rev., xiii, 303.
| The writings of James Madison, | |