BOOK IV. DIPLOMACY. 1813-1829. (continued 2)

Three days later, on the 24th October, the Americans sent back a very brief note bluntly refusing to treat on the basis of uti possidetis, or on any other basis than the status quo ante bellum in respect to territory, and calling for the British projet.

Of all the notes sent by the American negotiators, this, which they seem to have considered a matter of course and to which they gave not even a second thought, produced the liveliest emotions in the British government. Lord Liverpool, on receiving it, wrote at once to the Duke of Wellington: “The last note of the American plenipotentiaries puts an end, I think, to any hopes we might have entertained of our being able to bring the war with America at this time to a conclusion.... The doctrine of the American government is a very convenient one; that they will always be ready to keep what they acquire, but never to give up what they lose.... We still think it desirable to gain a little more time before the negotiation is brought to a close, and we shall therefore call upon them to deliver in a full projet of all the conditions on which they are ready to make peace before we enter into discussion on any of the points contained in our last note.”[138] Mr. Goulburn assumed that everything was over, and merely wished to know whether they had best break off on this point or on that of the fisheries, and he showed almost his only trace of common sense by advising government to select the fisheries.[139] On the British side it was formally, though secretly, announced through the interior official circle, that the American war was to go on, and for a time the only apparent question was how to carry it on most effectively.

Unluckily, however, the more the British government looked at the subject from this point of view the less satisfaction they found in it. Mr. Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was very uncomfortable. Lord Liverpool was quite as uneasy as Mr. Vansittart. On the 28th October, the same day on which he wrote to the Duke of Wellington, he sent a letter to Lord Castlereagh, at Vienna: “I think it very material that we should likewise consider that our war with America will probably now be of some duration. We owe it therefore to ourselves not to make enemies in other quarters, if we can avoid it, for I cannot but feel apprehensive that some of our European allies will not be indisposed to favor the Americans; and if the Emperor of Russia should be desirous of taking up their cause, we are well aware, from some of Lord Walpole’s late communications, that there is a most powerful party in Russia to support him.... Looking to a continuance of the American war, our financial state is far from satisfactory. Without taking into the account any compensation to foreign powers on the subject of the slave-trade, we shall want a loan for the service of the year of £27,000,000 or £28,000,000. The American war will not cost us less than £10,000,000 in addition to our peace establishment and other expenses. We must expect, therefore, to hear it said that the property tax is continued for the purpose of securing a better frontier for Canada.”[140] A week later Lord Liverpool wrote again to Lord Castlereagh in a still lower tone: “I see little prospect of our negotiations at Ghent ending in peace.... The continuance of the American war will entail upon us a prodigious expense, much more than we had any idea of.... All our colleagues are coming to town, and we are to have a Cabinet on the speech to-morrow. Many of them have not yet seen the American correspondence; but we have got the question into that state that the government is not absolutely committed, and there will be an opportunity therefore of reviewing in a full Cabinet the whole course of our policy as to America.”[141]

This Cabinet council hit upon a brilliant idea to extricate them from their difficulties: the Duke of Wellington should go to America, with full powers to make peace or to fight, and in either case to take the entire responsibility on his own shoulders. This scheme was immediately communicated to the Duke by Lord Liverpool, in a letter dated November 4, the day after the council, and in communicating it the Earl frankly said: “The more we contemplate the character of the American war the more satisfied we are of the many inconveniences which may grow out of the continuation of it. We desire to bring it to an honorable conclusion.”

The Duke of Wellington had some experience in acting as scape-goat for the blunders of his government; he was a man immeasurably superior to his civil chiefs, and even his common sense at times amounted to what in other men was genius. He wrote back, on the 9th November, a letter which would alone stamp him as the ablest English statesman of his day. He did not refuse to go to America, but he pointed out the mistakes that had been made there, and which must be remedied before he could do any good service; he then told Lord Liverpool very civilly but very decidedly that he had made a great blunder in requiring territorial concessions: “I confess that I think you have no right, from the state of the war, to demand any concession of territory from America. Considering everything, it is my opinion that the war has been a most successful one, and highly honorable to the British arms; but from particular circumstances, such as the want of the naval superiority on the lakes, you have not been able to carry it into the enemy’s territory, notwithstanding your military success and now undoubted military superiority, and have not even cleared your own territory of the enemy on the point of attack. You cannot, then, on any principle of equality in negotiation, claim a cession of territory excepting in exchange for other advantages which you have in your power. I put out of the question the possession taken by Sir John Sherbrooke between the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Bay. It is evidently only temporary and till a larger force will drive away the few companies he has left there; and an officer might as well claim the sovereignty of the ground on which his piquets stand or over which his patrols pass. Then, if this reasoning be true, why stipulate for the uti possidetis? You can get no territory; indeed, the state of your military operations, however creditable, does not entitle you to demand any; and you only afford the Americans a popular and creditable ground, which, I believe, their government are looking for, not to break off the negotiations, but to avoid to make peace. If you had territory, as I hope you soon will have New Orleans, I should prefer to insist upon the cession of that province as a separate article than upon the uti possidetis as a principle of negotiation.”[142]

This was plain speaking. The whole British scheme of negotiation had, moreover, been fatally shaken by the disastrous failure of Sir George Prevost’s attack on Plattsburg. Lord Liverpool immediately wrote back to the Duke that the question was still open and the Cabinet was disposed to meet his views on the subject.[143] A few days later, on the 18th November, he wrote to Lord Castlereagh announcing that government had at last decided to recede: “We have under our consideration at present the last American note of their projet of treaty, and I think we have determined, if all other points can be satisfactorily settled, not to continue the war for the purpose of obtaining or securing any acquisition of territory. We have been led to this determination by the consideration of the unsatisfactory state of the negotiations at Vienna, and by that of the alarming situation of the interior of France. We have also been obliged to pay serious attention to the state of our finances and to the difficulties we shall have in continuing the property tax. Considering the general depression of rents, which, even under any corn law that is likely to meet with the approbation of Parliament, must be expected to take place under such circumstances, it has appeared to us desirable to bring the American war, if possible, to a conclusion.”[144]

Thus the second round in this diplomatic encounter closed with the British government fairly discomfited; Lord Bathurst and Lord Liverpool had succeeded no better than Mr. Goulburn in dealing with the American envoys, and had received a sharp lesson from the Duke of Wellington into the bargain. When the unfortunate Mr. Goulburn received the despatches containing his new instructions, he was deeply depressed. “I need not trouble you,” he wrote on the 25th November to Lord Bathurst, “with the expression of my sincere regret at the alternative which the government feels itself compelled, by the present state of affairs in Europe, to adopt with respect to America. You know that I was never much inclined to give way to the Americans; I am still less inclined to do so after the statement of our demands with which the negotiation opened, and which has in every point of view proved most unfortunate.”[145] The draught was a bitter one, but he swallowed it.

Meanwhile, the American commissioners, ignorant of all this secret correspondence and consultation, were busy in framing their projet, and in disputing among themselves in regard to the extension they should give to the principle of the status quo ante bellum as applied to other than territorial questions, and especially to the fisheries and the Mississippi.

The task of preparing articles on impressment, blockade, and indemnities was assigned to Mr. Adams; but as these articles were at once declared inadmissible by the British, and were abandoned in consequence, the whole stress of negotiation fell upon those respecting boundaries and the fisheries, which Mr. Gallatin undertook to prepare. On this point local jealousies were involved, which not only troubled the harmony of the mission, but left seeds that afterwards developed into a ferocious controversy between some of its members. This was owing to the fact that the treaty of 1783 had to a certain extent coupled the American right to fish in British waters with a British right to navigate the Mississippi. The British now proposed to put an abrupt end to the American fisheries, but seemed disposed to retain the navigation of the Mississippi. To settle the question, Mr. Gallatin drew up an article by which the two articles of the treaty of 1783 on these points were recognized and confirmed.[146] To this Mr. Clay energetically objected, and a prolonged discussion took place. The question what the fisheries were worth was a question of fact, which was susceptible of answer, but no human being could say what the navigation of the Mississippi was worth, and for this very reason there could be no agreement. Whatever the right of navigation might amount to in national interest, it was very likely to equal the whole value of Mr. Clay’s personal popularity; and whatever the fisheries might be worth to New England, their loss was certain to bankrupt Mr. Adams’s political fortunes. Mr. Gallatin acted here not merely the part of a peacemaker, but that of an economist. He took upon himself the burden of saving the fisheries, and not only drafted the article which offered to renew the treaty stipulations of 1783, and thus set off the fisheries against the Mississippi, but assumed the brunt of the argument against Mr. Clay, who would listen to no suggestion of a return in this respect to the old status. On the 5th November the commissioners came to a vote on Mr. Gallatin’s proposed article; Mr. Clay and Mr. Russell opposed it; Mr. Gallatin, Mr. Adams, and Mr. Bayard approved it, and it was voted that the article should be inserted in the American projet. Mr. Clay declared that he would not put his name to the note, though he should not go so far as to refuse his signature to the treaty.

The next day, however, a compromise was made. Mr. Clay proposed that Mr. Gallatin’s article should be laid aside, and that, instead of a provision expressly inserted in the projet, a paragraph should be inserted in the note which was to accompany the projet. The idea suggested in this paragraph was that the commissioners were not authorized to bring the fisheries into discussion, because the treaty of 1783 was by its peculiar nature a permanent arrangement, and the United States could not concede its abrogation. True, the right to the Mississippi was thus made permanent, as well as the right to the fisheries, but Mr. Clay conceived that this right could be valid only so far as it was independent of the acquisition of Louisiana.

The reasoning seemed somewhat casuistic; Mr. Gallatin hesitated; he much doubted whether the provisions of 1783 about the fisheries and the Mississippi were in their nature permanent; on this point he believed the British to have the best of the argument; but the advantages of unanimity and of obedience to instructions outweighed his doubts. Mr. Clay’s compromise was accordingly adopted, but at the same time Mr. Adams, with the strong support of Mr. Gallatin, succeeded in adding the declaration that the commissioners were ready to sign a treaty which should apply the principle of the status quo ante bellum to all the subjects of difference. Mr. Clay resisted as long as he could, but at last signed with his colleagues, and the projet sent in on November 10 accordingly contained no allusion to the fisheries or the Mississippi.

This note and projet of November 10 found the British commissioners still in a belligerent temper, for the effect of Mr. Vansittart’s remonstrances and of the Duke of Wellington’s advice had not yet made itself felt. Mr. Goulburn wrote on the same day to Lord Bathurst that the greater part of the American projet was by far too extravagant to leave any doubt in his mind and that of his colleagues as to the mode in which it could be combated.[147] An entire fortnight passed before his government startled him with the announcement that he must again give way, and it was only then, on November 25, that the fishery question was seriously taken up on the British side.

In Lord Castlereagh’s original instructions of July 28,[148] the British commissioners had been told that the provisions of the treaty of 1783 in respect to the in-shore fisheries on the coast of Newfoundland had been productive of so much inconvenience as to determine the government not to renew them in their present form or to concede any accommodation to the Americans in this respect except on the principle of an equivalent in frontier or otherwise. Supplementary instructions, dated August 14,[149] had also declared that the free navigation of the Mississippi must be provided for. Lord Bathurst had now to settle his policy on these points, and he seems to have instructed Mr. Goulburn, in letters dated the 21st and 22d November, that the treaty might be concluded without noticing the fishery question, since the crown lawyers were of the opinion, although he himself thought otherwise, that the American rights, unless expressly renewed, would necessarily terminate. These letters of Lord Bathurst, however, have not been printed, and their tenor can only be inferred from Mr. Goulburn’s reply on the 25th November, from which it appears that the British were almost as much in doubt as the Americans in regard to the fishery rights: “Had we never mentioned the subject of the fisheries at all,” said Mr. Goulburn, “I think that we might have argued the exclusion of the Americans from them on the general principle stated by Sir W. Scott and Sir C. Robinson; but having once brought forward the subject, having thus implied that we had (what Lord Castlereagh seemed really to have) a doubt of this principle; having received from the American plenipotentiaries a declaration of what they consider to be their right in this particular, and having left that declaration without an answer, I entirely concur in your opinion that we do practically admit the Americans to the fisheries as they enjoyed them before the war, and shall not, without a new war, be able to exclude them. I ought to add, however, that Dr. Adams and Lord Gambier do not agree in this opinion. You do us but justice in supposing that, without positive instructions, we shall not admit any article in favor of the American fishery even if any such should be brought forward by them; indeed, we did not at all understand your letter, either public or private, as implying any such concession.”

The British counter-projet, sent in on November 26, contained accordingly no allusion to the fisheries and took no notice of Mr. Clay’s paragraph in regard to the treaty of 1783, but, on the other hand, contained a clause stipulating for the free navigation of the Mississippi. When this counter-projet came up for discussion in the American commission on the 28th November, another hot dispute arose. Mr. Gallatin proposed to accept the British clause in regard to the Mississippi, and to add another clause to continue the liberty of taking, drying, and curing fish, “as secured by the former treaty of peace.” To this proposition Mr. Clay offered a stout resistance; he maintained that the fisheries were of little or no value, while the Mississippi was of immense importance, and he could see no sort of reason in treating them as equivalent. Mr. Adams maintained just the opposite view, and after the dispute had lasted the better part of two days, “Mr. Gallatin brought us all to unison again by a joke. He said he perceived that Mr. Adams cared nothing at all about the navigation of the Mississippi and thought of nothing but the fisheries. Mr. Clay cared nothing at all about the fisheries and thought of nothing but the Mississippi. The East was perfectly willing to sacrifice the West, and the West equally ready to sacrifice the East. Now he was a Western man, and would give the navigation of the river for the fisheries. Mr. Russell was an Eastern man, and was ready to do the same.”

The proposition was accordingly made, and met with a prompt refusal from the British government, which proposed to adopt a new article by which both subjects should be referred to a future negotiation. This offer gave rise among the commissioners to a fresh contest, waged hotly about the point whether or not the United States should concede that a right fixed by the treaty of 1783 was open to negotiation. Here Mr. Gallatin parted company with Mr. Adams. He was unwilling to pledge the government to the doctrine that liberties granted by the treaty of 1783 could not be discussed, and he carried all his colleagues with him, Mr. Adams only excepted, in favor of a qualified acceptance of the British proposition, provided the engagement to negotiate applied to all the subjects of difference not yet adjusted, and provided it involved no abandonment of any right in the fisheries claimed by the United States.

Mr. Goulburn had flattered himself upon having at length gained a point. On the 10th December he had written to Lord Bathurst: “I confess my own opinion to be that the question of the fisheries stood as well upon the result of the last conference as it can do upon any reply which they may make to our proposition of this day. The arguments which they used at the time will certainly be to be learnt only from the ex parte statements of the negotiators; but the fact of their having attempted to purchase the fisheries is recorded, and is an evidence (to say the least of it) that they doubt their right to enjoy them without a stipulation. If they receive our proposition, all will be well; but if they reject it, they may derive from that rejection an argument against what we wish to deduce from the protocol.”[150]

Even the poor consolation which Mr. Goulburn thus hugged was disappointed, for Mr. Gallatin’s note neither accepted nor rejected the British offer to negotiate, but expressed a willingness to agree to do so only with the most emphatic reservation of all rights claimed by the United States. Mr. Goulburn was obliged to contemplate the abandonment of his last stronghold; he mildly wrote to Lord Bathurst, suggesting that all stipulations respecting the Mississippi and the fisheries should be omitted.[151]

After Mr. Gallatin had, with no little difficulty, succeeded in carrying his point, and after the usual delay consequent on the inevitable reference to London, an answer was returned on the 22d December. Somewhat to the discomfiture of both Mr. Clay and Mr. Adams, the Eastern and Western belligerents, this reply suddenly drew their war-chariots from under them. The British government was now more eager for peace than the American commissioners; it declared that it cared nothing about its proposed article by which the fisheries and the Mississippi were to be referred to negotiation, and would withdraw it with pleasure, so that the treaty might be silent on the subject. The practical result was that Mr. Adams’s view of the treaty of 1783 inevitably became the doctrine of his government, and that Mr. Clay was overset. Mr. Clay saw this, and was nettled by it; but Mr. Gallatin’s very delicate management, and the now clearly avowed desire of the British government to make peace, had clinched the settlement; further discussion or delay was out of the question, and three days later, on Christmas-Day, the treaty was signed.

Far more than contemporaries ever supposed or than is now imagined, the treaty of Ghent was the special work and the peculiar triumph of Mr. Gallatin. From what a fearful collapse it rescued the government, every reader knows. How bitterly it irritated the war-party in England, and what clamors were raised against it by the powerful interests that were bent on “punishing” the United States, can be seen in the old leaders of the London Times. What Lord Castlereagh at Vienna thought of it may be read in his letter of January 2, 1815, to Lord Liverpool: “The courier from Ghent with the news of the peace arrived yesterday morning. It has produced the greatest possible sensation here, and will, I have no doubt, enter largely into the calculations of our opponents. It is a most auspicious and seasonable event. I wish you joy of being released from the millstone of an American war.”[152] The peace was due primarily to the good sense of Lord Castlereagh, Lord Liverpool, and the Duke of Wellington; but there is fair room to doubt whether that good sense would have been kept steady to its purpose, and whether the American negotiators could have been held together in theirs, without the controlling influence of Mr. Gallatin’s resource, tact, and authority; whether, indeed, any negotiation at all could have been brought about except through Mr. Gallatin’s personal efforts, from the time he supported the mission in the Cabinet to the time when he took the responsibility of going to England. Sooner or later peace must have come, but there may be fair reason to think that, without Mr. Gallatin, the United States must have fought another campaign, and, Mr. Clay to the contrary notwithstanding, the position of New England and of the finances made peace vitally necessary. On that subject Mr. Gallatin’s knowledge of New England and of finance made him a wiser counsellor than Mr. Clay. Yet if Mr. Clay really had thought as he talked, he would not have crossed the ocean to assist in doing precisely what Mr. Gallatin’s policy dictated; he well knew that the United States could possibly win in the field no advantages to compensate for the inevitable mischief that another year of war must have caused to the government.

1815.

Be this as it may, the task done was done in the true spirit of Mr. Gallatin’s political philosophy and in the fullest sympathy with his old convictions. Stress of circumstances had wrested control from his hands, had blocked his path as Secretary of the Treasury, and had plunged the country headlong into difficulties it was not yet competent to manage. Gallatin had abandoned place and power, had thrown himself with all his energy upon the only point where he could make his strength effective, and had actually succeeded, by skill and persistence, in guiding the country back to safe and solid ground. He was not a man to boast of his exploits, and he never claimed peculiar credit in any of these transactions, but as he signed the treaty of Ghent he could fairly say that no one had done more than himself to serve his country, and no one had acted a more unselfish part.

After a furious parting quarrel between Mr. Clay and Mr. Adams, in which Mr. Gallatin again exercised all his tact to soothe the angry feelings of the two combatants, while he quietly threw his weight on Mr. Adams’s side, the commissioners separated, and he found himself free to follow his own fancy. As might be expected, his first act was to revisit his family and his birthplace; he took the road to Geneva.

Of this visit very little can be said. His letters to his wife during all the period of this stay in Europe have been lost, and their place cannot be supplied. No man, however, can go through the experience of returning to the associations of his youth, after more than thirty years of struggle like his, without sensations such as he would not care to express in words. He left only one allusion to the subject: he said that, as he approached Geneva, calm as his nature was, his calmness deserted him.

The citizens of his native town received him with the most cordial welcome; they were proud of him, and he was greeted with all the distinction he could have expected or wished. He passed a short time in renewing his relations with the surviving members of his family and with his old friends; then, departing again for Paris, he arrived there in season to witness the return of Napoleon from Elba, and to receive the information of his own appointment as minister to France in place of Mr. Crawford, who had decided to return home. In April he crossed the channel to England. He had not yet determined to accept the French mission, and in any case his family and his private affairs made a return to America necessary; meanwhile, he and his colleagues lingered, hoping to effect still further negotiation under their powers for a commercial treaty.

The following letter is a memento of his stay in Paris.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT TO GALLATIN.

Je n’ai pas été assez heureux pour vous trouver ce matin, mon illustre ami. J’aurais bien désiré cependant vous parler de mon attachement constant et tendre, de mon vif intérêt pour la paix que vous avez eu la gloire de conclure dans des circonstances difficiles. J’aurais aussi voulu vous féliciter sur cette belle et noble défense de la Nouvelle-Orléans qui fera respecter les armées de la Liberté, comme les flottes qui voguent sous votre pavillon se sont couvertes de gloire depuis longtemps. Que dans ces temps malheureux mes yeux se fixent avec attendrissement sur ces contrées qui seront bientôt le centre de la civilisation humaine! Je ferai d’autres tentatives pour vous trouver et vous recommander de nouveau Mr. Warden, mon ami et celui de Messrs. Berthollet, Thenard, Gay Lussac, et de tout ce qui aime les sciences. Je ne puis croire qu’un homme aussi instruit, aussi doux, aussi honnête, aussi attaché aux États-Unis, à M. Jefferson et aux doctrines vertueuses puisse être rejetté par votre gouvernement. Je supplie Madame Gallatin d’agréer l’hommage de mon respectueux dévouement. Quel contraste entre cette époque et celle où vous me vîtes à Londres ennuyé des “magnanimous Soverains” et de la croisade des héros!

Humboldt.

Quai Malaquais, No. 3. Jeudi.

Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Clay arrived in London early in April and began negotiations with Lord Castlereagh. Mr. Adams, now appointed minister to England, joined his colleagues in the following month, but Mr. Bayard remained in Paris or on shipboard. The President had appointed him minister to Russia, but he was not in a condition to accept the post even if he had cared to take it; broken down by illness, he was destined to reach home only to die. The negotiation with Lord Castlereagh was carried on almost entirely by Mr. Gallatin, and was the first of a long series of similar negotiations mainly conducted by him during the next fifteen years.

So far as England was concerned, excepting the questions of the fisheries, impressment, and boundary, the only source of serious difficulty arose in her colonial policy and the complications necessarily springing from it. These complications were numerous, but became threatening only when England was engaged in maritime war; at other times they were merely annoying, and kept our government incessantly employed in efforts to obtain the relaxation or abandonment of vexatious commercial restrictions. To obtain this result, however, the United States had left herself no inducements to offer. Most of the maritime powers in Europe had colonies, which they regarded as mere farms of the State; private property with regard to other nations; industrial speculations with which foreigners had no more to do than with their arsenals and dock-yards; places where they were admitted only on tolerance, and where they dealt not with the colonist, but with the imperial government. England especially had created a great system of this kind, and, to protect it, she had enacted a long series of navigation laws whose object was to secure all her own colonial trade to her own ships, and as much of her neighbors’ trade as she could gather into her ubiquitous hands. Between European nations there was a sort of colonial compact; they bargained one colonial trade against another, and admitted one another’s ships into their colonial ports provided their own ships were admitted in return; but when the United States claimed the same privilege, the European governments, with the spirit and in the language of so many small hucksters, asked what equivalent the United States could offer; where were the American colonies whose trade could be exchanged for that of the European? Mr. Gallatin pointed out where the American colonies lay, a long uninterrupted succession stretching from Lake Erie and Lake Superior to Mobile and New Orleans,—colonies whose growth surpassed that of the most prosperous European settlement as absolutely as the American continent surpassed in size and wealth the largest and richest island of either Indies. To this there was but one reply. The United States had already thrown the trade of her colonies open to the world; she could not now bargain for an equivalent. Even retaliation was precluded, for her own constitution would neither permit her to close any of her ports without closing all, nor to lay a duty on exports.

The English colonial system was the most difficult to deal with, since it was not only the most extensive, the most valuable, and the English colonies among the nearest to the United States, but its complications and inconsistencies were the most elaborate and perplexing, while to the British nation there was no absurdity in the whole mass that was not twisted deeply about some strong moneyed interest and that was not sanctified by age and English blood. To the United States there were three groups of questions involved in commercial relations with the British colonies. The first group included Canada and the whole trade with the provinces on our northern frontier, and was further complicated by our claim to the right of navigating the St. Lawrence. The second group included the British West India islands and their indirect trade with the United States through Nova Scotia. The third group consisted of the East Indies, and involved the trade between Calcutta, Europe, and the United States. These were the subjects which Mr. Gallatin attempted to settle by a commercial convention in the summer of 1815, and which detained him, much against his will, in England at a time when he was extremely anxious to be again at home.

Lord Castlereagh was friendly, and did what he could to smooth negotiation. Mr. Goulburn and Dr. Adams were continued in the British commission; but, in place of Lord Gambier, the American commissioners had a man to deal with whose qualifications and temper were of a very different kind. This was Frederic Robinson, afterwards Lord Goderich and Earl Ripon, who played a distinguished part in reforming the worst faults of the English commercial system. He was now vice-president of the Board of Trade, and treated the American ministers with courtesy and kindness, although able to do little more. Mr. Gallatin succeeded in disposing of none of the more difficult points in dispute. Not only did the British government politely decline to open the questions of impressment, blockade, and the trade with enemies’ colonies in time of war, but it withdrew the whole subject of the West India trade from discussion, and refused to listen to the American proposition for regulating the traffic with Canada and opening the river St. Lawrence. There remained only the East Indies, and a convention was ultimately signed which secured the Americans for four years in the enjoyment of this branch of commerce. In discussing with the Secretary of State the merits of this commercial convention of 1815, Mr. Gallatin afterwards declared that the only portion of it which appeared to him truly valuable was that which abolished discriminating duties, “a policy which, removing some grounds of irritation, and preventing in that respect a species of commercial warfare, may have a tendency to lay the foundation of a better understanding between the two nations on other points.”[153] This result of three months’ labor was small enough, but Mr. Gallatin might derive some encouragement from the fact that the British government looked upon itself as having done a very generous act, since, in the words of its last note, “it considers itself as granting to the United States a privilege in regard to the East Indies for which it is entitled to require an equivalent.”

The negotiation did not close without its inevitable accompaniment of discord.[154] Mr. Adams, who commonly recorded all his own sins of temper with conscientious self-reproach, seems in this case to have thought Mr. Gallatin at fault, and accuses him of speaking in a peremptory and somewhat petulant manner against a point of form in which Mr. Adams was undoubtedly right. The charge may very possibly be in this instance correct. The whole matter was trivial, so far as the dispute was concerned, and, like all these diplomatic irritations, had no lasting effect except to associate in Mr. Gallatin’s mind the recollection of Mr. Adams with ideas of deplorable wrong-headedness. This was not necessarily a correct conclusion, and Mr. Adams was naturally led to retaliate by thinking Mr. Gallatin tortuous. In point of fact, Mr. Adams was but one representative of a common New England type, little understood beyond the borders of that province; a type which, with an indurated exterior, was sinewy and supple to the core. The true Yankee wrested from man and from nature all he could get by force, but when force was exhausted he could be as pliable as his neighbors. In the present case, Mr. Adams attempted an experiment of this kind at the risk of some personal inconvenience to Mr. Gallatin. The nearly futile negotiation had detained Gallatin and Clay in England much beyond their intention; meanwhile, Bayard and Crawford, on June 18, had sailed in the Neptune, leaving their two companions to get home as they best could. It was now the 2d of July, and the treaty was waiting to be signed, when Mr. Adams made in the final draft some changes of form, which were certainly proper as a matter of national dignity, but which threatened to create further delay. This appears for a moment to have disturbed Gallatin’s equanimity; but Mr. Adams carried his point, Mr. Robinson made no difficulty, and the disagreement ended by Gallatin saying to Adams: “Well, they got over the transpositions very easily; but you would not have found it so if Dr. Adams had had the reading of your copy instead of Robinson.” “I said, that might be,” was Mr. Adams’s final entry.

That evening Mr. Gallatin dined for the last time during these negotiations with Mr. Alexander Baring, now and ever afterwards his warm friend, who had done more than any other man in England, or perhaps, with one exception, even in America, to hasten the peace, and who had, with the knowledge and consent of his own government, rendered very important financial assistance even while the war was going on. There had been much social entertainment in London, part of which is recorded in Mr. Adams’s Diary; but the only English friend Mr. Gallatin ever made whose society he greatly enjoyed, and whose character he deeply respected, was Mr. Baring.

On July 4, Mr. Gallatin began his homeward journey, and, after the usual delays, he reached America early in September. On the 4th of that month he wrote from New York to President Madison: “I received the account of my appointment to France with pleasure and gratitude, as an evidence of your undiminished friendship and of public satisfaction for my services. Whether I can or will accept, I have not yet determined. The season will be far advanced for taking Mrs. Gallatin across the Atlantic, and I have had no time to ascertain what arrangements, if any, I can make for my children and private business during a second absence. The delay has been rather advantageous to the public, as it was best to have no minister at Paris during the late events.”

GALLATIN TO JEFFERSON.

6th September, 1815.

I was much gratified by the receipt of your kind letter of March last, brought by Mr. Ticknor. Your usual partiality to me is evinced by the belief that our finances might have been better directed if I had remained in the Treasury. But I always thought that our war expenses were so great; perhaps necessarily so in proportion to the ordinary resources of the country; and the opposition of the moneyed men so inveterate, that it was impossible to avoid falling into a paper system if the war should be much longer protracted. I only regret that specie payments were not resumed on the return of peace. Whatever difficulties may be in the way, they cannot be insuperable, provided the subject be immediately attended to. If delayed, private interest will operate here as in England, and lay us under the curse of a depreciated and fluctuating currency. In every other respect I must acknowledge that the war has been useful. The character of America stands now as high as ever on the European Continent, and higher than ever it did in Great Britain. I may say that we are favorites everywhere except at courts, and even there, although the Emperor of Russia is perhaps the only sovereign who likes us, we are generally respected and considered as the nation designed to check the naval despotism of England. France, which alone can have a navy, will, under her present dynasty, be for some years a vassal of her great rival, and the mission with which I have been honored is in a political view unimportant. The revolution has not, however, been altogether useless. There is a visible improvement in the agriculture of the country and the situation of the peasantry. The new generation belonging to that class, freed from the petty despotism of nobles and priests, and made more easy in their circumstances by the abolition of tithes and by the equalization of taxes, have acquired an independent spirit, and are far superior to their fathers in intellect and information. They are not republicans, and are still too much dazzled by military glory, but I think that no monarch or ex-nobles can hereafter oppress them long with impunity.

The first question that pressed for an answer regarded the mission to France, but behind this a more serious subject presented itself; Mr. Gallatin must now decide what provision he could make for his children. This anxiety weighed upon his mind and caused much anxious thought and much hesitation in his conclusions. Fortunately, he had but the trouble of choice. In the course of a few months, one by one, the doors of every avenue to distinction or wealth were thrown open to him. The mission to France came first, and this, on the 23d November, he declined, alleging as his reason the private duties which required his attention to the interests of his children. Meanwhile, on the 23d September, 1815, Richard Bache wrote to him from Philadelphia, as follows: “A number of the conferees appointed to nominate a Democratic candidate to represent this district in the next Congress having met together last evening, it was unanimously agreed to nominate you, should you consent to serve.... We all anxiously hope that it will be consistent with your views to stand as a candidate, and we assure you that we are confident of success.”

If ambition were his object, this invitation opened to Mr. Gallatin the path to Congress, and a seat in the Senate might reasonably be assumed as standing not far in the distance. Mr. Gallatin’s reply was written the next day: “I am more gratified by the mark of confidence given me by the Republican conferees of the Philadelphia district than I can express. But I cannot serve them in the station with which they would honor me. My property is not half sufficient to support me anywhere but in the western country. To my private business and to making arrangements for entering into some active business I must necessarily and immediately attend. It is a duty I owe to my family.”

A few days later, on the 9th October, his friend Mr. John Jacob Astor wrote him a long letter proposing that he should become a partner in Mr. Astor’s commercial house. He had, he said, at that time a capital of about $800,000 engaged in trade. He estimated his probable profits at from $50,000 to $100,000 per annum, interest and all expenses deducted. “I propose to give you an interest of one-fifth, on which I mean to charge you the legal interest; if you put any funds to the stock, interest will be allowed to you of course.”

On the 4th December, Mr. Monroe wrote to him: “To your other letter I have felt a repugnance to give a reply. We have been long in the public service together, engaged in support of the same great cause, have acted in harmony, and it is distressing to me to see you withdraw. I will write you again on this subject soon.” He did write again, on the 16th, urging new reasons why Mr. Gallatin should accept the French mission. To this letter Mr. Gallatin made the following reply:

GALLATIN TO MONROE.

New York, 26th December, 1815.

1816.

Dear Sir,—I have received your friendly letters of 4th and 16th instant, and have a grateful sense of the motives which dictated them. I can assure you that I feel a great reluctance to part with my personal and political friends, and that every consideration merely personal to myself and detached from my family urges a continuance in public life. My habits are formed and cannot be altered. I feel alive to everything connected with the interest, happiness, and reputation of the United States. Whatever affects unfavorably either of them makes me more unhappy than any private loss or inconvenience. Although I have nothing to do with it, the continued suspension of specie payments, which I consider as a continued unnecessary violation of the public faith, occupies my thoughts more than any other subject. I feel as a passenger in a storm,—vexed that I cannot assist. This I understand to be very generally the feeling of every statesman out of place. Be this as it may, although I did and do believe that for the present at least I could not be of much public utility in France, I did in my private letter to the President place my declining on the ground of private considerations. In that respect my views are limited to the mere means of existence without falling in debt I do not wish to accumulate any property. I will not do my family the injury of impairing the little I have. My health is frail; they may soon lose me, and I will not leave them dependent on the bounty of others. Was I to go to France, and my compensation and private income (this last does not exceed $2500 a year) did not enable me to live as I ought, I must live as I can. I ask your forgiveness for entering in those details, but you have treated me as a friend, and I write to you as such. You have from friendship wished that I would reconsider my first decision, and I will avail myself of the permission. It will be understood that in the mean while, if the delay is attended with any public inconvenience, a new appointment may immediately take place. My motive for writing when I did was a fear that, specially with respect to other missions, the belief that I would go to France might induce the President to make different arrangements from those he would have adopted on a contrary supposition.

On the 27th January, 1816, Mr. Monroe replied by again urging Mr. Gallatin to accept, and pressing for a quick decision. On the 2d February Mr. Gallatin wrote his final acceptance.

GALLATIN TO JEFFERSON.

Washington, 1st April, 1816.

... After what I had written to you you could hardly have expected that I would have accepted the French mission. It was again offered to me in so friendly a manner and from so friendly motives that I was induced to accept. Nor will I conceal that I did not feel yet old enough, or had I philosophy enough, to go into retirement and abstract myself altogether from public affairs. I have no expectation, however, that in the present state of France I can be of any utility there, and hope that I will not make a long stay in that country....

Mr. Gallatin, like most men, had the faculty of deceiving himself. In writing these lines, he was so inconsistent as to ignore the fact that he had already refused to return to public life on the ground that he must provide for his family. He was driven into still greater inconsistencies a few days later.

MADISON TO GALLATIN.

Washington, April 12, 1816.

Dear Sir,—Mr. Dallas has signified to me that, it being his intention not to pass another winter in Washington, he has thought it his duty to give me an opportunity of selecting a successor during the present session of Congress; intimating a willingness, however, to remain, if desired, in order to put the National Bank in motion.

Will it be most agreeable to you to proceed on your mission to France, or are you willing again to take charge of a department heretofore conducted by you with so much reputation and usefulness, on the resignation of Mr. Dallas, which will, it is presumed, take effect about the 1st of October? In the latter case it will be proper that a nomination be forthwith made for the foreign appointment. Favor me with your determination as soon as you can make it convenient, accepting in the mean time my affectionate respects.

There could be no possible doubt that in this case ambition and public duty went hand in hand. If Mr. Gallatin still felt a passion for power, or still thought himself able to do good, this was his opportunity. His warm friend Joseph H. Nicholson wrote at once with all his old impetuosity to urge his acceptance.

JOSEPH H. NICHOLSON TO GALLATIN.

13th April, 1816.

My dear Sir,—I have this moment learned that Dallas is certainly going out. For God’s sake come into the Treasury again. I think you must be satisfied that you can if you will; and I am satisfied, and so is all the world, that you can be infinitely more useful there than in France, where you have nothing to gain and may lose. I think you will be looked to for the Treasury by all parties except Duane’s.

GALLATIN TO MADISON.

New York, April 18, 1816.

Dear Sir,—Your letter of the 12th reached me only the day before yesterday, and, not willing to make a hasty decision, I have delayed an answer till to-day. I feel very grateful for your kind offer, which I know to have been equally owing to your friendship for me and to your views of public utility. I decline it with some reluctance, because I think I would be more useful at home than abroad, and I had much rather be in America than in Europe. The reasons which induce me nevertheless to decline, under existing circumstances, preponderate. With these I do not mean to trouble you, and will only mention that, although competent as I think to the higher duties of office, there is for what I conceive a proper management of the Treasury a necessity for a mass of mechanical labor connected with details, forms, calculations, &c., which, having now lost sight of the thread and routine, I cannot think of again learning and going through. I know that in that respect there is now much confusion due to the changes of office and the state of the currency, and I believe that an active young man can alone reinstate and direct properly that department. I may add that I have made a number of arrangements founded on the expectation of the French mission, of a short residence there, and of a last visit to my Geneva relations, which could not be undone without causing inconvenience to me and disappointment to others. Accept my grateful thanks and the assurance of my constant and sincere attachment and respect.

Your obedient servant.

This letter shows rather a wish to find excuses than a faith in the weight of those alleged. There was clearly no weight in them such as could justify Mr. Gallatin’s refusal; had he accepted the Treasury he would probably have held it twelve years, unless he had himself chosen to retire, for although he appears rather to have favored the candidacy of Mr. Tompkins, of New York, than of Mr. Monroe, for the succession to President Madison, this probably indicated merely his unwillingness to exhaust public patience with indefinite Virginia supremacy, and did not imply hostility to Monroe, who would doubtless have retained him in the Cabinet, and to whom he would have been far more acceptable than the actual Secretary, William H. Crawford. Gallatin, too, would have made a much better Secretary than Crawford, and Mr. Monroe would have been spared most of the political intrigue in his Cabinet that caused him such incessant vexation; the national finances would have been better managed, and Mr. Gallatin would have enjoyed the triumph of restoring specie payments, practically extinguishing the national debt, and possibly carrying out his schemes for internal improvement.

On the other hand, one evident fact sufficiently explains why he was unwilling to resume his old post. The signature of the treaty of Ghent, on the 25th December, 1814, had closed one great epoch in his life, and, looking back from that stand-point upon the events of his political career, he could not avoid some very unpleasant conclusions. Riper, wiser, and infinitely more experienced than in 1800, Gallatin had still lost qualities which, to a politician, were more important than either experience, wisdom, or maturity. He had outgrown the convictions which had made his strength; he had not, indeed, lost confidence in himself, for, throughout all his trials and disappointments, the tone of his mind had remained as pure as when he began life, and he had never forfeited his self-respect; but he had lost something which, to his political success, was even more necessary; that sublime confidence in human nature which had given to Mr. Jefferson and his party their single irresistible claim to popular devotion. His statesmanship had become, what practical statesmanship always has and must become, a mere struggle to deal with concrete facts at the cost of philosophic and a priori principles. Gallatin, like Madison and Monroe, like Clay and Calhoun, had outgrown the Jeffersonian dogmas. There was no longer any great unrealized conviction on which to build enthusiasm; and even on those questions which were likely to arise, Mr. Gallatin was rather in sympathy with his old opponents than with his old friends or his old self. The following letter could hardly have been written in 1801 by Mr. Gallatin or received by Matthew Lyon.

GALLATIN TO MATTHEW LYON.

New York, May 7, 1816.

... The war has been productive of evil and good, but I think the good preponderates. Independent of the loss of lives and of the losses in property by individuals, the war has laid the foundation of permanent taxes and military establishments which the Republicans had deemed unfavorable to the happiness and free institutions of the country. But under our former system we were becoming too selfish, too much attached exclusively to the acquisition of wealth, above all, too much confined in our political feelings to local and State objects. The war has renewed and reinstated the national feelings and character which the Revolution had given, and which were daily lessened. The people have now more general objects of attachment with which their pride and political opinions are connected. They are more Americans; they feel and act more as a nation, and I hope that the permanency of the Union is thereby better secured.... I have lost three old friends: Mr. Savary, Thomas Clare, and Mr. Smilie.

He had come into office in 1801, with power more complete than he could ever hope to enjoy again; his aims and his methods had been pure, unselfish, and noble; yet he had been the sport of faction and the victim of bitter personal hatred. He had no fancy for repeating the experience. Moreover, there was no longer any essential disagreement among the people in regard to political dogmas. Federalists and Republicans had fused their theories into a curious compound, of which this letter to Matthew Lyon gives an idea, and upon the ground thus formed all parties were now glad to unite, at least for a time. There remained no sufficient force, perhaps no sufficient prejudice, to overbalance the natural tendency of Mr. Gallatin’s mind towards science and repose.

The seven years he passed in Paris were the most agreeable years of his life. Far the best diplomatist in the service, he was indispensable to his government, and was incessantly employed in all its most difficult negotiations, so far as they could be brought within his reach. Conscious of his peculiar fitness for diplomacy, weary of domestic intrigue, and indifferent to the possession of power, he dismissed his early ambitions and political projects not only without regret, but with positive relief.

GALLATIN TO MADISON.

New York, 7th June, 1816.

... I am urging the captain of the Peacock, and still hope that he will be ready to sail the day after to-morrow. I almost envy you the happy time which you will spend this summer in Orange, and which will not, I hope, be disturbed by any untoward change in our affairs. I think that, upon the whole, we have nothing to apprehend at this time from any foreign quarter. You already know how thoroughly impressed I am with the necessity of restoring specie payments. This subject will not disturb you in the country, but the present state of the currency is the only evil of any magnitude entailed by the war, and which it seems incumbent on us (pardon the expression) to cure radically. Public credit, private convenience, the sanctity of contracts, the moral character of the country, appear all to be involved in that question, and I feel the most perfect conviction that nothing but the will of government is wanted to reinstate us in that respect. The choice of the Secretary of the Treasury is, under those circumstances, important, and I am sorry that Mr. Crawford, as I am informed, has declined the appointment. I wish it may fall on Mr. Lowndes or on Mr. Calhoun. Our Maryland and Pennsylvania politicians, without excepting some of the most virtuous and whom I count amongst my best friends, are paper-tainted. The disease extends, though more particularly to this State.

I beg you to forgive this digression on a subject which I had no intention to touch when I began this letter.

On the 9th July, Mr. Gallatin, now accompanied by all his family, arrived in Paris. There he remained until June, 1823. During these seven years his connection with American politics was almost absolutely severed. His only political correspondent was Mr. Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury, who wrote him long and confidential letters, little calculated to excite in Mr. Gallatin the slightest desire to share in the political game. Indeed, politics had now become so exclusively a game in the United States, all vestige of party principles and all trace of deep convictions had so entirely vanished, that a statesman of the old school had no longer a place in public life. Petty factions grouped themselves about Crawford, Clay, Adams, Calhoun, De Witt Clinton, and General Jackson, and political action was regulated by antipathies rather than by public interest. If any one of these leaders seemed to be gaining an advantage, the followers of all the others combined to pull him down. Mr. Crawford’s correspondence dealt largely in matters of this sort, and Mr. Gallatin was familiar enough with the style of intrigue to feel himself happy in escaping it.

1817.

If there was little to regret at Washington, there was much to enjoy in Paris. There Mr. Gallatin’s position was peculiarly enviable. The United States, though a republic, was, in the royalist jargon of the French Court, a “legitimate” government. Its minister held a position which in itself was neither good nor bad, but which was capable of becoming the one or the other, according to the character of the man. In Gallatin’s hands it was excellent. Not only was Mr. Gallatin a man of refinement in manners, tastes, and expression, a man of dignified and persuasive address, such as suited the highly exacting society of Paris under Louis XVIII.; he had a passport much more effective than this to the heart of French society. By family he was one of themselves. In Geneva, indeed, where republican institutions prevailed, there were no titles and no privileges attached to the name of Gallatin; but in France the family had been received as noble centuries since, and Mr. Gallatin had presumedly the right to appear before Louis XVIII. as the Comte de Gallatin, had he chosen to do so. His distant cousin, then minister of the King of Würtemberg at Paris, was, in fact, known as Comte de Gallatin, a royalist and conservative of the purest breed, but closely intimate with and attached to his democratic relative. This accident of noblesse was a matter of peculiar and exceptional importance at this Court, which was itself an accident and an anomaly, a curious fragment of the eighteenth century, floating, a mere wreck, on the turbulent ocean of French democracy. As one of an ancient family whom the Kings of France had from time immemorial recognized as noble, Mr. Gallatin was kindly received at Court; he was somewhat a favorite with the King and the royal family, and it is said that on one occasion Louis, in complimenting him upon his French, maliciously added, “but I think my English is better than yours;” a remark which must have called up in the minds of both a curious instantaneous retrospect and comparison of the circumstances under which they had learned that language,—a retrospect less agreeable to the King, one might suppose, than to Mr. Gallatin. There was another aristocratic tie between the minister and Parisian society. As already shown, Mme. de Staël had established relations with Mr. Gallatin on his first visit to Paris before the negotiations at Ghent. She had been very useful in bringing the Emperor Alexander in contact with American influences. She was herself by birth and residence a Genevan, and a distant relative of the Gallatins. Her daughter was married to the Duke de Broglie in February, 1816, and as a consequence Mr. Gallatin found a new intimacy ready to his hand. American readers of the Memoirs of George Ticknor will remember how much the Spanish historian owed to that intimacy with the Broglies, which he obtained through Mr. Gallatin’s introduction, among others, to Mme. de Staël.

But the charm of Parisian society in Mr. Gallatin’s eyes did not consist in his aristocratic affiliations. These indeed smoothed his path and relieved him from that sense of awkward strangeness which was the lot of most American diplomates in European society; but his sympathies lay with another class of men. “There is Talleyrand,” said he to Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, when introducing him at court; “he is a humbug, unworthy of his reputation, but the world thinks otherwise, and you must not speak of my opinion.” The apostles of legitimacy and the oracles of the Faubourg St. Germain were never favorites with him, and his old republican principles were rather revived than weakened by this contact with the essence of all he had most disliked in his younger and more ardent days. His real sympathies lay with the men of science; with Humboldt, with La Place, or with pure diplomatists like Pozzo di Borgo, the brilliant Russian ambassador at Paris, with whom his relations were close and confidential; or, finally, with French liberals like La Fayette, between whom and all Americans the kindest exchange of friendly civilities was incessant. Insufficient as the salary of American minister was, Mr. Gallatin had a handsome establishment and entertained as freely as his position required. The company he selected as a matter of personal choice may be partly inferred from a dinner at which Mr. Ogle Tayloe was present in 1819; La Fayette, the Duke de Broglie, his brother-in-law, De Staël, Lord and Lady Ashburton (Alexander Baring), and Baron Humboldt. “Humboldt talked nearly all the time in good English.” French society was, however, in a very disturbed condition, and Mr. Gallatin did not always find it easy to avoid embarrassments. One example of such difficulties occurred in the case of La Place, who was somewhat sensitive in regard to his relations with the reigning family, and who, on finding himself about to be seated at Mr. Gallatin’s table in company with so obnoxious a Republican as La Fayette, was seized with a sudden illness and obliged to return home.

Social amusements, however, Mr. Gallatin regarded very much as he did good wine or good cooking,—things desirable in themselves, but ending with the momentary gratification. He made no record of this evanescent intellectual flavor. He wrote almost nothing except his official letters. During no period of his life are his memoranda and his correspondence so meagre and uninteresting as now. He had little to occupy him so far as official work was concerned, except at intervals when some emergency arose, and at first he chafed at this want of interest. He was indeed always possessed with the idea that he would rather be at home, and he averred every year with great regularity that he expected to return in the following summer. This is, however, a very common if not universal rule among American diplomatists of the active type. In reality, Mr. Gallatin never was so happy and never so thoroughly in his proper social sphere as when he lived in Paris and talked of Indian antiquities with Humboldt, of bi-metallic currency with Baring, and of Spanish diplomacy with Pozzo di Borgo.

Even his letters to Jefferson show his self-reproachful idleness:

GALLATIN TO JEFFERSON.

Paris, 17th July, 1817.

Dear Sir,—...The growing prosperity of the United States is an object of admiration for all the friends of liberty in Europe, a reproach on almost all the European governments. At no period has America stood on higher ground abroad than now, and every one who represents her may feel a just pride in the contrast between her situation and that of all other countries, and in the feeling of her perfect independence from all foreign powers. This last sentiment acquires new force here in seeing the situation of France, under the guardianship of the four great potentates. That this state of things should cease is in every respect highly desirable. Although not immediately affected by it, we cannot but wish to see the ancient natural check of England resume its place in the system of the civilized world; and it can hardly be borne in the present state of knowledge, that Austria or Russia should in the great scale stand before France. Indeed, it is only physical power that now prevails, and as I had most sincerely wished that France, when oppressing others, should be driven back within her own bounds, I may be allowed to sigh for her emancipation from foreign yoke. I cannot view the arrangements made at Vienna as calculated to ensure even tranquillity. There is now a kind of torpid breathing-spell; but the fire is not extinct. The political institutions do not either here, in Italy, or even in Germany, harmonize with the state of knowledge, with the feelings and wishes of the people. What must be the consequence? New conflicts whenever opportunity will offer, and bloody revolutions effected or attempted, instead of that happy, peaceable, and gradual improvement which philanthropists had anticipated, and which seems to be exclusively the portion of our happy country.

We have lately lost Mme. de Staël, and she is a public loss. Her mind improved with her years without any diminution of her fine and brilliant genius. She was a power by herself, and had more influence on public opinion, and even on the acts of government, than any other person not in the ministry. I may add that she was one of your most sincere admirers.

I thirst for America, and I hope that the time is not distant when I may again see her shores and enjoy the blessings which are found only there. There I also hope of once more meeting with you.

Nevertheless, Mr. Gallatin was far from idle during these seven years. The wars in Europe had left a long train of diplomatic disputes behind them. Commercial treaties were necessary for the protection of American commerce. The old difficulties with England were still unsettled, and were pressing for settlement. Spain was always on the verge of war with the United States, both in respect to her undecided Florida boundary and the status of her revolted American colonies. Mr. Gallatin was at the head of the diplomatic service, highly valued both by Mr. Monroe, by Mr. Adams, who, in 1817, succeeded Mr. Monroe as Secretary of State, and by Mr. Crawford, who, as Secretary of the Treasury, had much to say in regard to questions of foreign commerce. Perhaps there was more unanimity among these three gentlemen, in their opinions of Mr. Gallatin, than there was on any other political subject. In fact, since the time of Dr. Franklin, the United States had never sent a minister abroad with qualifications equal to his, and it will never be possible to find a minister to France who approaches more nearly the highest ideal; accordingly, the government mainly depended upon him for its work, and economized his services by employing him freely in all its foreign relations.

1818.

The immediate object of sending a minister to France was to press for a settlement of American claims. These claims ran back ten years or more, to the time of the Berlin and Milan decrees, when large numbers of American ships with their cargoes were seized and confiscated, or destroyed at sea, by order of the Emperor Napoleon, in violation of every principle of decency, equity, and law. To exact a settlement of these claims was one of the points on which our country was most determined; to elude a settlement was a matter of equal determination with the government of Louis XVIII. No one, least of all the French ministries of the restoration, denied the indignity and the outrage of the robberies committed by Napoleon, nor did they quite venture to assert that Louis was not responsible for the acts of his predecessor; indeed, in Mr. Gallatin’s first interview with the Duke de Richelieu, that minister frankly admitted the justice of the demand, and only asked some consideration for the helpless condition of France, weighed to the ground by indemnities exacted from her by the great European powers. But this was only a temporary weakness; Mr. Gallatin very soon found that there was little hope of obtaining any formal recognition, much less any settlement, of his claims, and he saw with some irritation and some amusement a host of difficulties, side-issues, petty complaints, and assumed quarrels, started by one French minister after another to distract his attention and check his pressure, until year after year elapsed without his gaining a single step, and at last the minister in 1823, M. de Chateaubriand, ceased to pay his notes any attention at all, and contented himself with replying that they did not alter his view of the subject. This exhausted Mr. Gallatin’s patience, and he roundly told M. de Chateaubriand that if France meant to remain friends with America, her conduct must be changed. Simple as the case was, Mr. Gallatin gained nothing in seven years of patient effort; his elaborate and admirable notes were utterly thrown away; and he left the whole question at last, to all appearance, precisely where he found it.

During the first year of his residence abroad, this subject of the French claims was the only one which occupied his attention, and when it became clear that the French government would do nothing about these, he complained that he was absolutely without occupation. In July, 1817, he was sent to the Hague to assist Dr. Eustis, then minister there, in negotiating a commercial treaty with the Netherlands. This negotiation occupied two months and was also a failure. The Dutch insisted even more pertinaciously than the English on what Mr. Gallatin called the “preposterous ground” of colonial equivalents. It was found impossible even to stipulate for the mutual abandonment of discriminating duties, a stipulation which Mr. Gallatin regarded as the most valuable part of his convention with England in 1815. The Dutch insisted that a repeal of discriminating duties must not be limited merely to importations of the produce and manufactures of the two countries, and argued with great force that the geographical position of Holland and Belgium made it impossible to distinguish between their own produce and that brought down the Rhine or from across their border. To this Mr. Gallatin could only reply that his government could not offer more than fair reciprocity, and that the abolition of discriminating duties such as the Dutch claimed, would be wholly to the disadvantage of the American merchant and equally so to that of the American government in its negotiations with other powers. Yet, if the Dutch would have conceded the first point of admitting American vessels on favorable terms to their East India colonies, some compromise might have been effected in regard to the discriminating duties; in the inability to effect any transaction of this sort, the negotiation was in a friendly way adjourned.

In the following year Mr. Gallatin was employed on a more serious mission. The commercial convention of July 3, 1815, which he had negotiated in London after the Treaty of Ghent, would expire by limitation in July, 1819, and a timely agreement with the British government in regard to its renewal was very desirable. The opportunity was taken by the President to reopen negotiations on the whole range of disputed points left unsettled by the Treaty of Ghent, or arising under that treaty. As for impressment, indeed, Lord Castlereagh had very recently again declined the American proposals for a settlement, and the subject was therefore not pressed; but the fisheries, the commercial intercourse with Canada and the West Indies, and the boundary from Lake Superior to the Rocky Mountains, were all added to the negotiation; indemnity for slaves carried away under the Treaty of Ghent was to be urged; and the serious character of the dispute over the North-West boundary was just beginning to make itself evident in connection with Mr. Astor’s trading settlement on the Columbia River.

Mr. Richard Rush was then the American minister in England; he had been called into public life by Gallatin, who made him Comptroller of the Treasury and presumably urged him for the place of Attorney-General, to which post he had been appointed on the retirement of William Pinkney in 1811. With him Mr. Gallatin was on most friendly terms, and Mr. Rush welcomed with great pleasure, what is always a somewhat delicate act, the intrusion of a third person in his relations with the government to which he was accredited. Mr. Gallatin was ordered to England, where he arrived August 16, 1818, and was occupied till the end of October, his “necessary and reasonable expenses” being, as usual, his only remuneration.

The negotiation with England of 1818 was not very much more fruitful in result than that of 1815; nevertheless the two countries had made some progress. On the one hand, Lord Castlereagh was still far in advance of public sentiment and had done something towards breaking down the insular arrogance of the colonial and navigation system; on the other hand, the United States government had plucked up courage to hasten the rapidity of British movements by retaliatory legislation of its own. Early in 1817 Congress passed two acts, by one of which British vessels were prohibited from importing into the United States any articles other than those which were produced or manufactured within the British dominions; by the other a tonnage duty of two dollars a ton was levied on all foreign vessels entering the United States from any foreign port with which vessels of the United States were not ordinarily permitted to trade. A year later, shortly before Mr. Gallatin was sent to England, Congress had gone one step further, and had absolutely closed the ports of the United States against every British vessel coming from ports ordinarily closed against vessels of the United States.

This was the condition of affairs with which Mr. Gallatin and Mr. Rush had to deal. As in 1815, the British government was represented by Mr. Frederic Robinson, now president of the Board of Trade, assisted by Mr. Goulburn. The American commissioners offered five articles, covering the fisheries, the boundary, the West India trade, that with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and the captured slaves. The English plenipotentiaries offered a scheme for regulating impressment. Finally, the Americans proposed a series of rules in regard to contraband and maritime points.

The result of repeated conferences was to throw out the articles on maritime rights and impressment, and to refer the West India article to the President. A convention limited to ten years was then signed covering the fisheries, the boundary between the Lake of the Woods and the Rocky Mountains, the joint use of the Columbia River, the slave indemnity, and finally the renewal of the commercial convention of 1815. On the whole, there was certainly a considerable improvement in the relations of the two countries; even in the matter of impressments, Lord Castlereagh was ready to concede very nearly all that was required; the navigation of the Mississippi was definitively set at rest; even in regard to the West India trade, Mr. Robinson made very liberal concessions, and accepted in full the principle that this trade should be thrown open on principles of perfect reciprocity. That the British should have got so far as to admit that they were ready to open this trade at all on principles of reciprocity was no small step, but when Mr. Gallatin undertook to put upon paper his ideas of perfect reciprocity, it was found that agreement was still out of the question. He required that the vessels and their cargoes should on either side be subject to no charges to which both parties should not be equally liable, while the British insisted upon reserving the right to impose discriminating duties in favor of the trade of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Mr. Robinson did not, however, attempt to defend the dogmas of the British colonial and navigation laws; he only urged the impossibility of breaking them down at once. To the American argument of reciprocity he opposed the powerful interests he was obliged to humor,—the fish and the lumber of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick; the salted provisions and the flour of Ireland; the shipping of England; and the influence of the West India planters who sat in Parliament or moved in the business circles of the city.

There could be little doubt that the new retaliatory legislation of the United States would sooner or later bring the two countries into collision on this old subject of controversy; for the United States government was by no means inclined to look back with pleasure or with pride upon the humiliations which it had endured, ever since the peace of 1783, on this point of the colonial trade. Perhaps it had now a tendency to assert its rights and its dignity in a tone somewhat too abrupt, and even unnecessarily irritating to European ears. The new-born sense of nationality with which, since the peace of Ghent, every American citizen was swelling would tolerate from the national government nothing short of the fullest assertion of the national pride; and political parties no longer, as in the days of Mr. Jefferson, shrank from supporting their rights by force. Mr. Gallatin had done what he could to prevent mischief, and it remained to be seen whether his efforts were to be successful. His despatches dwelt repeatedly on the intimation of Mr. Robinson that Great Britain was certain to recede if she were allowed time to prepare, and that unlimited intercourse with the colonies would be the sure result of such a partial intercourse as he offered. On the other hand, however, the United States were still better aware that English diplomacy was inclined to respect very little except strength.

While the colonial dispute was thus left open, another serious question was only partially closed. On the subject of the fisheries, Mr. Gallatin effected a compromise not altogether satisfactory even to himself; he obtained an express recognition of the permanent right, but he was obliged to concede essential limitations of the practice. Perhaps, indeed, this question is one of those which admits of no complete settlement; as Mr. Gallatin wrote on November 6 to Mr. Adams: “The right of taking and drying fish in harbors within the exclusive jurisdiction of Great Britain, particularly on coasts now inhabited, was extremely obnoxious to her, and was considered as what the French civilians call a servitude.... I am satisfied that we could have obtained additional fishing-ground in exchange of the words ‘for ever.’... Yet I will not conceal that this subject caused me more anxiety than any other branch of the negotiations, and that, after having participated in the Treaty of Ghent, it was a matter of regret to be obliged to sign an agreement which left the United States in any respect in a worse situation than before the war.... But ... if a compromise was to take place, the present time and the terms proposed appeared more eligible than the chance of future contingencies.... With much reluctance I yielded to those considerations, rendered more powerful by our critical situation with Spain, and used my best endeavors to make the compromise on the most advantageous terms that could be obtained.”[155]

On his return to Paris in October, 1818, an entirely different class of objects forced themselves on Mr. Gallatin’s attention. This was the period when Spain’s American colonies were in revolt, and it was of the highest importance to the United States that Europe should intervene in no way in the quarrel. Mr. Gallatin’s business was to obtain early information of whatever concerned this subject, and to prepare the European powers for the recognition by the United States of the South American republics. The Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle was then sitting, and its proceedings were an object of intense curiosity throughout the world. So far as the policy of the United States was concerned, the result of this congress was very favorable; for Spain, finding herself abandoned by Europe, was driven into a treaty for the sale of Florida. This treaty was made, but its ratification was refused by the Spanish government on various pretexts, until a new revolution in Spain brought about a change of policy. In all these transactions Mr. Gallatin was deeply interested, and his advices to the home government furnished much of its best information.

1819.

Meanwhile, his powers to negotiate a commercial convention with France had lain nearly dormant, until in 1819 they were called out by a complication which soon brought the two countries to the verge of a commercial war. The French commercial system had never been a very enlightened one, but so long as her shipping remained in the state of nullity in which the long wars left it, American commerce had hardly perceived the fact that American ships were loaded with extra charges and discriminating duties such as made quite impossible all effective competition with the vessels of France. When at last the French commercial marine revived, complaints of the excessive burden of these discriminating duties and charges began to pour in from American consuls and merchants. The question was one of time only, when all commerce between the United States and France would be carried on exclusively in French ships. Well aware that the French government was entirely controlled in its commercial policy by the spirit of monopoly and narrow interests, Mr. Gallatin, while remonstrating to the minister of foreign affairs, warned the President that mere remonstrance would have no effect and that stronger measures must be used. He would have preferred an amendment to the Constitution authorizing Congress to lay an export duty on American produce when exported in foreign vessels; but, rather than wait for so distant and uncertain a remedy, he recommended that Congress should at once impose a countervailing tonnage duty of $12.50 per ton on French ships. This despatch was written on the 25th October, 1819. The rest of the story may be found recorded in Mr. Adams’s Diary:

1820.

“May 15, 1820.—...Mr. Hyde de Neuville, the French minister, was there [at the Capitol] much fretted at the passage of a bill for levying a tonnage duty of $18 a ton upon French vessels, to commence the 1st July next. It is merely a countervailing duty to balance discriminating duties in France upon the same articles as imported in French or American vessels. It passes on the earnest recommendation of Mr. Gallatin after a neglect of three years by the French government of our repeated proposals to negotiate a commercial treaty, and after full warning given by Mr. Gallatin that, if they did not come to some arrangement with us, countervailing measures would be taken at the present session of Congress. The bill has been before Congress half the session, and De Neuville had never mentioned it to me. He probably had flattered himself that it would not pass. Now, after it had passed both Houses, he was in great agitation about it, and entreated me to ask the President to object to its passage, at least to postpone its commencement till the 1st of October. He said the 1st of July was only six weeks off, and would not even give the French merchants notice of what was awaiting them.... I told him it was now too late to make the amendment. I mentioned, however, his request to the President, who said it could not be complied with.”

“September 5, 1820.—I received a despatch of 14th July from A. Gallatin, after Mr. Hyde de Neuville had arrived in Paris. Gallatin encloses a copy of a very able note that he had sent to Baron Pasquier, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, concerning the tonnage duty upon French vessels coming into the ports of the United States, laid at the last session of Congress, but he complains that the measures of Congress, which he had recommended, were not adopted, but others more irritating to France, and also that his letters were published. The law of Congress was certainly a blister, and his letters were not oil to soften its application. The commencement of the law was fixed too soon, and the duty was too high. But France had been so sluggish and so deaf to friendly representations that it was necessary to awaken her by acts of another tone.”

1821.

Certainly government was much to blame in this matter. Mr. Gallatin sent over a careful outline of the bill he wished to pass, fixing the duty at $12.50 and arranging the details so as to facilitate negotiation. Government proceeded to enact an unjust and extravagant bill, and then threw the responsibility on Mr. Gallatin. This is the special annoyance to which diplomatic agents are most frequently subjected. Mr. Gallatin remonstrated to his government and maintained his position stoutly against the French minister, who, after at once doubling the French discriminating duties, at last transferred the negotiation to Washington, where Mr. Adams was obliged to take it up.

“February 24, 1821.—I called at the President’s with a note received of yesterday’s date from the French minister, Hyde de Neuville. I sent him two or three days since the copy of a full power, made out by the President’s direction, authorizing me to treat with him upon commercial arrangements. The note of yesterday was introductory to the negotiation. Its principal object was to ask an answer to a long letter which De Neuville had written to me the 16th of June, 1818, upon a claim raised by the French government upon the 8th article of the Louisiana cession treaty. I had already answered one long note of his upon the subject, and had left his reply unanswered only to avoid altercation upon a claim which had no substance and upon which my answer to his first letter was of itself a sufficient answer to his reply. But when after the Act of Congress of 15th May last, and the retaliatory ordinances of the King of France of 26th July, the French government had been dragged into this negotiation, finding themselves unanswerably pressed by notes of great ability from Gallatin, they started from the course by setting up again this Louisiana claim and declaring it indispensably connected with the arrangement of the question upon discriminating duties. And as Mr. Gallatin was not instructed upon the Louisiana claim, they made this a pretext for transferring the negotiation here, and sending De Neuville back here to finish it, with an ulterior destination to Brazil, held out to our cotton-planters ‘in terrorem.’”

But if Mr. Adams irritated Mr. Gallatin by the manner of carrying out his recommendation of retaliatory laws against France, Mr. Gallatin irritated Mr. Adams by his treatment of another diplomatic difficulty still more delicate. A French ship, the Apollon, had been seized by order of our government in the river St. Mary’s, on the Spanish side, for infringing and evading our navigation laws. The seizure was a high-handed act, hardly defensible in law, and of the same class with many acts rendered, or supposed to be rendered, necessary by the inefficiency of the Spanish administration in Florida. Mr. Adams, who rarely allowed himself to be hindered by merely technical impediments in carrying out a correct policy, defended this act much as he defended the far more unjustifiable execution of Arbuthnot and Ambrister by General Jackson; that is, he made the best defence he could, and carried it off with a high hand. Mr. Gallatin, however, tried to justify the seizure by proving that it took place in American waters, and in discussing the subject in correspondence with Mr. Adams he added the remark which was, to any one who knew his mode of thought, quite inevitable as his summing up, that the tenor of Mr. Adams’s argument was dangerous and would not find acceptance in Europe. This seems to have extremely irritated the Secretary, and called out the following entry in his Diary:

“8th November, 1821.—The most extraordinary part of Gallatin’s conduct is that after a long argument to the French government upon grounds entirely new and different from those we had taken here, he gives us distinctly to understand that he considers all these grounds, ours and his own, as not worth a straw. I asked Calhoun to-day what he thought it could mean. He said perhaps it was the pride of opinion. I think it lies deeper. Gallatin is a man of first-rate talents, conscious and vain of them, and mortified in his ambition, checked, as it has been, after attaining the last step to the summit; timid in great perils, tortuous in his paths; born in Europe, disguising and yet betraying a supercilious prejudice of European superiority of intellect, and holding principles pliable to circumstances, occasionally mistaking the left for the right-handed wisdom.”

The character thus drawn by Mr. Adams is very interesting as a study of something more than Mr. Gallatin only. Mr. Gallatin certainly was a man of first-rate talents and was no doubt conscious of them; he would have been more than human had he not felt the injustice of that prejudice which had shut the door of the Presidency in his face because he was born in another republic; he certainly had the faculty of keeping his opinions, whatever they were, to himself, which is always an assumption of superiority; he was moreover an extremely adroit politician, full of resource, conciliatory and pliable in a remarkable degree; possibly, too, he may have at times mistaken his path. Timid he was not, but his courage was of a kind so perfectly self-assured that it often disregarded imputations of timidity which would have been intolerable to more sensitive men. Mr. Adams himself long afterwards and in the most public manner paid a tribute to his absolute honesty such as he would have been willing to pay hardly any other very prominent man of the time, unless it were Madison and Monroe. The character may, therefore, be admitted as at least half true, and as throwing much light on its subject; but it was very amusing as coming from the sources that produced it. Ambition is not, within reasonable limits, a deadly sin, but if it were, there was not a leading man of that time, from Thomas Jefferson to De Witt Clinton, whose chance of salvation was better than Mr. Gallatin’s. Vanity is a pardonable weakness, but the virtue of extreme modesty was not among those merits which most characterized the American statesmen of President Monroe’s day. Pliability in politics, if accompanied by honesty, is a virtue; business can be conducted in no other way; but in all Mr. Gallatin’s long career there was and was to be no parallel to the political pliability to be found among the Cabinet officers of President Monroe. Human nature is only relatively perfect; absolute perfection is a higher standard than statesmen are required to attain; but even as regards relative perfection, there is a curious suggestiveness in finding Mr. Gallatin singled out for pride of opinion, vanity, timidity, and tortuousness, pliability, superciliousness, and mistakes of judgment, among Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Adams, Mr. Crawford and Mr. Clay.

This, however, was merely one of those diplomatic quarrels which, like those at Ghent, have no real significance. Mr. Gallatin was probably right in the opinion which vexed his chief. At all events, the French negotiation went on undisturbed, and even after its transfer to Washington, which a very sensitive man would have felt as a slight, Mr. Gallatin continued his active assistance to Mr. Adams and pressed upon the French government with all his weight. Ultimately an agreement was effected and a treaty signed at Washington which, as Mr. Gallatin seems to have thought, conceded somewhat more than was necessary, but which at least put an end to the commercial war.

1822.

The conclusion of this treaty had been the principal object of Mr. Gallatin’s continuance at Paris, but this affair, the anxious condition of our relations with Spain, and his own increasing sense of satisfaction in diplomatic life, made him contented and even happy to remain over the year 1822. Mr. Crawford, whose candidacy for the succession to Mr. Monroe was then likely to prove successful, took pains to maintain close relations with Mr. Gallatin, and was especially anxious for his early return in order that his influence might be felt in the important State of Pennsylvania. This duty seems, however, to have little suited Mr. Gallatin’s taste. He remained of his own accord in Paris, his opinion agreeing with that of the President that his presence there was desirable. At the same time he declined the office of president of the Bank of the United States. While thus holding himself aloof from public interests in America, he took a resolution which seems to show how little he understood the change that time and experience had worked in his circumstances. He sent his younger son to New Geneva with directions to build a stone house in extension of the brick building he had constructed thirty years before; here he proposed to return with his family and to pass the remainder of his life.

One of Sir Walter Scott’s favorite sayings was that the wisest of our race often reserve the average stock of folly to be all expended upon some one flagrant absurdity. He might have added that when a shrewd and cautious man once commits such a folly there is more than a fair probability of his repeating it. Mr. Calhoun, who should have had some sympathy with this trait, may have been right in seeking for the source of unusual acts in “pride of opinion;” or a wider philosophy might trace such eccentricities to the peculiar structure of individual minds and to ineradicable habits of thought. Mr. Gallatin had in the pride of youth and the full fervor of fresh enthusiasm committed the folly of burying himself in the wilderness, and now, when more than sixty years old, after an active life of constant excitement, with a family of children almost entirely educated in Paris, and a wife who even thirty years before had found the western country intolerable, he proposed to return there and end his life. Had the great wave of western improvement swept New Geneva before it in its course, there might have been an excuse for Mr. Gallatin’s determination; but New Geneva remained what he had left it, a beautiful and peaceful mountain valley, where no human being could find other employment than that of cultivating the soil with his own hands. There Mr. Gallatin decided to go, on the extraordinary plea that he could afford to live nowhere else, and the loss of a part of his private income in 1823 only fixed him more firmly in his determination.