The current pasha, America’s enemy Yusuf Karamanli, had come to power a decade earlier by fomenting a coup against his brother Hamet while the latter was away from the city. America could take sides with Hamet Karamanli, who would march upon Tripoli from the landward side at the head of a force of Arabs and Mamelukes. Hamet vowed that in case of success, he would free all of his state’s Christian slaves, allow the Americans to garrison one of the chief batteries guarding his capital’s harbor, and free the United States of any obligations of tribute or ransom forevermore. Yusuf would suffer the fate customary in such cases: hanging.22

  So a local force participated in bringing the First Barbary War to its successful conclusion. Once an Egyptian force commanded by American diplomat William Eaton made its way from Alexandria, Egypt, to Tripolitan Derna (on “the shores of Tripoli”) en route to Benghazi, this threat, the presence of Hamet Karmanli’s force on the Gulf of Sidra, and news that five American frigates would make their appearance at the beginning of the next campaign season drove Yusuf to negotiate. He conceded that he knew the Americans would take the city if it came to that. Reckoning that once installed, Hamet was unlikely to hold power in Tripoli, America paid no tribute and no peace bribe, but it did pay a $60,000 ransom for the number of Americans held captive by Tripoli in excess of the Tripolitans held by the United States. America had her Mediterranean trade once again, though the president’s dreams of a neutral naval coalition to suppress Barbary piracy forever never reached fruition. The United States would have to confront the matter on its own again during the Madison administration.23

  Dealing with the Barbary states was one thing. Relations with the major European powers proved to be quite another. President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison expected, as their second term in tandem began, for foreign affairs to play a significant part in their next four years’ stewardship. Having won glory via the Louisiana Purchase, they anticipated a new triumph in connection with West Florida.

  That was the name of the Spanish province stretching from the Perdido River to the Mississippi River—essentially, the coastal portions of today’s states of Alabama and Mississippi, plus the part of Louisiana east of the Mississippi. Jefferson and Madison calculated that their success in buying the enormous Louisiana Territory from France, most powerful nation in the world, augured well for their chances of prying relatively small West Florida from Spain. If France had Europe’s ablest leader, best farmland, and largest population, after all, Spain had few natural resources, a sub-mediocre king, and few people. Because Spain bordered France and had for generations played second fiddle in a family entente with the senior branch of the Bourbon dynasty ruling in Paris, and because Napoleon’s recent abandonment of St. Domingue (now Haiti) meant he would not recoup the revenue stream thus lost to France, it seemed entirely likely that Emperor Napoleon would facilitate American success in prying West Florida from Spain.

  As we have seen, the American negotiators Monroe and Livingston asked the French foreign minister, Talleyrand, whether he agreed that the Louisiana Territory purchased by them from France included West Florida, and he gave an obscure non-answer. Napoleon was not one to respect a country shorn, as Jeffersonian America by design was, of whatever paltry military assets it had possessed. Besides that, the events of the first year of Jefferson’s second term, 1805, hardened Napoleon’s disposition to side with France’s traditional ally Spain in whatever diplomatic difficulty it might encounter with the United States.

  Although he had impressed all of Europe with his Italian victories of 1796, 1797, and 1800, it was in 1805 that Napoleon established himself as one of the great captains of history. His smashing Austerlitz Campaign, beginning with a superlatively brilliant encirclement of Austria’s fifty-thousand-man army at Ulm and capped by his destruction of a combined Russian-Austrian army at Austerlitz, since immortalized in Count Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, put him on the road to complete domination of Europe.

  Further complicating the diplomatic picture from America’s point of view was an event toward the end of the year off Cape Trafalgar in southwestern Spain. There a smaller British fleet under the command of Vice Admiral Horatio, Lord Nelson destroyed the combined fleets of France, Spain, and The Netherlands, capturing or destroying eighteen ships in history’s most decisive naval battle.24 This outcome made Britannia ruler of the waves for the nonce—if she could man her warships.

  From the great powers’ point of view, America did not much matter. France’s master had his eye on completing his subjugation of Europe (which he did with a crushing defeat of Prussia’s armies in 1806 and a win over a combined Russian-Austrian army, thus bringing about a Russian peace, in 1807) as a necessary prelude to reducing Britain, while the British determined to use their naval supremacy to defend their home islands and undermine Napoleon’s Continental System. American attempts to bring one or the other of the main combatants to diverge from the path it was on proved futile. Predictably. The end of Jefferson’s administration did not mark any great turning point in this course of affairs. Rather, Secretary Madison’s succession to the presidency came at a point of ignominious American acquiescence.

  America had profited handsomely from its neutrality through Jefferson’s first term. It traded with both of the leading belligerents under cover of the slogan “Free ships make free goods,” which stood for the idea that while a belligerent’s ship could rightly be interdicted by its enemy, a neutral party’s shipping was to be left alone. Not only could the Americans trade their wares and crops with the British home islands and Napoleonic Europe, but American ships traded freely with the belligerents’ New World colonies as well. In the middle of 1805, that course of business came to a crashing halt.

  The Essex decision of July 23, 1805, resuscitated strict enforcement of the so-called Rule of 1756.25 Under that rule the British Admiralty declared impermissible in wartime any trade that would have been prohibited in peacetime. In other words, for example, if France had not allowed neutral (American) ships to trade between French Caribbean colonies and the French homeland prior to resumption of hostilities in 1803, Britain would not allow such trade in wartime.

  Although this general policy had been on the books prior to the Essex decision, Britain had allowed Americans to skirt it via the fiction of the broken voyage. Thus, while an American ship could not take, say, sugar directly from Guadeloupe to Bordeaux in wartime without running afoul of British policy because it had not been allowed by France’s mercantile laws to do so in peacetime, if the American ship stopped at, say, Philadelphia en route, unloaded the sugar at the American port, and then reloaded it for the Atlantic voyage, this was treated not as a voyage from the French island colony to the French port, but as transportation of American goods from Philadelphia to France. The British navy treated it as two voyages rather than one. What the Essex holding did was put an end to this fiction. From now on the Royal Navy would treat the broken voyage as the ruse it was, which meant that an American merchant ship bound from Guadeloupe to Bordeaux and its cargo were apt to be seized and sold by His Majesty’s Government regardless of whether the ship had stopped in an American port on its way.

  The Essex decision reflected more than a single British judge’s calculation about American ships and the French trans-Atlantic trade, however. In a pamphlet entitled War in Disguise; or the Frauds of the Neutral Flags, Englishman James Stephen laid out an understanding of the Jefferson administration’s trade policy notably similar to American Federalists’. Since they carried to and from the French Empire goods that the Royal Navy would otherwise interdict, the Americans and other neutrals were benefiting from aiding Napoleon in what amounted to a war over Britain’s survival. The British had no reason to tolerate this behavior.

  The Essex decision and the pamphlet virtually coincided with the epic victory off Cape Trafalgar and with stepped-up British impressment of sailors from American merchant ships. This British practice—stopping American ships at sea, questioning the crew members, and forcing those identified as British into the Royal Navy on the spot—stoked considerable animosity in the United States. As the president described the situation, “What an awful spectacle does the world exhibit at this instance. One nation bestriding the continent of Europe like a Colossus, and another roaming unbridled on the ocean.”26 Secretary Madison had told Minister Merry even before the Essex decision that retraction of the British impressment policy was an essential precondition of an improvement in British-American relations. Impressments, Madison confided to Monroe, were an “evil” to which Americans felt “growing sensibility.” Although the secretary instructed Monroe to ensure that Whitehall did not take American complaints about impressment to be “marks of illiberal or hostile sentiments towards Great Britain,” he wanted his representative to convey the depth of American concern.27 The imperative to respond to this situation would dominate the attention of the Cabinet and Congress to a growing degree through the balance of Jefferson’s presidency—and into that of his successor.

  24

  Meantime American diplomatic efforts in Europe reached a kind of climax. James Monroe proceeded from Paris to Madrid with the idea of wringing from the feeble Spanish government acquiescence in the American claim that the Louisiana Territory included West Florida. Foreign Minister Talleyrand allowed Monroe to be on his way on the three-week journey across the Pyrenees, then sent him a communication making clear that no, Napoleon’s government did not agree with the American position: West Florida remained Spanish. It did not form part of the Louisiana Purchase.

  France’s reasons for taking this position are easy to divine. For one thing, so long as the Floridas remained in Spain’s hands, France might again have use of them. For another, difficulty in the relationship between America and Madrid would likely be to France’s advantage, as Talleyrand could serve as a kind of broker between them. This calculation assumed, reasonably, that Jefferson could not conceivably be brought to a rapprochement with the British. Finally, France almost certainly guessed that the Americans could be brought to provide yet more gold for the emperor’s coffers if that were what it took to add the Floridas to their territory. The secretary of state captured the administration’s position clearly when he confided to the French minister to Washington that “when the pear is ripe it will fall of its own accord.”1 Talleyrand at last flatly told the new American minister in Paris, John Armstrong, on December 21, 1804, that the Americans’ claim to the Floridas had absolutely no basis.2

  That John Armstrong Jr., formerly a senator from New York and by this point a relative of the Livingstons by marriage, should have become American minister to France is one of the truly jaw-dropping developments in American political history. This was the same John Armstrong who as a colonel in the Continental Army had played the leading role in the Newburgh Conspiracy, that nearly successful attempt by disgruntled officers to organize a march in force from their upstate New York encampment to the seat of Congress, where they were to extract back pay from that body by what can only charitably be called a mass act of false arrest. A harsher appraisal is that they intended treason.

  Hearing of these plans and informed in advance of those officers’ meeting to finalize their plans, General George Washington famously—and of course without being invited—strode into the meeting, marched straight to the lectern, fumbled around in his breast pocket, pulled out the spectacles virtually no one had known he wore, and as he put them on said, “I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.”3 Only by the margin of the Great Man’s intervention did the United States at that precarious moment dodge the fate of so many other republics in the form of what amounted to a military coup, or at least military coercion of the Confederation Congress.

  John Quincy Adams judged Armstrong’s appointment to be a disreputable act. As he described the Senate confirmation of Armstrong in a March 17, 1806 diary entry,

  There was nothing said this day in his favour. The Speakers against him were Mr. Smith of Maryland, Mr. Pickering, Mr. Wright and myself; who closed the debate. The votes were 15 to 15—And the Vice-President decided in favour of the appointment—Mr. Adair of Kentucky left his seat to avoid voting—He was averse to the appointment, but had not the courage to vote against it; and by his weakness, this shameful transaction was accomplished. Of the 15 members who voted for this nomination two thirds at least answered with faltering voices—I consider it as one of the most disgraceful acts of Mr. Jefferson’s Administration.… 4

  Armstrong would hold this important post until 1810.5

  Although possible political motivations for this appointment seem obvious, that a president so sensitive to the possibility of military usurpation in a republic should have made this choice is strikingly, even shockingly, out of character. Armstrong’s generally sympathetic biographer explains it by observing that Armstrong not only belonged to the Livingston family, but wrote skillfully and knew world affairs. Too, like Jefferson and Madison, Armstrong possessed the means to support himself in what in that day was a costly position.6

  In the end Armstrong’s tenure as minister to France had two notable effects. First, he appears at the emperor’s invitation in Jacques-Louis David’s momentous masterwork Le Sacre de Napoléon.7 More important, Armstrong’s ministerial service, when joined to his stint as a senator and his Livingston connection, qualified him for a significant position in the Cabinet, which he would hold to great—and woeful—effect in the Madison administration.

  With the failure of his Spanish mission, Monroe became available for a new post in Great Britain, where he joined William Pinkney in endeavoring to negotiate some modus vivendi with the mother country. The British government’s new posture toward the United States promised to make that difficult. Madison, following lengthy discussions with Jefferson and his fellow Cabinet secretaries, repeatedly sent lengthy letters instructing the two of them to ensure an end to impressment—the British practice of on-the-spot conscription of sailors on American merchant vessels whom British naval officers identified as British. In case it could be helpful, Madison relayed to Monroe that “Incidents are daily occurring which otherwise may overcome the calculating policy of the Present Executive, & provoke the public temper into an irresistible impetus on the public Councils.”8

  Soon enough Madison informed Monroe that “In the American seas … the scene … I fear is growing worse and worse.” Congress perhaps would legislate an exclusion of any ship believed to have participated in impressment from American ports, which it only delayed doing in hopes of a negotiated end to such behavior.9

  Madison first hoped that an end to impressment might be achieved through informal agreement.10 After relaying the insistence on an end to impressments, Madison at last sent Monroe formal instructions and a draft agreement.11 The draft contemplated resolution of several outstanding issues between the two countries, notably that neither should force a citizen/subject of the other residing within its territory into its navy; that their warships should try to remain out of cannon range of each other; that “contraband of war” subject to seizure should include only certain enumerated items obviously useful by military forces; that a “blockaded port” would be only a port actually blockaded by the other party’s navy; that neither party should give sanctuary to deserters from the other’s armed forces; and a few more suchlike provisions.

  Most notably, each party was to be prohibited from carrying away “any seamen or soldiers” from the other’s territory, and no impressment of any sailor not then “in the Military service of an enemy” of the impressing party was to be allowed. Madison listed this as his first and optimum suggested provision of any agreement. An alternative, “Second and Ultimatum Article I,” allowed one of the parties to take men off the other’s ships “in cases where they may be liable to be so taken according to the law of nations; which liability however, shall not be construed to extend in any case to seamen, or seafaring persons being actually part of the crew of the vessel in which they may be.…”

  Monroe approached the new British premier, Lord Hawkesbury, in his first meeting with him after he succeeded to the premiership about a potential treaty addressing matters arising as a result of the present war and those opened up by the expiration of Jay’s Treaty. Hawkesbury suggested the Jay Treaty form the basis of new negotiations, and he appeared startled by Monroe’s blunt rejection of the idea. Monroe told him that people in Britain knew the present American administration disliked some features of Jay’s handiwork, and the lord said perhaps they should put the matter off, to which Monroe agreed.12

  Hawkesbury agreed to Monroe’s suggestion that some elements of the trade relationship could not be regularized while the war continued, pointing to the slave rising of St. Domingue as illustrative. Monroe suggested America and Britain enter into an interim agreement on the matter of trade, but he rejected the lord’s idea of simply extending Jay’s Treaty while hostilities continued.

  Nothing came of it. A change of ministry in the U.K. if anything brought in a new government less congenial to the United States. Thus in the winter of 1805 Madison sent Monroe his conclusion that “[t]he procrastinations of the British Ministry in meeting you effectively, on the subjects proposed in your project for a Convention betray a repugnance to some of them, and a spirit of evasion, inauspicious to a satisfactory result.” Merry had by now used “language on several late occasions [which] strongly opposed the expectation that Great Britain will ever relinquish her practice of taking her own subjects out of neutral vessels.”13 The Republican high command would remain similarly insistent. Perhaps war would be the outcome.

  The president’s general position in regard to the European broils can be found in a letter he sent to Minister Monroe on January 8, 1804.14 The British diplomat Edward Thornton, echoing long-standing Federalist appraisals, had said that America favored France over Britain, but Jefferson denied it. “[W]e are anxious to see England maintain her standing,” the president insisted, “only wishing she would use her power on the ocean with justice. if she had done this heretofore, other nations would not have stood by & looked on with unconcern on a conflict which endangers her existence.”