To have recognized Amelia Island and Galveztown as independent would in some sense “have sanctioned all the unlawful claims and practices of this pretended Government in regard to the United States,” besides “countenanc[ing] a system of privateering in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere the ill effects of which might … have been deeply and very extensively felt.” Besides, the president explained, the 1811 congressional No-Transfer Resolution and accompanying law were immediately seen as being applicable when the Executive saw McGregor’s proclamation. The operative part of the No-Transfer Resolution said that the United States “could not without serious inquietude see any part of” “the territory adjoining the southern boundary of the United States” pass “into the hands of any foreign Power” and might “under certain contingencies” occupy that territory temporarily itself. In case it did, that territory would “remain subject to a future negotiation.”7 Monroe said that “Early intimation having been received of the dangerous purposes of these adventurers, timely precautions were taken by the establishment of a force near the St. Marys to prevent their effect, or it is probable that it would have been more sensibly felt.”

  After saying that the Spanish colonial governments had been unaware of, and not responsible for, these developments, Monroe expressed confidence that they would “prevent the abuse of their authority in all cases to the injury of the United States.” In case they were unable to do so, “The territory of Spain will nevertheless be respected so far as it may be done consistently with the essential interests and safety of the United States.” The United States had not intended in expelling the adventurers from Spanish territory to injure either Spain or her colonies. That injuries such as those recently suffered should not recur, and no foreign government occupy those territories, he concluded, “will be provided for … in a spirit of amity in the negotiation now depending with the Government of Spain.”

  Secretary Adams and Spanish Minister Luis de Onís y Gonzales had a lot of work to do.

  Their work would be complicated in 1818 by the human analogue of a loose cannon: Battle of New Orleans—and Horseshoe Bend—victor Major General Andrew Jackson. Ordered to pursue the Seminoles to Spain’s chief posts in the Floridas, Jackson went farther. Long having believed that America should seize West and East Florida from the decrepit Spanish administrations there, he seized Pensacola and St. Marks, the colonial capitals, arrested two British subjects he thought had been encouraging the Indians in marauding raids against Americans in Georgia and Alabama Territory, and put the Brits on trial. One, the Scottish trader Alexander Arbuthnot, was hurriedly convicted and sentenced to death, at which point Jackson had him hanged from his ship’s yardarm. The other, former Royal Marine Robert Ambrister, was convicted but not sentenced to capital punishment by the court. Jackson overrode the court’s decision, though in a bow to Ambrister’s military record he sentenced him to a more respectable death by firing squad.8

  Jackson’s attitude concerning his own authority was seen by many in his own day as similar to that of a Caesar. For example, on April 22, 1817, he told his officers that they should not obey orders coming directly from the War Department, but instead should do as the civilians said only if such orders had passed through Jackson. Any other course, he said, “would be a tame surrender of military rights and etiquette.” If George Washington had thought of “the tame surrender of military rights to civil authority as the principal bulwark of republican liberty,” George Washington was no Andrew Jackson.9 Given the slowness of communications between the Florida frontier and Washington, D.C., it took six months for President Monroe to be informed of this, run it past his Cabinet, and send Jackson a correction. Characteristically indirect as Jackson was nearly the opposite, Monroe told his constitutional subordinate that he did not know how Jackson’s directive could be acceptable. He closed his letter by saying that of course he hoped Jackson would stay in service.10

  On December 26, 1817, John Quincy Adams noted that he “[r]eceived a Note from the President, asking me to call at his house at twelve O’Clock, to meet the other Heads of Departments, and consult upon the War, with a Southern tribe of Indians; the Seminoles.”11 Monroe told Adams, who arrived an hour early, that he should consult freely with the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, saying, “This had heretofore been the practice and had been found very useful to the Government,” and that Representative John Forsyth, R-GA, was friendly to the administration. At noon Crawford, Calhoun, and Crowninshield arrived and the discussion began. “The Seminole Indians,” Adams wrote, “have commenced actual hostilities; and cut off a detachment of fifty men going with a boat and provisions for a part of the troops under General Gaines.” In response Monroe and his advisors decided Jackson was to be sent to take command, while Gaines was to concentrate all of his men, “with the Addition of Militia from the State of Georgia, and to reduce them by force, pursuing them into East Florida, if they should retreat for refuge there.…”

  Calhoun had told General Edmund Pendleton Gaines ten days before to feel free to march into Florida and attack the Seminoles “unless they should shelter themselves under a Spanish post.” When he learned of this, Jackson fired off a letter to Monroe insisting on a different plan. The Seminoles, he counseled, must be pursued even into Spanish posts “where an enemy is permitted and protected or disgrace attends.” He insisted that seizing East Florida was the best strategy and that he’d implement it if signaled. Rather than wait for his message to make its long way to Monroe and for Monroe to send a response the long way back, Jackson grasped the reins of the situation, raising forces and hitting the road on January 22nd. Asked by Representative John Forsyth about Monroe’s orders to Jackson, the administration answered that since Spain could not stop the Seminoles’ incursions into the U.S.A., his administration would do so. General Jackson, he said, had been told not to enter Florida unless pursuing Seminoles. On this basis, he seized St. Mark’s on April 7th.12

  President Monroe started on his second American tour—this one of the Chesapeake Bay region—on May 28, 1818. At three weeks’ length, it would be far briefer than his northern tour.

  The Chesapeake Bay tour, confined as it was to towns of military significance in the president’s home region, concerned itself, as Monroe had intended the previous one to do, with inspections of the nation’s military defenses. It included no grand patriotic spectacles such as had greeted Monroe in New York and Boston. No prominent men’s guilty consciences, it seems, prodded them to flaunt their love of country along the way this time.

  Monroe initially envisioned a trip “to examine the Chesapeake” for the purpose of ensuring the fitness of the region’s fortifications, with his youngest brother, Joseph, and son-in-law George Hay accompanying him. Hay in the event did not make it, but Joseph went along as the president’s secretary. The plan was to set out from Washington for Baltimore, then take a steamboat to Annapolis. From Annapolis, the president and his Cabinet secretaries would travel via a U.S. Navy schooner. Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Crowninshield provided sumptuous food for Monroe and his traveling companions aboard their ship.13

  The popular press explained to the public that Monroe had intended to inspect the Chesapeake defenses the year before, but that his unanticipatedly time-consuming tour of the North had kept him from it.14 The first stop on the trip, Annapolis, was void of “an affectation of pomp or parade,” as the Baltimore American noted. “Immediately on [Monroe’s] arrival the flag of the Union was displayed from the spire of the State-house,” added the (Annapolis) Maryland Gazette. The following morning, however, Balimoreans woke to a twenty-one-gun salute (what was a little “pomp or parade” among friends?), and Monroe was read an address by the local mayor. His main point was that many of his constituents remembered Monroe’s having been in Baltimore while a congressman in 1783. The president replied that he recalled those days and was happy to see people familiar from that time, when he in entering upon a public career had been a witness as “the illustrious commander of our revolutionary armies, after performing services, which a grateful country can never forget, nor time obliterate, restored his commission to the authority from whom he had received it” (that is, resigned his commission and returned it to Congress). The dinner party drank thirteen toasts, including “The memory of Washington,” “The survivors of the Revolutionary Army,” “Jefferson and Madison,” “The freedom of the Press,” “The militia of the U. States,” and “The improvement of our docks and harbours.” One could almost have concluded that it was a partisan event.15

  The party left Baltimore headed down the Chesapeake on May 30th. “It is understood,” a local paper noted, “that St. Mary’s, York, James, and Elizabeth Rivers [the first in Maryland, the other three in Virginia], will severally be visited and probably Albemarle [in North Carolina], when the Secretary of War will proceed to his residence in South Carolina.”16 On June 5th the president and his party arrived at Yorktown, where, according to Chief of (Army) Engineers Joseph G. Swift, Monroe, Calhoun, Crowninshield, and Monroe’s private secretary “visited the site of the marquees of Washington and Rochambeau on the field of 1781.” The day after that, they “looked over the positions that the board had surveyed near York.…”17 On June 8th Swift, apparently weary of the folderol, recorded only that the party had “examined the navy yard and forts” at Norfolk.18 The (Norfolk) American Beacon, on the other hand, named everyone in the presidential retinue, described four different military posts’ ceremonial cannon fire as the president’s ship passed them, and gave the particulars of Monroe’s landing. “As might have been expected,” it continued, “such was the curiosity to behold the man in whom the confidence and affections of a nation of freemen are concentered, that we never have witnessed such an indiscriminate assemblage on any occasion in our town.” Perhaps recalling the un-Virginian ceremonial that had met Monroe in the North, it observed that, “It might indeed be said, that the reception was in a style of genuine Republican simplicity.” Local military units, adult and junior, performed “the usual evolutions of the countermarch,” and otherwise attempted to display their martial skill for the president, whose “generous smile of approbation, which beamed in the countenance of this Veteran of the Revolution, as he moved down the line, surveying all their movements with the eye of a soldier, was animating beyond description.…” The presidential party visited three neighborhood military installations, was treated to more military ceremonial, and retired for the night.19

  The southern terminus of the tour, Elizabeth City, proved an enjoyable place to visit. Lemuel Sawyer, the brother of Monroe’s host, recorded that “We heard of their approach; and in the afternoon I rode a few miles out to meet the cortege, the dust of which, for near a mile off, gave signs of their approach. The President’s carriage, surrounded by a dozen attendants on horseback, was in the van, and Mr. Crowninshield and Calhoun followed, and I fell into the rear.…” Monroe was easily persuaded to stay the night, and the locals prepared to give him “the hospitalities of the town.” “A fine green turtle” was the centerpiece of the dinner the Monroe party enjoyed. A prominent local, Lemuel Sawyer, took Calhoun in his “barouche” to the home of his brother Enoch Sawyer, appointed by Washington Collector of Customs for Camden, North Carolina, who put up the president’s party in a house spacious enough for “Lear with his hundred knights.” “My niece Mary,” Lemuel Sawyer wrote, “a beautiful and accomplished young maiden, entertained the party … by some of her best airs on the harp, an instrument on which she excelled, accompanied by a sweet well-trained voice.”20

  At Norfolk the president heard from the mayor an address about the blessing of America’s republican institutions in lieu of Europeans’ “obsequious homage to the arbitrary distinctions of hereditary, rank, and adventitious birth.” Fortunately they had him for their chief magistrate as a result of “the unbiassed and unerring verdict of the public will.” The rest of the address was along the same lines—recalling Monroe’s long record of public service, his martial exploits, and his creditable principles before saluting his decision to inspect America’s defensive installations. All would be well, and in time Monroe would retire with “the most precious of all earthly consolations—that of having done your duty.” Monroe’s response was equally routine for him by this point. Then followed another public dinner, after which came the usual routine of numerous toasts.21

  Arriving at Hampton, Virginia, on June 13th, the president’s ship was intercepted by a boat bearing prominent local citizens. Monroe accepted their invitation to a public dinner, and he and his party went ashore to the sound of ceremonial cannon fire. Having dined with local people, Monroe returned to his ship and went to Old Point Comfort, “from whence at 8 o’clock in the evening, he took his departure for Washington.”22 The National Intelligencer of June 18th reported that Monroe the morning before had left the Nonsuch and been rowed up the Potomac to Washington. “Thus,” it concluded, “has the President terminated the tour of observation of the waters of the Chesapeake, which his official duty devolved upon him.”23

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  Back in Washington on July 15, 1818, the Cabinet discussed General Jackson’s actions for five hours.1 He had taken Pensacola, the capital of West Florida. “The President and all the members of the Cabinet except myself,” Adams wrote, “are of opinion that Jackson acted not only without, but against his Instructions—that he has committed War upon Spain, which cannot be justified, and in which if not disavowed by the Administration, they will be abandoned by the Country. My opinion is that there was no real though an apparent violation of his instruction; that his proceedings were justified by the necessity of the case, and by the misconduct of the Spanish commanding Officers in Florida.” As the secretary of state reasoned, “The question is embarrassing and complicated, not only as involving that of an actual war with Spain; but that of the Executive power, to authorize hostilities without a declaration of War by Congress.” Jackson, he continued, had been authorized to pursue hostile Indians across the Florida border. The constitutional issue arose when his actions passed from defensive—“There is no doubt that defensive acts of hostility may be authorized by the Executive”—to offensive.

  As Adams understood matters, everything Jackson had done, including even “the order for taking the fort of Barrancas [at Pensacola] by storm,” had been “incidental” to “the object” of “the termination of the Indian War.” Jackson said as much, and the general denied that merely crossing a line of latitude could shield the hostiles from American military action. On the other hand, Calhoun, “generally of sound, judicious and comprehensive mind, seems in this case to be personally offended, with the idea, that Jackson has set at nought the Instructions of the Department.” Unbeknownst to Adams, Calhoun’s initial instructions to Jackson had told him to “concentrate your forces and to adopt the necessary measures to terminate a conflict which it has ever been the desire of the President … to avoid.…” In other words Calhoun had (perhaps unintentionally) given Jackson orders seemingly conferring very broad discretion.2 Monroe conceded in theory that Jackson’s measures could have been justified, but he thought “that he has not made out his case.” After dinner with the president and his colleagues, Adams discovered upon walking home that the French minister awaited him there—quite concerned to maintain peace between America and Spain.

  The following day, July 16th, Adams found himself alone in the Cabinet in defending Jackson.3 The issue now was “the degree to which his acts are to be disavowed.” Crawford, who was angling for Virginian support in the presidential succession, insisted the administration must disavow Jackson and return Pensacola. It seemed to Wirt that Judge Spencer Roane—son-in-law of Patrick Henry, chief judge of the Virginia Court of Appeals, leader of that court in opposing John Marshall’s Supreme Court in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, and intellectual eminence of the fabled Richmond Junto—had launched a series of anti-Jackson editorials in the Richmond Enquirer. Roane considered Jackson’s invasion unconstitutional, yes, but he had mixed feelings about the victor of New Orleans. He urged his “readers to ‘divest … of the irritated feelings about Indian cruelties, united to Spanish insults’ and submit Jackson’s conduct ‘to the tribunal of reason.’” Virginians should join Roane in “grief[,] … shame and abhorrence” in considering “the bloody massacre” of the friendly Creeks, besides the general’s “imprudence … [and] contempt of the laws.”4 Adams stood firm, however: to fire Jackson would be to turn him loose to attack the Monroe administration, which he would do with great vigor. On the other hand, if Jackson were not relieved, “Pensacola might be restored, and its capture by him still justified.” When, during a break in the meeting, Adams found the French diplomat Hyde de Neuville in his office, he responded to his offer to mediate between the Americans and Onís by saying he should be told that Pensacola could be returned, its capture should be understood as undertaken by Jackson without orders, “no blame could be admitted as attaching to General Jackson,” and blame should be attached to both the governor of Pensacola and the commandant of St. Marks. Monroe agreed to this. Adams walked home with Calhoun.

  In the end, after six Cabinet meetings in seven days, the American government decided that Pensacola could not be kept by the Americans without congressional authorization. The National Intelligencer ran a column (apparently written by Attorney General Wirt) that, besides this, also told the public that “the King of Spain shall, hereafter, keep such a force in those colonies, as shall enable him to execute, with fidelity, the fifth article of the treaty between the United States and Spain”—that is, to keep Florida Indians from raiding American territory or attacking Americans.5

  On July 19th Monroe wrote to Jackson to inform him of the administration’s decisions and explain the reasoning underlying them.6 He began by telling the general he would observe in this letter the “freedom and candor” that had “invariably” characterized his communication with the general. First, Monroe said, “the view and intentions of the Government were fully disclosed in respect to the operations in Florida” when Jackson was called “into active service against the Seminoles.” “In transcending the limit prescribed by those orders,” he continued, “you acted on your own responsibility, on facts and circumstances which were unknown to the Government when the orders were given, many of which, indeed, occurred afterward, and which you thought imposed on you the measure, as an act of patriotism, essential to the honor and interests of your country.”