Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812. Volume 1

Before the peace of 1783, the writings of Adam Smith had gravely shaken belief in the mercantile system of extraordinary trade regulation and protection as conducive to national prosperity. Though undermined, however, it had not been overthrown; and even to doubters there remained the exception, which Smith himself admitted, of the necessity to protect navigation as a nursery for the navy, and consequently as a fundamental means of national defence. Existence takes precedence of prosperity; the life is more than the meat. Commercial regulation, though unfitted to increase wealth, could be justified as a means to promote ship-building; to retain ship-builders in the country; to husband the raw materials of their work; to force the transport of merchandise in British-built ships and by British seamen; and thus to induce capital to invest, and men to embark their lives, in maritime trade, to the multiplication of ships and seamen, the chief dependence of the nation in war. "Keeping ships for freight," said Sheffield, "is not the most profitable branch of trade. It is necessary, for the sake of our marine, to force or encourage it by exclusive advantages." "Comparatively with the number of our people and the extent of our country, we are doomed almost always to wage unequal war; and as a means of raising seamen it cannot be too often repeated that it is not possible to be too jealous on the head of navigation." He proceeds then at once to draw the distinction between the protection of navigation and that of commerce generally. "This jealousy should not be confounded with that towards neighboring countries as to trade and manufactures; nor is the latter jealousy in many instances reasonable or well founded. Competition is useful, forcing our manufacturers to act fairly, and to work reasonably." Sheffield was the most conspicuous, and probably the most influential, of the controversialists on this side of the question at this period; the interest of the public is shown by his pamphlet passing through six editions in a twelvemonth. He was, however, far from singular in this view. Chalmers, a writer of much research, said likewise: "In these considerations of nautical force and public safety we discover the fundamental principle of Acts of Navigation, which, though established in opposition to domestic and foreign clamors, have produced so great an augmentation of our native shipping and sailors, and which therefore should not be sacrificed to any projects of private gain,"—that is, of commercial advantage. "There are intelligent persons who suggest that the imposing of alien duties on alien ships, rather than on alien merchandise, would augment our naval strength."⁵⁹

Colonies therefore were esteemed desirable to this end chiefly. To use the expression of a French officer,⁶⁰ they were the fruitful nursery of seamen. French writers of that day considered their West India islands the chief nautical support of the state. But in order to secure this, it was necessary to exercise complete control of their trade inward and outward; of the supplies they needed as well as of the products they raised, and especially to confine the carriage of both to national shipping. "The only use and advantage of the (remaining) American colonies⁶¹ or West India islands to Great Britain," says Sheffield, "are the monopoly of their consumption and the carriage of their produce. It is the advantage to our navigation which in any degree countervails the enormous expense of protecting our islands. Rather than give up their carrying trade it would be better to give up themselves." The entrepôt system herein found additional justification, for not only did it foster navigation by the homeward voyage, confined to British ships, and extort toll in transit, but the re-exportation made a double voyage which was more than doubly fruitful in seamen; for from the nearness of the British Islands to the European continent, which held the great body of consumers, this second carriage could be done, and actually was done, by numerous small vessels, able to bear a short voyage but not to brave an Atlantic passage. Economically, trade by many small vessels is more expensive than by a few large, because for a given aggregate tonnage it requires many more men; but this economical loss was thought to be more than compensated by the political gain in multiplying seamen. It was estimated in 1795 that there was a difference of from thirty-five to forty men in carrying the same quantity of goods in one large or ten small vessels. This illustrates aptly the theory of the Navigation Act, which sought wealth indeed, but, as then understood, subordinated that consideration distinctly to the superior need of increasing the resources of the country in ships and seamen. Moreover, the men engaged in these short voyages were more immediately at hand for impressment in war, owing to the narrow range of their expeditions and their frequent returns to home ports.

In 1783, therefore, the Navigation Act had become in general acceptance a measure not merely commercial, but military. It was defended chiefly as essential to the naval power of Great Britain, which rested upon the sure foundation of maritime resources thus laid. Nor need this view excite derision to-day, for it compelled then the adhesion of an American who of all in his time was most adverse to the general commercial policy of Great Britain. In a report on the subject made to Congress in 1793, by Jefferson, as Secretary of State, he said: "Our navigation involves still higher considerations than our commerce. As a branch of industry it is valuable, but as a resource of defence essential. It will admit neither neglect nor forbearance. The position and circumstances of the United States leave them nothing to fear on their land-board; … but on their seaboard they are open to injury, and they have there too a commerce (coasting) which must be protected. This can only be done by possessing a respectable body of citizen-seamen, and of artists and establishments in readiness for ship-building."⁶² The limitations of Jefferson's views appear here clearly, in the implicit relegation of defence, not to a regular and trained navy, but to the occasional unskilled efforts of a distinctly civil force; but no stronger recognition of the necessities of Great Britain could be desired, for her nearness to the great military states of the world deprived her land-board of the security which the remoteness of the United States assured. With such stress laid upon the vital importance of merchant seamen to national safety, it is but a step in thought to perceive how inevitable was the jealousy and indignation felt in Great Britain, when she found her fleets, both commercial and naval, starving for want of seamen, who had sought refuge from war in the American merchant service, and over whom the American Government, actually weak and but yesterday vassal, sought to extend its protection from impressment.

Up to the War of American Independence, the singular geographical situation of Great Britain, inducing her to maritime enterprise and exempting her from territorial warfare, with the financial and commercial pre-eminence she had then maintained for three-fourths of a century, gave her peculiar advantages for enforcing a policy which until that time had thriven conspicuously, if somewhat illusively, in its commercial results, and had substantially attained its especial object of maritime preponderance. Other peoples had to submit to the compulsion exerted by her overweening superiority. The obligation upon foreign shipping to be three-fourths manned by their own citizens, for instance, rested only upon a British law, and applied only in a British port; but the accumulations of British capital, with the consequent facility for mercantile operations and ability to extend credits, the development of British manufactures, the extent of the British carrying trade, the enforced storage of colonial products in British territory, with the correlative obligation that foreign goods for her numerous and increasing colonists must first be brought to her shores and thence transshipped,—all these circumstances made the British islands a centre for export and import, towards which foreign shipping was unavoidably drawn and so brought under the operation of the law. The nation had so far out-distanced competition that her supremacy was unassailable, and remained unimpaired for a century longer. To it had contributed powerfully the economical distribution of her empire, greatly diversified in particulars, yet symmetrical in the capacity of one part to supply what the other lacked. There was in the whole a certain self-sufficingness, resembling that claimed in this age for the United States, with its compact territory but wide extremes of boundary, climates, and activities.

This condition, while it lasted, in large degree justified the Navigation Act, which may be summarily characterized as a great protective measure, applied to the peculiar conditions of a particular maritime empire, insuring reciprocal and exclusive benefit to the several parts. It was uncompromisingly logical in its action, not hesitating at rigid prohibition of outside competition. Protection, in its best moral sense, may be defined as the regulation of all the business of the nation, considered as an interrelated whole, by the Government, for the best interests of the entire community, likewise regarded as a whole. This the Navigation Act did for over a century after its enactment; and it may be plausibly argued that, as a war resort at least, it afterwards measurably strengthened the hands of Great Britain during the wars of the French Revolution. No men suffered more than did the West India planters from its unrelieved enforcement after 1783; yet in their vehement remonstrance they said: "The policy of the Act is justly popular. Its regulations, until the loss of America, under the various relaxations which Parliament has applied to particular events and exigencies as they arose, have guided the course of trade without oppressing it; for the markets which those regulations left open to the consumption of the produce of the colonies were sufficient to take off the whole, and no foreign country could have supplied the essential part of their wants materially cheaper than the colonies of the mother country could supply one another."

Thus things were, or were thought to be, up to the time when the revolt of the continental colonies made a breach in the wall of reciprocal benefit by which the whole had been believed to be enclosed. The products of the colonies sustained the commercial prosperity of the mother country, ministering to her export trade, and supplying a reserve of consumers for her monopoly of manufactures, which they were forbidden to establish for themselves, or to receive from foreigners. She on her part excluded from the markets of the empire foreign articles which her colonies produced, constituting for them a monopoly of the imperial home market, as well in Great Britain as in the sister colonies. The carriage of the whole was confined to British navigation, the maintenance of which by this means raised the British Navy to the mastery of the seas, enabling it to afford to the entire system a protection, of which convincing and brilliant evidence had been afforded during the then recent Seven Years' War. As a matter of political combination and adjustment, for peace or for war, the general result appeared to most men of that day to be consummate in conception and in development, and therefore by all means to be perpetuated. In that light men of to-day must realize it, if they would adequately understand the influence exercised by this prepossession upon the course of events which for the United States issued in the War of 1812.

In this picture, so satisfactory as a whole, there had been certain shadows menacing to the future. Already, in the colonial period, these had been recognized by some in Great Britain as predictive of increasing practical independence on the part of the continental colonies, with results injurious to the empire at large, and to the particular welfare of the mother kingdom. In the last analysis, this danger arose from the fact that, unlike the tropical West Indies, these children were for the most part too like their parent in political and economical character, and in permanent natural surroundings. There was, indeed, a temporary variation of activities between the new communities, where the superabundance of soil kept handicrafts in abeyance, and the old country, where agriculture was already failing to produce food sufficient for the population, and men were being forced into manufactures and their export as a means of livelihood. There was also a difference in their respective products which ministered to beneficial exchange. Nevertheless, in their tendencies and in their disposition, Great Britain and the United States at bottom were then not complementary, but rivals. The true complement of both was the West Indies; and for these the advantage of proximity, always great, and especially so with regard to the special exigencies of the islands, lay with the United States. Hence it came to pass that the trade with the West Indies, which then had almost a monopoly of sugar and coffee production for the world, became the most prominent single factor in the commercial contentions between the two countries, and in the arbitrary commercial ordinances of Great Britain, which step by step led the two nations into war. The precedent struggle was over a market; artificial regulation and superior naval power seeking to withstand the natural course of things, and long successfully retarding it.

The suspension of intercourse during the War of Independence had brought the economical relations into stronger relief, and accomplished independence threatened the speedy realization of their tendencies. There were two principal dangers dreaded by Great Britain. The West India plantation industry had depended upon the continental colonies for food supplies, and to a considerable extent also financially; because these alone were the consumers of one important product—rum. Again, ship-building and the carrying trade of the empire had passed largely into the hands of the continental colonists, keeping on that side of the Atlantic, it was asserted, a great number of British-born seamen. While vessels from America visited many parts of the world, the custom-house returns showed that of the total inward and outward tonnage of the thirteen colonies, over sixty per cent had been either coastwise or with the West Indies; and this left out of account the considerable number engaged in smuggling. Of the remainder, barely twenty-five per cent went to Great Britain or Ireland. In short, there had been building upon the western side of the ocean, under the colonial connection, a rival maritime system, having its own products, its own special markets, and its own carrying trade. The latter also, being done by very small vessels, adapted to the short transit, had created for itself, or absorbed from elsewhere, a separate and proportionately large maritime population, rivalling that of the home country, while yet remaining out of easy reach of impressment and remote from immediate interest in European wars. One chief object of the Navigation Act was thus thwarted; and indeed, as might be anticipated from quotations already made, it was upon this that British watchfulness more particularly centred. As far as possible all interchange was to be internal to the empire, a kind of coasting trade, which would naturally, as well as by statute, fall to British shipping. Protective regulation therefore should develop in the several parts those productions which other parts needed,—the material of commerce; but where this could not be done, and supplies must be sought outside, they should go and come in British vessels, navigated according to the Act. "Our country," wrote Sheffield, in concluding his work, "does not entirely depend upon the monopoly of the commerce of the thirteen American states, and it is by no means necessary to sacrifice any part of our carrying trade for imaginary advantages never to be attained."⁶³

A further injury was done by the cheapness with which the Americans built and sold ships, owing to their abundance of timber. They built them not only to order, but as it were for a market. Although acceptable to the mercantile interest, and even indirectly beneficial by sparing the resources for building ships of war, this was an invasion of the manufacturing industry of the kingdom, in a particular peculiarly conducive to naval power. The returns of the British underwriters for twenty-seven shipping ports of Great Britain and Ireland, during a series of years immediately preceding the American revolt, no ship being counted twice, showed the British-built vessels entered to be 3,908, and the American 2,311.⁶⁴ The tonnage of the latter was more than one-third of the total. The intercourse between the American continent and the West Indies, not included in this reckoning, was almost wholly in American bottoms. The proportion of American-built shipping in the total of the empire is hence apparent, as well as the growth of the ship-building industry. This of course was accompanied by a tendency of mechanics, as well as seamen, to remove to a situation so favorable for employment. But the maintenance of home facilities for building ships was as essential to the development of naval power as was the fostering of a class of seamen. In this respect, therefore, the ship-building of America was detrimental to the objects of the Navigation Act; and the evil threatened to increase, because of a discernible approaching shortness of suitable timber in the overtaxed forests of Europe.

Such being the apparent tendency of things, owing to circumstances relatively permanent in character, the habit of mind traditional with British merchants and statesmen, formed by the accepted colonial and mercantile systems, impelled them at once to prohibitory measures of counteraction, as soon as the colonies, naturally rival, had become by independence a foreign nation. For a moment, indeed, it appeared that broader views might prevail, based upon a sounder understanding of actual conditions and of the principles of international commerce. The second William Pitt was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time the provisional articles of peace with the United States were signed, in November, 1782; and in March, 1783, he introduced into the House of Commons a bill for regulating temporarily the intercourse between the two nations, so far as dependent upon the action of Great Britain, until it should be possible to establish a mutual arrangement by treaty. This measure reflected not only a general attitude of good will towards America, characteristic of both father and son, but also the impression which had been made upon the younger man by the writings of Adam Smith. Professing as its objects "to establish intercourse on the most enlarged principles of reciprocal benefit," and "to evince the disposition of Great Britain to be on terms of most perfect amity with the United States of America," the bill admitted the ships and vessels of the United States, with the merchandise on board, into all the ports of Great Britain in the same manner as the vessels of other independent states; that is, manned three-fourths by American seamen. This preserved the main restrictions of the Navigation Act, protective of British navigation; but the merchandise, even if brought in American ships, was relieved of all alien duties. These, however, wherever still existing for other nations, were light, and this remission slight;⁶⁵ a more substantial concession was a rebate upon all exports from Great Britain to the United States, equal to that allowed upon goods exported to the colonies. As regarded intercourse with the West Indies, there was to be made in favor of the thirteen states a special and large remission in the rigor of the Act; one affecting both commerce and navigation. To British colonies, by long-standing proscription, no ships except British had been admitted to export or import. By the proposed measure, the United States, alone among the nations of the world, were to be allowed to import freely any goods whatsoever, of their own growth, produce, or manufacture, in their own ships; on the same terms exactly as British vessels, if these should engage in the traffic between the American continent and the islands. Similarly, freedom to export colonial produce was granted to American bottoms from the West Indies to the United States. Both exports and imports, thus to be authorized, were to be "liable to the same duties and charges only as the same merchandise would be subject to, if it were the property of British native-born subjects, and imported in British ships, navigated by British seamen."⁶⁶ In short, while the primary purpose doubtless was the benefit of the islands, the effect of the measure, as regarded the West India trade, was to restore the citizens of the now independent states to the privileges they had enjoyed as colonists. The carrying trade between the islands and the continent was conceded to them, and past experience gave ground to believe it would be by them absorbed.

It was over this concession that the storm of controversy arose and raged, until the outbreak of the French Revolution, by the conservative reaction it provoked in other governments, arrested for the time any change of principle in regard to colonial administration, whatever modifications might from time to time be induced by momentary exigencies of policy. The question immediately argued was probably on all hands less one of principle than of expediency. Superior as commercial prosperity and the preservation of peace were to most other motives in the interest of Pitt's mind, he doubtless would have admitted, along with his most earnest opponents, that the fostering of the national carrying trade, as a nursery to the navy and so contributory to national defence, took precedence of purely commercial legislation. With all good-will to America, his prime object necessarily was the welfare of Great Britain; but this he, contrary to the mass of public opinion, conceived to lie in the restoration of the old intercourse between the two peoples, modified as little as possible by the new condition of independence. He trusted that the habit of receiving everything from England, the superiority of British manufactures, a common tongue, and commercial correspondences only temporarily interrupted by the war, would tend to keep the new states customers of Great Britain chiefly, as they had been before; and what they bought they must pay for by sending their own products in return. This constraint of routine and convenience received additional force from the scarcity of capital in America, and its abundance in Great Britain, relatively to the rest of Europe. The wealthiest nation could hold the Americans by their need of accommodations which others could not extend.

In so far there probably was a general substantial agreement in Great Britain. The Americans had been consumers to over double the amount of the West Indies before the war, and it was desirable to retain their custom. Nor was the anticipation of success deceived. Nine years later, despite the rejection of Pitt's measure, an experienced American complained "that we draw so large a proportion of our manufactures from one nation. The other European nations have had the eight years of the war (of Independence) exclusively, and the nine years of peace in fair competition, and do not yet supply us with manufactures equivalent to half of the stated value of the shoes made by ourselves."⁶⁷ In the first year of the government under the Constitution, from August, 1789, to September 30, 1790, after seven years of independence, out of a total of not quite $20,000,000 imports to the United States, over $15,000,000 were from the dominions of Great Britain;⁶⁸ and nearly half the exports went to the same destination, either as raw material for manufactures, or as to the distributing centre for Europe. The commercial dependence is evident; it had rather increased than diminished since the Peace. As regards American navigation, the showing was somewhat better; but even here 217,000 tons British had entered United States ports, against a total of only 355,000 American. As of the latter only 50,000 had sailed from Great Britain, it is clear that the empire had retained its hold upon its carrying trade, throughout the years intervening between the Peace and the adoption of the Constitution.

As regards the commercial relations between the two nations, these results corresponded in the main with the expectations of those who frustrated Pitt's measure. He had conceived, however, that it was wise for Great Britain not only to preserve a connection so profitable, but also to develop it; to multiply the advantage by steps which would promote the prosperity and consequent purchasing power of the communities involved. This was the object of his proposed concession. During the then recent war, no part of the British dominions—save besieged Gibraltar—had suffered so severely as the West Indies. Though other causes concurred, this was due chiefly to the cessation of communications with the revolted colonies, entailing failure of supplies indispensable to their industries. Despite certain alleviations incidental to the war, such as the capture of American vessels bound to foreign islands, and the demand for tropical products by the British armies and fleets, there had been great misery among the population, as well as financial loss. The restoration of commercial intercourse would benefit the continent as well as the islands; but the latter more. The prosperity of both would redound to the welfare of Great Britain; for the one, though now politically independent, was chained to her commercial system by imperative circumstances, while of the trade of the other she would have complete monopoly, except for this tolerance of a strictly local traffic with the adjoining continent. As for British navigation, the supreme interest, Pitt believed that it would receive more enlargement from the increase of productiveness in the islands, and of consequent demand for British manufactures, than it would suffer loss by American navigation. More commerce, more ships. Then, as at the present day, the interests of Great Britain and of the United States, in their relations to a matter of common external concern, were not opposed, but complementary; for the prosperity of the islands through America would make for the prosperity of Great Britain through the islands.

This, however, was just the point disputed; and, in default of the experience which the coming years were to furnish, fears not wholly unreasonable, from the particular point of view of sea power, as then understood, were aroused by the known facts of American shipping enterprise, both as ship-builders and carriers, even under colonial trammels. John Adams, who was minister to Great Britain from 1785 to 1788, had frequent cause to note the deep and general apprehension there entertained of the United States as a rival maritime state. The question of admission to the colonial trade, as it presented itself to most men of the day, was one of defence and of offence, and was complicated by several considerations. As a matter of fact, there was no denying the existence of that transatlantic commercial system, in which the former colonies had been so conspicuous a factor, the sole source of certain supplies to an important market, reflecting therein exactly Great Britain's own position relatively to the consumers of the European continent. The prospect of reviving what had always been an imperium in imperio, but now uncontrolled by the previous conditions of political subjection, seemed ominous; and besides, there was cherished the hope, ill-founded and delusive though it was, that the integrity of the empire as a self-sufficing whole, broken by recent revolt, might be restored by strong measures, coercive towards the commerce of the United States, and protective towards Canada and the other remaining continental colonies. It was believed by some that the agriculture, shipping, and fisheries of Canada, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, despite the obstacles placed by nature, could be so fostered as to supply the needs of the West Indies, and to develop also a population of consumers bound to take off British manufactures, as the lost colonists used to do. This may be styled the constructive idea, in Sheffield's series of propositions, looking to the maintenance of the British carrying trade at the expense of that of the United States. This expectation proved erroneous. Up to and through the War of 1812, the British provinces, so far from having a surplus for export, had often to depend upon the United States for much of the supplies which Sheffield expected them to send to the West Indies.

The proposition was strongly supported also by a wish to aid the American loyalists, who, to the number of many thousands, had fled from the old colonies to take refuge in the less hospitable North. These men, deprived of their former resources, and having a new start in life to make, desired that the West India market should be reserved for them, to build up their local industries. Their influence was exerted in opposition to the planters, and the mother country justly felt itself bound to their relief by strong obligation. Conjoined to this was doubtless the less worthy desire to punish the successful rebellion, as well as to hinder the growth of a competitor. "If I had not been here and resided here some time," wrote John Adams, in 1785, "I should not have believed, nor could have conceived, such an union of all Parliamentary factions against us, which is a demonstration of the unpopularity of our cause."⁶⁹ "Their direct object is not so much the increase of their own wealth, ships, or sailors, as the diminution of ours. A jealousy of our naval power is the true motive, the real passion which actuates them. They consider the United States as their rival, and the most dangerous rival they have in the world. I can see clearly they are less afraid of the augmentation of French ships and sailors than American. They think they foresee that if the United States had the same fisheries, carrying trade, and same market for ready-built ships, they had ten years ago, they would be in so respectable a position, and in so happy circumstances, that British seamen, manufacturers, and merchants too, would hurry over to them."⁷⁰ These statements, drawn from Adams's association with many men, reflect so exactly the line of argument in the best known of the many controversial pamphlets published about that time,—Lord Sheffield's "Observations on the Commerce of the American States,"—as to prove that it represented correctly a preponderant popular feeling, not only adverse to the restoration of the colonial privileges contemplated by Pitt, but distinctly inimical to the new nation; a feeling born of past defeat and of present apprehension.