28 28From the best information I could obtain, this city contains nearly three hundred houses, and about three thousand inhabitants, including all colours. There are several extensive mercantile houses established here, and one at least which imports goods directly from England. There are two printing-offices, and consequently two newspapers, which are published weekly … The gentlemen pass their time in the pursuit of three things: all make love; most of them play [gamble]; and a few make money. With Religion they have nothing to do; having formed a treaty with her, the principal article of which is, “Trouble not us, nor will we trouble you.”1
US MERCHANT SHIPPERS WERE caught in the crossfire between implacable opposed forces that would not allow them to act without subterfuge. Both the belligerent conservative government in Britain and Napoleon’s government in France were increasingly taking a policy that there were no neutrals, pursuant to which they claimed the right to seize American vessels.
Napoleon’s Berlin Decree of November 21, 1806, prohibited trade with Britain and its allies, and allowed the capture of ships and the blockading of ports in service of that goal. However, it was not put into force against the United States for almost a year, so that in British eyes, the Jefferson administration was getting special treatment from Napoleon and was therefore not neutral but pro-French, as Jefferson had been deemed to be by the British all along. Indeed, Jefferson acquiesced to the Berlin Decree “without effectual protest,” as Henry Adams put it.2 Britain responded with the draconian Orders in Council of November 11, 1807, an opaquely worded declaration of commercial war against neutrals that was squarely aimed at the United States, even as Bonaparte began applying the Berlin Decree to American ships.
Jefferson’s “peaceable coercion” theory of defense was about to be sorely tested. Henry Adams, whose nine-volume history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations examines the matter in detail, wrote bluntly, “Jefferson and his government had shown over and over again that no provocation would make them fight; and from the moment that this attitude was understood, America became fair prey.”3 Both France and Britain were seizing American merchant ships, but Britain’s bullying was more aggressive, leading to the galvanizing seizure of one of the few ships of the American navy, the Chesapeake, by the British ship Leopard off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, on June 22, 1807.
Dramatizing the stakes was the fate of Denmark. In Europe, both powers pressured the Danish king to support them, the endgame of which was that Britain bombarded Copenhagen from September 2 through 5, 1807, destroying about half the city, killing some two thousand people, and confiscating some $10 million worth of merchandise in Danish vessels.4 Adams wrote that “the annihilation of Denmark left America almost the only neutral, as she had long been the only Republican State.” (Not counting Haiti, that is, but the United States, England, and France alike refused to recognize Haiti’s claim to be a republic and considered it an outlaw that still rightfully belonged to France.) According to Adams, the undefended United States’ “offences … had been more serious than those of Denmark, and had roused to exasperation the temper of England. A single ship of the line, supported by one or two frigates, could without a moment’s notice repeat at New York the tragedy which had required a vast armament at Copenhagen.”5
During the seven years of his presidency, Jefferson had discarded his previously declared Republican ideals of limited government one by one. Now, in the commercial emergency posed by Britain’s Orders in Council, Jefferson imposed the Embargo Act, signed on December 22, 1807. His secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, described it as “an act prohibiting the sailing of ships or vessels from the ports and harbors of the U. States to any foreign port or harbor”—in other words, nothing less than a self-imposed embargo on all US maritime commerce and travel.6 This unparalleled real-world economic experiment was a hopeless attempt to resolve British and French incursions on US sovereignty at sea. It badly depressed the US economy, made Jefferson widely hated during his last year in office, and did nothing to dispel the tensions that ultimately erupted in the War of 1812.
When the prohibition against the slave trade kicked in on January 1, 1808, then, it happened against the backdrop of the general embargo, which had unleashed a panic in American (and European) commerce that made even the African trade seem a minor issue. Even had the slave trade not been specifically prohibited, there would have been no one to ship slaves from Africa to South Carolina. The merchants of Liverpool, who provided the bulk of the slave shipments, had been shut down from London, because Britain now prohibited their trade and would soon be sending its imperial navy to chase down slavers. Nor would Rhode Island’s slave-trade specialists have been able to take up the slack, because even had their slave ships somehow not been prohibited along with all other foreign commerce by Jefferson’s embargo, they would have been subject to confiscation at sea by the British navy, or possibly by French ships taking prizes for Napoleon.
While the embargo did stimulate American manufactures, it was received in New England as a plot by the French agent Jefferson to destroy American commerce. In New York, wrote the traveler John Lambert, “the grass had begun to grow upon the wharves.”7 But the full brunt of the embargo fell on the South, where two consecutive crops could not get to market. “Virginia society could neither economize nor liquidate,” wrote Henry Adams. “Tobacco was worthless; but four hundred thousand negro slaves must be clothed and fed … with astonishing rapidity Virginia succumbed to ruin, while continuing to support the system that was draining her strength.” With more than a little sarcasm, he added, “No episode in American history was more touching than the generous devotion with which Virginia clung to the embargo, and drained the poison which her own President held obstinately to her lips…. the old society of Virginia could never be restored … President Jefferson himself woke from his long dream of power only to find his own fortunes buried in the ruin he had made.”8
The indecisiveness of Jefferson’s solution prolonged the agony, as the external threat to commerce did not let up. Jefferson had begun his second term riding the popularity in the South of his greatest achievement as president: the annexation of Louisiana, to which New England’s legislators had been opposed. Now, even in the wake of the unpopular embargo, he still had support in Virginia. He was, in the final analysis, the slavery president, and he had given his home-state constituents the means of monetizing their inert labor force.
Not for another eight years, until the resolution of the War of 1812 finally ended the crisis of seizure at sea, would the coast be clear for something like normal commerce to resume—and for Virginia planters to take advantage of the great gift Jefferson had given them by selling large quantities of black Virginians down South.
Jefferson was humiliatingly forced to sign the removal of the embargo on March 1, 1809, days before a new president was inaugurated—another Virginian, Jefferson’s protégé James Madison.
The election had not been an inspiring one from the point of view of New England. It was a Virginia versus South Carolina election, pitting the Republican James Madison of Virginia, principal author of the Constitution, against Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, he who at the Constitutional Convention had insisted on a full twenty years’ protection for the African slave trade. In his first term, President Madison more or less continued the policies he had pursued as Jefferson’s secretary of state—which had left a sectionally divided country, a damaged economy, a restless Louisiana that chafed under Anglo-American rule from the Chesapeake, an unresolved stalemate with an angry Britain, and an unbridled Napoleon—who, despite having dumped Louisiana, was still intent on controlling the Americas.
On the pretext of subduing Portugal for having engaged in commerce with its centuries-long trading partner England, Napoleon introduced his forces into Spain in 1807 with the intention of taking control of the ports of Lisbon and Cádiz, key bases for reaching across the Atlantic. With his troops installed in Iberia, he humiliated Carlos IV and his son Fernando VII before the world by installing his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne as King José I.
Napoleon’s defenestration of the Spanish government was a green light for independence movements in Spain’s American territories. But Cuba remained loyal to the Spanish crown, and in eastern Cuba (known as Oriente), the French speakers who had relocated as refugees from the Haitian Revolution came under suspicion.
Already there had been justified concern that the franceses might secede from the island and take over Oriente for themselves as per the model of the neighboring island Hispaniola, permanently divided between contentious French and Spanish speakers. Now the thirty thousand (a best-guess number) who had escaped the unraveling of Leclerc’s genocide by fleeing as immigrants to eastern Cuba from Saint-Domingue were seen as potentially subversive by the loyalist Spanish government of Cuba. Those who did not take a loyalty oath to Spain or marry Spanish citizens found it expedient to leave for New Orleans, taking their slaves with them.
In the course of this flotilla, a report published by New Orleans mayor James Mather counted 9,059 people as entering New Orleans on some sixty ships, many of them privateers, mostly during the last three months of 1809. In this number, 3,225 of them (36 percent) were slaves, and only 962 of those were men over fifteen.9 Since this took place after the January 1, 1808, cutoff, “importation of persons” was by then prohibited by federal law, so it took an act of Congress to disembark the enslaved passengers, who were impounded for months in the harbor of what was then called the Territory of Orleans. They were thus the last slaves to be legally imported into the United States.
As they had previously done in Santiago de Cuba, the newly arrived Domingans transformed the French part of New Orleans—the old part, which came to be known as the French Quarter for the language spoken there. New Orleans by then was well along in becoming two adjacent towns: a fast-growing English-speaking one and a much larger French- (and Spanish-) speaking one, separated by the no-man’s-land (“neutral ground”) of Canal Street (named for a canal that was never dug). While the Domingans’ arrival helped push Louisiana’s population a little farther toward the minimum of sixty thousand free inhabitants required for statehood, it also slowed the pace of Americanization of New Orleans for the next thirty years and brought a new layer of culture and skills to an already complex Afro-Louisianan population. Despite the peculiarity and isolation of Louisiana, it had been a colonial cousin of Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadaloupe. Six of the twenty-three French slave ships that came to Louisiana were from Ouidah in present-day Benin, from whence the word vodou. Domingan vodou found fertile ground in Louisiana, since it was kin to practices that had been going on in Louisiana since the first contact with Africa.
Ending the African trade signaled a major cultural shift in black America. Africans had been entering the colonies on an ongoing, though not continual, basis for almost two centuries.
There were 1,191,364 slaves in the United States according to the 1810 census, an increase of 33.4 percent over 1800. It seems reasonable to assume that fewer than one hundred thousand were African-born, with most of those in the Lowcountry. The next five decades would each show a growth of the enslaved population of never less than 24 percent—a tremendous level of growth for a population not being supplemented by imports and routinely devastated by high child mortality—but never again would the 1800 to 1810 rate of growth in the slave population be reached, combining as it did massive importation in combination with reproduction of the domestic population.
During that decade, the population of the southwestern corner of Mississippi quadrupled. Most of the new nation’s frontiers pushed westward, but the expansion of plantations into Mississippi unrolled in a northeasterly direction. Natchez, in the southwest of the territory, was at the edge of a vast forest of uncleared land. The nearest Anglo-American towns to the east were hundreds of miles away. Nor was it easy to get to Natchez from New Orleans; as Christian Schultz was leaving Natchez downriver in April 1808, his boat passed one going the other way whose cargo of enslaved laborers were doing the hard upriver slog that required physically pulling the boat forward: “we met a brig at the Fausse Rivière, one hundred and sixty-five miles above New-Orleans, which was then forty-two days from that city. This vessel had part of her cargo of slaves on board, and was bound to Natchez; and though she had the advantage of extraordinary assistance from her slaves, she had performed only one half of her voyage. I have no doubt that her whole voyage from city to city took up more than eighty days.”10
Natchez was already the second biggest slave market of the Deep South. Sitting at the end of the distribution line, it paid the highest prices. As had happened in the Chesapeake and Carolina, there was a political cleavage between the planters already established around Natchez, who had plenty of slaves and wanted to see the value of their holdings appreciate, and those on the frontier, who wanted to buy more slaves, cheap.
When Jefferson left office at the beginning of 1809, the US economy was in tatters from his embargo, with New England’s shipping industry having suffered especially badly. As shipping resumed, Britain and France returned to impounding American vessels, and the new president, James Madison, continued to swallow the insults.
As when Madison had been Jefferson’s secretary of state, the acquisition of Florida continued to be a strategic obsession. A new Native American group had formed there: the Seminoles were a composite people, most numerously a breakaway group of Creeks who had incorporated a number of black escapees into their ranks. These “Black Seminoles,” as they were called, were largely Gullah people making use of Native American social identity while living in marronage.
All over the Southeast, settlers pushed onto Native American land, and they wanted more of it. In Congress, the perhaps twenty-one representatives and senators who clamored for war with Britain were overwhelmingly Southern and Western. Their Federalist enemies dubbed them the “War Hawks.” Kentucky’s thirty-four-year-old Henry Clay made his debut on the national stage when, after two weeks as a senator, on February 22, 1810, he announced, “The conquest of Canada is in your power … I verily believe that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.”11
Clay was trying to appeal to annexationists in New England, but he also wanted the Native Americans, Spanish, and British cleared out of the way of the Southern river arteries that could carry Kentucky’s products to the Gulf of Mexico via the West Florida ports of Mobile and Pensacola. When Madison invaded the short-lived, self-proclaimed independent Republic of West Florida, which the United States had no claim to other than conquest, Clay defended the action on Christmas Day, 1810, with these words:
I am not, sir, in favor of cherishing the passion of conquest, but I must be permitted, in conclusion, to indulge the hope of seeing, ere long, the new United States, (if you will allow me the expression,) embracing, not only the old thirteen States, but the entire country east of the Mississippi, including East Florida, and some of the territories to the north of us also.12
Exposed to attack from without and within, the Chesapeake was leery of war. Virginia congressman John Randolph argued restraint because of “the danger arising from the black population,” as the congressional recorder summarized it during a December 1811 oration. “The French Revolution had polluted” them, declaimed Randolph with his characteristic rhetorical extravagance, and was teaching them
that they are equal to their masters; in other words, advising them to cut their throats … What was the consequence? Within the last ten years, repeated alarms of insurrection among the slaves, some of them awful indeed. From the spreading of this infernal doctrine, the whole Southern country had been thrown into a state of insecurity…. God forbid, sir, that the Southern States should ever see an enemy on their shores, with these infernal principles of French fraternity in the van! While talking of taking Canada, some of us were shuddering for our own safety at home.
He then evoked the fearful specter of Gabriel’s rebellion, reminding everyone to be afraid of the slaves’ potential for violence: “The night-bell never tolled for fire in Richmond that the mother did not hug her infant more closely to her bosom.”13
South Carolina’s twenty-nine-year-old John C. Calhoun, as new in Congress as Clay, was at the beginning of a career that would see him become the embodiment of pro-slavery doctrine. Calhoun was the first upcountry South Carolina politician to make a name on the national stage; if he was representative, upcountry was an angry place.
Calhoun was a brilliant writer and debater, and to judge from the extensive documentation that exists, he was an unhappy, strict man whose single goal in life was to become president. Harriet Martineau wrote in 1838 of Calhoun that “I know of no man who lives in such utter intellectual solitude. He meets men and harangues them by the fire-side as in the Senate. He is wrought like a piece of machinery, set going vehemently by a weight, and stops while you answer. He either passes by what you say, or twists it into suitability with what is in his own head, and begins to lecture again.”14
George C. Rogers Jr. writes that “Calhoun considered diplomacy too slow—the tool of the effete coastal aristocrat.”15 Slavery was Calhoun’s irreducible demand, and he treated it as synonymous with the human dignity of his people; an affront to slavery was an affront to a Southerner. He replied to Randolph by bragging about how much better South Carolinans were than Virginians at keeping their enslaved ignorant:
Of the Southern section, I, too, have some personal knowledge; and can say, that in South Carolina no such fears in any part are felt … however the gentleman may alarm himself with the disorganizing effects of French principles, I cannot think our ignorant blacks have felt much of their baneful influence. I dare say more than one half of them never heard of the French Revolution.16
The awareness of what had happened in Haiti may well have reached more enslaved ears in Carolina than Calhoun imagined; but in Louisiana, the enslaved had definitely heard of the French Revolution. Up the Mississippi from New Orleans, on the riverbank that had since 1795 become a home to the death camps of sugarland, the mulatto Charles Deslondes—not a Domingan, but fully aware of what had happened there—led the largest peacetime slave revolt in US history: the “German Coast rebellion” that began on January 8, 1811. The uprising was ruthlessly suppressed by South Carolina’s Wade Hampton, who would later become a Louisiana planter.
Clay, who urged armed confrontation with Britain, was also one of the Southern and Western legislators who pushed to allow the twenty-year charter of the First Bank of the United States to expire in 1811, with unfortunate consequences when the war began.
It requires an effort for a modern person, accustomed to a national currency, to imagine the monetary situation of the early United States.
The Constitution gave the federal government monetary authority, reserving for it the exclusive right “to coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin.” No state could “enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; [or] make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”17
“Bills of Credit” meant paper money. The Constitution explicitly prohibited the printing of money by the states, so there couldn’t be, say, Massachusetts dollars and Virginia dollars. But, perhaps because the debate would have been endless, the Constitution was silent on the issuance of paper money by the federal government, and silent on its issuance by banks. The most desirable money—many would tell you, the only real money—was specie, minted gold or silver coins that were usable around the world as money, most commonly in the form of Spanish coins. President Washington signed the Coinage Act in 1792, which adopted the dollar as the monetary unit, “each to be of the value of a Spanish milled dollar,” and allowed for the coining of money, expressed in dollars and bearing an image “emblematic of liberty.” Foreign gold and silver coins continued in circulation and were legal tender until 1857.
But there weren’t enough silver dollars to conduct daily commerce with, nor was moving all the available precious metal around in daily circulation the best way to use it. Paper money was a practical necessity. A bank would own a given amount of specie and would issue notes “backed” by it. The notes could be redeemed in person at the bank for their face value in silver, but for most transactions this was an unnecessary step. The system worked because at any given time, much paper would circulate, serving the needs of commerce, while only a relatively small amount of paper would actually be exchanged for specie. In order to be assured of being able to cover their obligations, banks were expected to maintain “fractional reserve” requirements at a reasonable level, though that requirement was frequently ignored.
The First Bank of the United States, the only federally chartered bank, was a creation of Alexander Hamilton, modelled in part on the Bank of England. It was not under the control of the Department of the Treasury, though the government owned 20 percent of it and Treasury had access to its books, and it had a monopoly on receiving deposits of the government’s revenues, some 90 percent of which were tariffs collected at seaport customs houses.18 It was well-run and profitable, and by 1811 its high-quality notes constituted about 20 percent of the nation’s money supply.
The state banks, most of which were chartered after the First Bank of the United States was chartered in 1791, disliked the competition from a national bank that acted to some degree as a regulator on the amount of paper money they could issue, and they wanted the deposits of specie that were going to the national bank. Jefferson in particular had been vehemently opposed to Hamilton’s bank, as he was to banks in general. The hard Jeffersonians were united in their ideologically based opposition to the bank; meanwhile, the state banks leaned on senators and congressmen to take their competition out. In a political triumph for South Carolina’s Langdon Cheves, who was Speaker of the House, Congress refused to renew the bank’s charter, overriding the objections of the only competent member of Madison’s undistinguished cabinet, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
Without a national bank, then, the War of 1812 was fought without financing by a government whose principal source of revenue—customs duties—had been devastated by wartime conditions since the embargo of 1807. Nor was there much of an army. The military structure was plagued by a surfeit of officers, many of them incompetent, and a deficit of troops, who suffered unspeakable hardships. The militias were undisciplined, as they would demonstrate when they turned and ran by the thousands at the Battle of Bladensburg (August 24, 1814), opening the door for the burning of the federal city. The navy, the most competent branch of the military, had been crippled by Jefferson’s gunboat debacle.
Napoleon’s towering influence on the course of American history extended to causing the breach in which the Spanish colonies could move toward independence. In forcing Carlos IV’s abdication in 1808, he put a definitive end to Spain’s status as a world power. As Spain’s empire disintegrated, the fortress-city of Cartagena declared independence on November 11, 1811, beginning a series of bloody South American independence wars.
The Lafitte brothers—French-born pirates who had relocated from Saint-Domingue to Cuba and then to Louisiana—received letters of marque from Cartagena giving them legal cover as privateers to do what they were already doing: preying on Spanish slave ships bound for Cuba. They sold the human merchandise by the pound, cheap, from their well-guarded grey-market base at Barataria, west of New Orleans. Mostly they sold to the French-speaking creoles of southern Louisiana, who preferred to get their slaves from pirates than from the Georgiamen.
Louisiana’s colonial status ended on April 30, 1812, when it was admitted to the Union. It was the best way to secure the largely French-speaking state’s dubious loyalty to the United States before going to war against Great Britain on June 18, four days before Napoleon declared war on Russia. By going to war against Britain, the United States effectively became an ally of Napoleon, who was quite popular in New Orleans.
Jefferson’s presidency, which began with his great popularity, had ended in disaster; now Madison’s was failing. “Successive generations of scholars have never ceased to wonder,” writes J. C. A. Stagg, who edited Madison’s presidential papers, “how the creative statesman who ‘fathered’ both the Federal Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to say nothing of the Republican Party of the 1790s, could be as incompetent and as unsuccessful as he seemed to be as a chief executive.” Stagg describes an enduring image of Madison as “the weak and indecisive statesman who handled the disputes with Great Britain over maritime rights so badly that he lost control of his policies to a congressional faction of ‘War Hawks,’ whose members, after November 1811, stampeded him into a conflict which he did not want and which he then mismanaged to the extent that he remains to this day the only president ever to have been driven from the nation’s capital by an invading army.”19 Stagg supplied this description in an attempt to dispel it as a stereotype, but while it is admittedly incomplete as a summary of Madison’s presidential career, it is not incorrect.
Remembered by the ideologically neutral name of the War of 1812, this conflict was crucial to the development of the republic. It was effectively the United States’ participation in the final stage of the Napoleonic Wars, and it can be seen as a second War of Independence, since one of its most important outcomes was the definitive acknowledgment by Britain of American sovereignty. In New England, where many were antiwar, it was a failed war to annex Canada. In the South, where it was a war against Native Americans and free blacks, it was an essential step in the expansion of slavery that would fill in the territory from Louisiana to Florida with plantations.
There were four main fronts to the thirty-two-month war with Britain:
1) Canada, which the United States repeatedly attempted to assault, without success;
2) the Chesapeake, whose commerce was blockaded by the British from the start of the war and which was invaded by an army that burned the White House and the Capitol. The blockade was not impermeable, however, as the British admiral John B. Warren wrote to headquarters: “Several large Clipper Schooners of from two to three hundred Tons, strongly manned and armed have run thro’ the Blockade in the Chesapeak, in spite of every endeavour and of the most vigilant attention of our Ships to prevent their getting out, nor can any thing stop these Vessels escaping to Sea in dark Nights and Strong Winds.”20
3) Alabama, a front not generally mentioned as such in summaries of the war, because it did not directly entail fighting with Britain but with Native Americans, who were massacred. In Alabama, the United States achieved its military goals with what has been remembered as the Creek War, undertaken as part of the War of 1812. It’s something of a commonplace that no territory changed hands as a result of the War of 1812, but that’s not so. Under cover of war with Britain, the United States—in the person of the most effective general in the US Army, Andrew Jackson—grabbed a vast area of Native American land in Georgia and Alabama; and
4) the Gulf South, whose seaports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola were essential for control of trade with the interior. There the British were vanquished under the iron command of Andrew Jackson, in a tremendous victory for Southern slaveowners against the power that had dared offer freedom to their property.