HE IS DRAWN INTO POLITICS.

123

To ac

their glory were identical, he had subdued nearly every nation of Europe. England and Russia, for once made friends by their common danger, were almost the only exceptions, and really the sole barriers, to his European empire. Nearly all of the great powers, however, either secretly or openly, had combined against him; but, in the general struggle, no one of them had given him so much trouble as Great Britain. By land, he could cope, and had coped, with everything that could be brought against him; but the English navy, then at the acme of its power, had taken from France most of her insular possessions, and swept her shipping from the seas. complish this result, England had been compelled to employ all her naval force, and to abandon almost entirely her foreign trade, on which she depended, of course, for the greater part of her breadstuffs in a time of peace, and for immensely increased agricultural supplies in a time of war. Her vast military es tablishment, growing with every day's continuance of the war, had gradually drawn so much upon the rural and manufactur ing districts, had transformed so many producers into wasters, that the success of all her gigantic military efforts, if not the existence of the nation, seemed to depend on such stores as could be obtained from other lands. France, at the same time, shaken by internal revolutions for more than twenty years, and exhausted by a succession of the most bloody and most expensive foreign wars, had been compelled by degrees to call her agricultural population to take arms, and thus, like England, to throw herself upon other countries for a supply of bread. This, in a pecuniary point of view, was the harvest day for America, which, even then, could export more grain and flour than all Europe combined; and it actually became the leading business of this country to carry food to the belligerent and hungry na tions of the old world, and particularly to England and to France. Peace, therefore, to be maintained by a most positive neutrality, was evidently the best policy, the only good politice,

of this country. Our people, and our politicians, had a right to remain, so far as their financial interests were concerned, cool and even calculating spectators of the European struggle, to enrich and strengthen their country at the expense of a general conflict which they could neither govern nor prevent.

In every democratic country, however, the passions of the multitude, at a period of popular excitement, are more likely to get the ascendency, than the better judgment of the more sagacious and reflecting class of minds. It was so, in this country, at that time. A few years before, England had been our enemy, and France our ally, in the most illustrious and important of modern wars. This was the first thing thought of by superficial men; and this consideration alone had been sufficient, from the very opening of the French revolution, to carry the feelings of a large portion of our citizens to the side of France. This revolution of France, too, in its inception, with all its barbarities and opposition to christianity, had been called a democratic movement; and, as usual, thousands of the uninformed, honest and true-hearted as they were, had been cheated by a name. The third and perhaps the most powerful of the causes, that had thus worked together to create the public opinion of the United States, in relation to this subject, was the efforts made by a class of American infidels, led on by Thomas Paine and favored by Thomas Jefferson, which, coöperating with Voltaire, and the French atheists, who were the high-priests of the French democracy, in their attempt to overthrow the church of France, expected in this way to begin the overthrow of christianity in every land. In this manner, and chiefly for these reasons, during all the wars of the French Directory, and in the midst of the wars of Bonaparte, a majority of the American people had given their sympathies to France.

Bonaparte, waxing hotter in his hatred to England, as the final contest between him and her drew more near at hand, see. mg her dependence upon foreign countries, and chiefly upon

EUROPEAN POLITICS.

125

this country, for her supplies of food, resaved to cut off those supplies at a single stroke, and thus starve her into a submission which he had not been able to compel by force of arms. While at the city of Berlin, in the midst of his victories of the German war, he issued a decree, which blockaded all the ports of England, but opened wider than ever, to the shipping of all nations, excepting England and her allies, the ports of France. This, though aimed at Great Britain, was a still heavier blow against the United States; and it was clearly the policy of the United States to join with England in repelling an attack, which, in a business point of view, gave to the two countries a com

mon cause.

England, however, had given to our people a very grave of fence. Her seamen, weary of the long war, or envious of the rich gains of the peaceful commerce of our merchantmen, had been deserting the English navy, and entering into the Ameri can trade, in large numbers; and the sea-faring population of Great Britain, who had had no connection with the British maritime service, had numerously followed this example. England, alarmed at these desertions from her navy, and equally alarmed at the loss of so many of that class of her people, from which her navy, in any emergency, was to be supplied, saw no other alternative, than to pass laws, and send out orders to her naval officers, to reclaim all such of her refugee citizens, and compel them to return to their allegiance, wherever they might be found. Such laws had been passed; but their execution, easy in respect to nations speaking other languages and marked by different costumes and manners, was exceedingly difficult in relation to our own; and the result often was, without doubt, with all the care possible in such a case, that hundreds if not thousands of American citizens, mistaken for Englishmen in disguise, were thus taken from their own vessels and thrust into the English men-of-war. Though the English government of fered to return every American citizen thus abducted, whose

citizenship could be proved, the haters of England, those cheated by the French use of the word democracy, anl the American infidels, constituting the republican or democratic party in the days of Jefferson, overlooking the sublime position of Great Britain at that time, as the great and last bulwark of christianity, overlooking the extinction of everything democratic in France under the imperial ambition of Bonaparte, and secretly favoring the infidels of America, whose success, it was supposed, would tend to widen the distance in our government between church and state, were willing enough to brook the insult and the injury of the Berlin decree, but took fire at once against England for her attempt, carelessly executed, it is confessed, to recover the services of her own citizens in a time of uncommon need.

Actuated by such motives, the party in power, under the administration of Jefferson, instead of going forward to keep up our lucrative commerce with Great Britain, and with her allies, in spite of the French embargo, which France had not navy enough to enforce against us, or against any other nation at peace with England, had sent an ambassador to Paris and become the ally of France. They had taken the weaker and the wicked side, when the material welfare of their country, and a just regard for the cause of morality and religion throughout the world, in a word, when duty and interest both, had demanded the utmost stretch of charity toward England, in her day of embarrassment and peril, since that very peril she was suffering not more for herself, than for the highest and holiest interests of mankind. Not daring, however, in a manly way, if war with England was right and just, to make an open declaration of war, and meet the enemy upon an open sea, in a weak and cowardly manner, they had laid a second embargo, an American embargo, on American shipping, not only forbidding trade with England, which trade France most desired should be forbidden, but with all the rest of the world, thus at the

EUROPEAN POLITICS CONTINUED.

127

same time helping Bonaparte in his effort of annihilating Great Britain at a cost little less than ruinous to ourselves. Our soil,

it is true, remained fertile, and could give us the necessaries of existence; but the great surplus of produce, on which we depended, through our flourishing commerce, for the comforts and the elegancies of life, and for the means of developing the hid den resources of our country, had been allowed to perish in our fields. Wheat had fallen in a day from the price of two dollars per bushel to that of seventy cents; and the whole land, while aiding a traitor to republicanism in an attempt to break down the best government of the best people, next to our own,. on the face of the earth, had been bereft of its business, its pol icy, and its power.

Immediately upon this, England, still struggling for her ex istence against the great aspirant to universal dominion, and seeing no other way of meeting the force of the Berlin decree, had published her celebrated orders in council, which, in substance, were another embargo, which blockaded against all nations the ports of France; but in the execution of these orders, still looking with a friendly eye upon the United States, as the natural ally of the great Anglo-Saxon and Protestant power of Europe, England had treated our shipping with a favor, which she had denied to all the commerce of the world. Publishing her orders suddenly, after a lengthy but secret deliberation, she had permitted all American vessels, then in her ports, to leave peaceably with their cargoes, and had given directions to her naval commanders, in every part of the globe, to allow our merchantmen quietly to return home.

In this state of things had the country been left, at the expiration of Jefferson's second term; and when his successor, Mr. Madison, had come into the presidency, he had seen so much. evil to our commerce, and consequently to our agriculture, and to all the business of our hitherto thriving population, flowing from this policy that he had been, at the beginning of his pres