cedure ought to have on the public councils, it will not fail to render more dear to the hearts of all good citizens that happy union of these States which, under Divine Providence, is the the guaranty of their liberties, their safety, their tranquillity and their prosperity."

Preparations for War. If "coming events cast their shadows before," it must have been plainly seen that open warfare was near at hand. On April 1 a special message, short and direct, contained the following advice:

"Considering it as expedient, under existing circumstances and prospects, that a general embargo be laid on all vessels now in port, or hereafter arriving, for the period of sixty days, I recommend the immediate passage of a law to that effect."

Time brought no remedy for the evils which the Government of Great Britain chose to inflict upon the United States. War had to come, and this being the case, it should have been declared by Congress several years before, and probably would have been, but for the vain hope that one British Administration would be just.

CHAPTER XII.

BRITISH AGGRESSIONS RESENTED - WAR OF 1812.

Madison's Review of British Wrongs. With a patience unexampled in history, our government had borne with the aggressions of the British government until forbearance had long been without excuse. War alone could bring relief, yet nothing is more uncertain than an issue of war. Many a just cause has thus been lost. In his special message of June 1, 1812, President Madison reviews the situation and lays before Congress the fact that the end of diplomatic resistance had come. Few state papers ever had more of interest for the consideration of the country.

The War Message. "I communicate to Congress certain documents, being a continuation of those heretofore laid before them on the subject of our affairs with Great Britain.

"Without going back beyond the renewal in 1803 of the war in which Great Britain is engaged, and omitting unrepaired wrongs of inferior magnitude, the conduct of her government presents a series of acts hostile to the United States as an independent and neutral nation.

Impressment of our Seamen.

"British cruisers have been in the continued practice of violating the American flag on the great highway of nations, and of seizing and carrying off per-sons sailing under it, not in the exercise of a belligerent right founded on the law of nations against an enemy, but of a municipal prerogative over British subjects. British jurisdiction is thus extended to neutral vessels in a situation where no laws can operate but the law of nations and the laws of the country to which the vessels belong; and a self-redress is assumed which, if British subjects were wrongfully detained and alone concerned, is that substitution of force for a resort to the re

sponsible sovereign which falls within the definition of war. Could the seizure of British subjects in such cases be regarded as within the exercise of a belligerent right, the acknowledged laws of war, which forbid an article of captured property to be adjudged without a regular investigation before a competent tribunal, would imperatively demand the fairest trial where the sacred rights of persons were at issue. In place of such a trial these rights are subjected to the will of every petty commander. "The practice, hence, is so far from affecting British subjects alone that, under the pretext of searching for these, thousands of American citizens, under the safeguard of public law and of their national flag, have been torn from their country and from everything dear to them, have been dragged on board ships of war of a foreign nation, and exposed under the severities of their discipline, to be exiled to the most distant and deadly climes, to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors, and to be the melancholy instruments of taking away those of their own brethren.

66

'Against this crying enormity, which Great Britain would be so prompt to revenge if committed against herself, the United States have in vain exhausted remonstrances and expostulations, and that no proof might be wanting of their conciliatory dispositions, and no pretext left for a continuance of the practice, the British government was formally assured of the readiness of the United States to enter into arrangements such as could not be rejected if the recovery of British subjects were the real and the sole object. The communication passed without effect."

The Violation of our Coasts. "British cruisers have been in the practice of violating the rights and the peace of our coasts. They hover over and harass our entering and departing commerce. To the most insulting pretensions they have added the most lawless proceedings in our very harbors, and have wantonly spilt American blood within the sanctuary of our territorial jurisdiction. The principles and rules enforced by that nation, when a neutral nation, against armed vessels of belligerents hovering over her coasts and disturbing her commerce, are well known. When called on, nevertheless, by the United States to punish the greater offenses committed by her

own vessels, her government has bestowed on their commanders additional marks of honor and confidence."

Outrages from Paper Blockades. "Under pretended blockades, without the presence of an adequate force and sometimes without the practicability of supplying one, our commerce has been plundered in every sea, the great staples of our country have been cut off from their legitimate markets, and a destructive blow aimed at our agricultural and maritime interests. In aggravation of these predatory measures, they have been considered as in force from the dates of their notification, a retrospective effect being thus added, as has been done in other important cases, to the unlawfulness of the course pursued. And to render the outrage the more signal, these mock blockades have been reiterated and enforced in the face of official communications from the British government declaring as the true definition of a legal blockade, That particular ports must be actually invested and previous warning given to vessels bound to them not to enter.'

"Not content with these occasional expedients for laying waste our neutral trade, the cabinet of Britain resorted at length to the sweeping system of blockades, under the name of orders in council, which has been moulded and managed as might best suit its political views, its commercial jealousies, or the avidity of British cruisers.

"To our remonstrances against the complicated and transcendent injustice of this innovation, the first reply was that the orders were reluctantly adopted by Great Britain as a necessary retaliation on decrees of her enemy proclaiming a general blockade of the British Isles at a time when the naval forces of that enemy dared not issue from his own ports. She was reminded without effect that her own prior blockades, unsupported by an adequate naval force actually applied and continued, were a bar to this plea; that executed edicts against millions of our property could not be retaliation on edicts confessedly impossible to be executed, that retaliation, to be just, should fall on the party setting the guilty example, not an innocent party which was not even chargeable with an acquiescence in it.

"When deprived of this flimsy veil for a prohibition of our

trade with her enemy by the repeal of his prohibition of our trade with Great Britain, her cabinet, instead of a corresponding repeal or a practical discontinuance of its orders, formally avowed a determination to persist in them against the United States until the markets of her enemy should be laid open to British products, thus asserting an obligation on a neutral power to require one belligerent to encourage by its internal regulations the trade of another belligerent, contradicting her own practice towards all nations, in peace as well as in war, and betraying the insincerity of those professions which inculcated a belief that, having resorted to her orders with regret, she was anxious to find an occasion for putting an end to them.

"Abandoning still more all respect for the neutral rights of the United States and for its own consistency, the British government now demands as prerequisites to a repeal of its orders as they relate to the United States, that a formality should be observed in the repeal of the French decrees nowise necessary to their termination nor exemplified by British usage, and that the French repeal, besides including that portion of the decrees which operate within a territorial jurisdiction as well as that which operates on the high seas, against the commerce of the United States, should not be a single and special repeal in relation to the United States, but should be extended to whatever other neutral nations unconnected with them may be affected by those decrees. And as an additional insult they are called on for a formal disavowal of conditions and pretensions advanced by the French government for which the United States are so far from having made themselves responsible that, in official explanations which have been published to the world, and in a correspondence of the American minister at London with the British Minister for foreign affairs such a responsibility was explicitly and emphatically disclaimed.

Our Commerce to be Sacrificed. "It has become sufficiently certain that the commerce of the United States is to be sacrificed, not as interfering with the belligerent rights of Great Britain, not as supplying the wants of her enemies, which she herself supplies, but as interfering with the monopoly which she covets for her own commerce and navigation. She carries on a