AMERICA.

DECLARATION OF WAR AGAINST BRITAIN.

AN act, declaring war with this country,

after passing both houses of Congress,

received the sanction of the President of the United States on the 18th June; previous to which the following message, enumerating the various complaints of America against Great Britain, was submitted to Congress, To the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States.

"I communicate to Congress certain documents, being a continuation of those heretofore laid before them, on the subjects of

our affairs with Great Britain.

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

"British cruizers have been in the continued practice of violating the American flag on the great highway of nations, and of seizing and carrying off persons 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 address is assumed, which, if British subjects were wrongfully detained and alone concerned, is that substitution of force for a resort to the responsible 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 imperiously demand the fairest trial, where the sacred rights of persons were at issue. In place of such 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 laws, and of their national flag, have been torn from their country, and from every thing 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.

"Against this crying enormity, which Great Britain would be so prompt to avenge, 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 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 the British subjects were the real and the sole object. The communication passed without effect.

"British cruizers have been in the practice also of violating the rights and the peace of our coasts. They hover over and harrass our entering and departing commerce. Το the most insulting pretensions they have added lawless proceedings in our very harbours, 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 near her coasts, and disturbing her commerce are well known. When called on, nevertheless, by the United States, to punish the greater offences committed by her own vessels, her Government has bestowed on their commanders additional marks of honour and confidence.

"Under pretended blockades, without the presence of an adequate force, and sometimes without the practicability of applying 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

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 inforced 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 Great 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 cruizers.

"To our remonstrances against the complicated and transcendant 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 force of that enemy dared not issue from his 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 confesssedly impossible to be executed; that retaliation, to be just, should fall on the party setting the guilty example, not on 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 Great Britain, her Cabinet, instead of a corrresponding 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 Britsh 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 pre-requisites 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, no wise necessary to their termination, nor

exemplified by British usage; and that the French repeal, besides including that portion of the decrees which operates within a territorial jurisdiction, as well as that which operates on the high seas against the commerce of the United Statss, should not be a single 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 cal led on for a formal disavowal of conditions pretensions advanced by the French Government, for which the United States are so far from having been themselves respon. sible, 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.

"It has become indeed sufficiently certain, that the commerce of the United States is to be sacrificed, not as interfering with belligerent rights of Great Britain, not as supplying the wants of their enemies, which she herself supplies, but as interfering with the monopoly which she covets for her own commerce and navigation. She carries on a war against the lawful commerce of a friend, that she may the better carry on a commerce with an enemy, a commerce polluted by the forgeries and perjuries which are for the most part the only passports by which it can succeed.

"Anxious to make every experiment short of the last resort of injured nations, the United States have withheld from Great Britain, under successive modifications, the benefits of a free intercourse with their mar ket, the loss of which could not but outweigh the profits accruing from her restrictions of our commerce with other nations. And to entitle those experiments to the more fa vourable consideration, they were so framed as to enable her to place her adversary under the exclusive operation of them. To these appeals her Government has been equally inflexible, as if willing to make sacri fices of every sort, rather than yield to the claims of justice, or renounce the errors of a false pride. Nay, so far were the attempts carried to overcome the attachment of the British Cabinet to its unjust edicts, that it received every encouragement, within the competency of the executive branch of our Government, to expect that a repeal of them would be followed by a war between the United States and France, unless the French edicts should also be repealed. Even this communication, although silencing for ever the plea of a disposition in the United States

to acquiesce in those edicts, originally the sole plea for them, received no attention.

"If any other proof existed of a pre-determination of the British Government against a repeal of its orders, it might be found in the correspondence of the Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States at London; and the British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, in 1810, on the question, whether the blockade of May 1806 was considered in force or as not in force. It had been ascertained, that the French Government, which urged this blockade as the ground of its decree, was willing, in the event of its removal, to repeal that decree; which being followed by alternate repeals of the other offensive edicts, might abolish the whole system on both sides. This inviting opportunity for accomplishing an object so important to the United States, and professed so often to be the desire of both the belligerents, was made known to the British Government.

As that Government admits, that an actual application of an adequate force is necessary to the existence of a legal blockade; and it was notorious, that if such a force had ever been applied, its long discontinuance had annulled the blockade in question, there could be no sufficient objection on the part of Great Britain to a formal revocation of it, and no imaginable objection to a declaration of the fact that the blockade did not exist. The declaration would have been consistent with her avowed principles of blockade, and would have enabled the United States to demand from France the pledged repeal of her decrees; either with success, in which case the way would have been opened for a general repeal of the belligerent edicts; or without success, in which case the United States would have been justified in turning their measures exclusively against France. The British Government would, however, neither rescind the blockade, nor declare its non-existence, nor permit its non-existence to be inferred and affirmed by the American Plenipotentiary. On the contrary, by representing the blockade to be comprehended in the orders in Council, the United States were compelled so to regard it in their subsequent proceedings.

"There was a period when a favourable change in the policy of the British Cabinet was justly considered as established. The Minister Plenipotentiary of his Britannic Majesty here proposed an adjustment of the differences more immediately endangering the harmony of the two countries. The proposition was accepted with a promptitude and cordiality corresponding with the invariable professions of this Government. A foundation appeared to be laid for a sin· August 1812.

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cere and lasting reconciliation. The prospect, however, quickly vanished. The whole proceeding was disavowed by the British Government, without any explanation that could at that time repress the belief, that the disavowal proceeded from a spirit of hostility to the commercial rights and prosperity of the United States. And it has since come into proof, that at the very moment when the public Minister was holding the language of friendship, and inspired confidence in the sincerity of the negociation with which he was charged, a secret agent of his Government was employed in intrigues, having for their object a subversion of our Government, and a dismemberment of our happy union.

"In reviewing the conduct of Great Britain towards the United States, our attention is necessarily drawn to the warfare just renewed by the savages on one of our extensive frontiers; a warfare which is known to spare neither age nor sex, and to be distinguished by features peculiarly shocking to humanity. It is difficult to account for the activity and combinations which have for some time been developing themselves among the tribes in constant intercourse with British traders and garrisons, without connecting their hostility with that influence, and without recollecting the authenticated examples of such interpositions heretofore furnished by the officers and agents of that Government.

"Such is the spectacle of injuries and indignities which have been heaped on our country, and such the crisis which its unexampled forbearance and conciliatory efforts have not been able to avert. It might at least have been expected, that an enlightened nation, if less urged by moral obligations, or invited by friendly dispositions on the part of the United States, would have found in its true interests alone a sufficient motive to respect their rights and their tranquillity on the high seas; that an enlarged policy would have favoured the free and general circulation of commerce, in which the British nation is at all times interested, and which in times of war is the best alleviation of its calamities to herself, as well as the other belligerents: and more especially that the British Cabinet would not, for the sake of a precarious and surreptitious intercourse with hostile markets, have persevered in a course of measures which necessarily put at hazard the invaluable market of a great and growing country, disposed to cultivate the mutual advantages of an active

and to enlarge pretensions. We behold our seafaring citizens still the daily victims of lawless violence committed on the great and common highway of nations, even within sight of the country which owes them protection. We behold our vessels freighted with the products of our soil and industry, or returning with the honest proceeds of them, wrested from their lawful destinations, confiscated by prize courts no longer the organs of public law, but the instruments of arbitrary edicts; and their unfortunate crews dispersed and lost, or forced or inveigled in British ports into British fleets; whilst arguments are employed in support of these aggressions, which have no foundation but in a principle equally supporting a claim to regulate our external commerce in all cases whatsoever.

"We behold, in fine, on the side of Great Britain, a state of war against the United States; and on the side of the United States a state of peace towards Great Britain.

Whether the United States shall continue passive under these progressive usurpations, and these accumulating wrongs: or, opposing force to force in defence of their natural rights, shall commit a just cause into the hands of the Almighty Disposer of events: avoiding all connections which might entangle it in the contests or views of other pow ers, and preserving a constant readiness to concur in an honourable re-establishment of peace and friendship, is a solemn question, which the constitution wisely confides to the legislative department of the Government. In recommending it to their early deliberation, I am happy in the assurance that the decision will be worthy the enlightened and patriotic councils of a virtuous, a free, and a powerful nation.

Having presented this view of the relations of the United States with Great Britain, and of the solemn alternative growing out of them, I proceed to remark, that the communications last made to Congress on the subject of our relations with France, will have shown, that since the revocation of her decrees as they violated the neutral rights of the United States, her Government has authorised illegal captures by its privateers and public ships, and that other outrages have been practised on our vessels and our gitizens. It will have been seen also, that no indemnity had been provided, or satisfactorily pledged, for the extensive spoliations committed under the violent and retrospective order of the French Government .against the property of our citizens, seized within the jurisdiction of France.

I abstain at this time from recommending to the consideration of Congress definitive measures with respect to that nation,

in the expectation, that the result of unclo sed discussions between our Minister Plenipotentiary at Paris and the French Govern. ment, will speedily enable Congress to decide, with greater advantage, on the course due to the rights, the interests, the honour of our country.

JAMES MADISON."

Washington, June 1, 1812.

In consequence of the above declaration, an order, directing an embargo on all American vessels in this country, was issu ed by the British Government; exempting, however, from its operation, those who had previously obtained licences; and the time then marked for their departure has since been prolonged, to enable them to complete their cargoes. At the time that the American Government resolved on war, it had not received any account of the repeal of the orders in Council; and Mr Foster, our Ambassador at Washington, immediately received his passports, and has since returned to this country. Another effort to adjust the differences between the two countries, we understand, is yet to be made; and, accordingly, Sir J. B. Warren, with a squadron of ships of war, has sailed for the coast of America, furnished, it is said, with powers to negociate as well as to act offensively in case of necessity; but proposals of conciliation are, in the first instance, to be made; and though the opinions entertained as to the probable success of the attempt are various, we believe the wishes for such a result are very general throughout this country.

In the meantime, the Americans seem actively engaged in preparations for war, having already fitted out a number of priva teers which have begun to make depreda tions on our trade. The invasion of Canada is also projected; the American General Hull, being to attack it on the west, and General Dearborne on the east. Every necessary measure, however, has been adopted in that quarter for repelling their at tempts.

SPAIN.

VICTORY OF SALAMANCA.

We have the pleasure this month to pat upon record the most splendid and decisive victory which has graced the annals of the present war in the Peninsula. The details of this atchievement we shall give in the words of the Earl of Wellington, from whom dispatches have been received of the dates of the 21st, 24th, and 28th July.

AB