Military Policy: the Second Term

As tensions with Great Britain increased during his second term, Jefferson thought it prudent to make some defensive preparations. At first these involved modest appropriations. In 1806, the Republican Congress authorized $250,000 for the construction of fifty gunboats and $150,000 to increase the fortifications at some key harbors. Jefferson believed that gunboats were the answer to the American dilemma of how to defend the large country from the threat posed by the British navy without having to spend a fortune building ships-of-the-line, heavy frigates, and brigs.

Jefferson knew that British naval supremacy was so great that their ships could crush whatever fledgling fleet the Americans could build and put out to sea. What is more, the very building of such a fleet would be seen as a threat and might provoke them into launching a preemptive strike to destroy the new ships and shipyards before they would become large enough to challenge the British navy. The British destruction of the Danish fleet as it lay at anchor in Copenhagen—Denmark was a neutral power and not at war with Britain at the time—was proof that they would not let the technicality of American neutrality stop them from sailing up the Chesapeake in force to destroy the Norfolk and Washington shipyards.

The Americans had nothing but a handful of frigates, brigs, and schooners, how could they defend their coastline from British depredations in the event of a war? For Jefferson, gunboats were the answer. Gunboats were basically floating barges with lots of guns. They were relatively cheap to build; they did not pose a threat to the British fleet on the ocean; and they were thought to be effective in battling larger warships in the close quarters of harbors, bays, and inland waterways. In other words, Jefferson saw them as the perfect defensive weapon to guard against British invasion.

Jefferson also decided to augment the size of the standing army and to arm the state militias. In February 1808, Jefferson had Dearborn request authorization to add eight regiments to the regular army since war loomed with Great Britain. The Republicans promptly passed a bill authorizing the increase. Just ten years previously, when the country was engaged in an undeclared naval war with France, the Republicans had vetoed an Adams administration measure to create twelve new army regiments. John Randolph was one of the few Republicans in the House to remain consistent with his classical-republican opposition to standing armies and commercial wars. He voted against the eight regiment bill, just as he had voted against the twelve regiment bill in 1798.

In the last year of his presidency, Jefferson doubled the size of the regular army, thus making it larger than it had been when he took office. Nor was that all. At the president’s urging, Congress passed other military measures including $850,000 for 188 gunboats, $1 million for harbor fortifications, authorization for the president to sell surplus muskets to the states, $200,000 to arm and equip the state militias, authority for the president to require the state governors to organize, arm, and equip 100,000 state militia, and the authority for the president to call all, or part, of those forces for six months of federal service.[84]

The question of Jefferson’s motivation in making preparations for war, even while embarking on a policy of peaceable coercion, is important. There are three possibilities for this. First, he may have believed that defensive preparations on top of the embargo would induce the British to repeal their Orders in Council and cease their impressments for fear of a war with the United States. This explanation is consistent with his earlier diplomacy in which he repeatedly dropped hints to one of the three great powers that he was considering making an offensive alliance with one of their rivals. Second, he may have already foreseen the need for new gunboats and army regiments to enforce his embargo. Jefferson knew that the mercantile classes, especially in New England, did not favor the embargo and that they had a long tradition of resisting commercial restrictions by smuggling. Third, Jefferson may have been seriously contemplating an eventual war with Great Britain. While Jefferson sincerely wanted peace and understood that a war would bring in its train taxes and debt, he also knew that a successful war would offer one splendid prize—Canada.

The Republicans had long coveted Canada, and it was taken for granted that in the event of a second war with Great Britain, the Americans would invade and add it to the confederation. During the war fever produced by the British attack on the American frigate Chesapeake, Jefferson and his cabinet discussed the feasibility of invading Canada during the winter of 1808–1809. Gallatin even prepared a memorandum for Jefferson outlining possible military operations against their northern neighbor; he estimated that its conquest would require 30,000 soldiers.[85]

Jefferson believed that acquiring Canada would bring the same kind of benefits as had acquiring Louisiana—land, security on the cheap, and independence from Europe. He understood that the more territory his countrymen controlled on the North American continent, the less need they would have of a regular army, the more secure they would be from invasion, and the more insulated they would be from the incessant wars and political entanglements of the Old World. Throughout his career, Jefferson often expressed his wish “that there were an ocean of fire between us and the Old World.”[86]

An important contrast should be kept in mind. Jefferson and his party were willing to consider war only if it were in the national interest; the Federalists, on the other hand, sought war for the incidental benefits it would bring—taxes, debt, centralization of power, patronage, glory—and seemed not to care a whit for the good of the country. For instance, it is hard to see what benefits (land, increased security, or commercial wealth) a military alliance with Great Britain would have brought the people.

Whatever Jefferson’s initial intentions in increasing military expenditures and making war preparations, by June 1808, he was already considering the possibility that the embargo would fail and his country would have to go to war with England.

But if this is before the repeal of the Orders of Council, we must abandon it only for a state of war. “The day is not distant, when that will be preferable to a longer continuance of the embargo. But we can never remove that, and let our vessels go out and be taken under these orders, without making reprisal.”[87]

Reprisal meant issuing letters of marque and arming merchant ships, both of which Jefferson knew would lead to war with Great Britain. By late 1808, most of the new gunboats and army regiments were employed trying to prevent Americans from trading with the British, and the latter showed no sign of wanting to negotiate or make concessions. What is more, opposition to the embargo in the Eastern states was steadily increasing. Jefferson’s response was to intensify the enforcement effort and prepare for war. Jefferson and his cabinet agreed that the proper policy to pursue was to tighten the enforcement of the embargo, increase war preparations, and set a date in the early summer of 1809 when, unless the British and French repealed their restrictions on American commerce, Congress would declare war against one or both powers.

In early December, at the recommendation of Gallatin (and hence Jefferson) Senator William Branch Giles introduced the Second Enforcement Act in Congress. Later in the month, at the recommendation of Dearborn (and hence Jefferson), the House began debating a bill to raise, train, and equip 50,000 volunteers at the cost of $2.1 million. The volunteers would serve one month annually for a period of two years, and they could be called into active service by the president at any time during that period. If this bill were to pass on top of the 9,000 regulars already serving and the president’s new authority to call up 100,000 militia at any time, President Madison would be able to deploy 160,000 troops for an invasion of Canada, the defense of the coastline, and perhaps an invasion of Florida as well.

Jefferson’s program was only partly enacted. On January 6, Congress passed the Second Enforcement Act. On January 20, the House passed a bill calling for an early or extra session of Congress to meet on May 22, the purpose of which would be to end the embargo and declare war. On January 30, Jefferson’s close ally Wilson Cary Nicholas introduced a measure declaring that if Great Britain and France had not repealed their orders and edicts directed against America’s neutral commerce before June 1, then the embargo would cease and letters of marque and reprisal would be issued against those two powers. Everyone knew that the issue of such letters would initiate hostilities and be followed by war.[88]

In a series of votes in early February 1809, Congress stepped back from enacting Jefferson’s and Madison’s war program. First, it rejected the Nicholas bill and voted to end the embargo on March 4; second, it voted for a mild nonintercourse act; and third, it refrained from passing the bill for 50,000 volunteers. The Northern Republicans, especially those from New York and New England, had turned against the administration’s measures because they decided that neither they nor their constituents wanted war. When the bulk of the Northern Republicans joined the antiwar, antiembargo coalition of Federalists and Old Republicans, Jefferson’s party lost its majority and the embargo was doomed. Bowing to the inevitable, Jefferson signed the bill repealing the embargo on March 1, just three days before he retired from the presidency.

What saved the country from war in 1809 was the activity and defiance of the New England Federalists, acting in the same spirit and on the same principles as the Republicans had done in 1798–1799. By late 1808, prominent New England Federalists were taking the preliminary steps to calling a convention of the five New England states and New York to protest the embargo and to adopt measures of cooperation in resisting its enforcement. The chief leaders of this movement were U.S. Senators Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts and James Hillhouse of Connecticut, Massachusetts Senate leader Harrison Gray Otis, and Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull.[89]

The first public manifestation of this well-organized and well-orchestrated movement was the holding of town meetings all across Massachusetts in January 1809. Resolutions passed by these meetings challenged the constitutionality of the embargo, vowed cooperation among the towns in resisting the second Enforcement Act, and promised to oppose any future war with Great Britain.[90] The Boston town meeting appealed to the General Court for its “interposition” to protect the “liberties and property” of the people of the state from the oppressive embargo system.[91] Soon thereafter, the Massachusetts legislature passed a series of antiwar, antiembargo resolutions. They promised to “co-operate” with their “sister States” “in measures to rescue our common country from impending ruin,” including the adoption of amendments to the Constitution designed to defend the rights of commerce; “to give to the commercial States fair and just consideration in the government of the Union”; and to afford “permanent security, as well as present relief, from the oppressive measures under which they now suffer.”[92] The Connecticut legislature soon followed Massachusetts’s example and passed similar resolutions. Governor Trumbull publicly invoked the doctrine of state interposition in his opening speech to the Connecticut legislature:

Whenever our national legislature is led to overleap the prescribed bounds of their constitutional powers, on the State legislatures in great emergencies devolves the arduous task—it is their right, it becomes their duty—to interpose their protecting shield between the rights and liberties of the people and the assumed power of the general government.[93]

Trumbull was not just blowing smoke. When War Secretary Dearborn requested him to select militia officers on whom the collectors might call for military assistance in enforcing the embargo, he refused to lend his cooperation. Trumbull reasoned that the Second Enforcement Act was “unconstitutional in many of its provisions, interfering with the State sovereignties, and subversive of the rights, privileges, and immunities of the citizens of the United States.”[94] The New England states had made their intent plain: Not only would they not cooperate in the Republican policy of embargo followed by war but they would actively resist it by collective measures, including the calling of a New England convention.

Jefferson and his cabinet were faced with a grim dilemma. Not only was the embargo not working, but they feared that were it to be persisted in, it might provoke the Eastern states to secede. If they opted for war, they could not count on New England troops to help in the invasion of Canada; what was worse, war might well drive those states to secession and common cause with England. If they chose to abandon the embargo, they would be admitting a costly and humiliating failure of policy. Ultimately, members of their own party forced their hand. When the state resistance of New England was coupled with the growing defection of Northern Republicans from the embargo and quasi-war policy, Jefferson and his cabinet had no choice but to surrender their experiment of commercial coercion and their preparations for war. Years later, he would write:

I felt the foundations of the government shaken under my feet by the New England townships. . . . [a]nd although the whole of the other States were known to be in favor of the measure, yet the organization of this little selfish minority enabled it to overrule the Union.[95]

Jefferson was bitter about this denouement. He long believed that at a time when the nation’s independence and honor was at stake, the Federalists of New England could think only of their pocketbooks.

If the irony of the political situation was palpable, so was the opportunism and hypocrisy of many New England Federalists who only eight years previously had been hard-core consolidationists and advocates of federal over state authority. Nevertheless, the New England Federalist’s invocation of the principles of ’98 gave added weight to Jefferson’s own core belief that states’ rights were “the surest bulwarks against anti-Republican tendencies.”[96] Jefferson’s belief that the decentralized and extensive nature of the federal Union was the best security for popular liberties had now been confirmed twice by experience. Although Jefferson never admitted it, Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1809 had served the cause of constitutional liberty much as Virginia and Kentucky had done in 1798 when

by a part of the Union having held on to the principles of the Constitution, time has been given to the States to recover from the temporary frenzy into which they had been decoyed, to rally round the Constitution, and to rescue it from the destruction with which it had been threatened even at their own hands.[97]