In May, 1811, there occurred one of those accidents which happen on purpose, and often serve as a relief when the public temper is in an exasperated and almost dangerous condition. This was the fight between the American frigate President, of forty-four guns, and the English sloop-of-war Little Belt, of eighteen guns. This vessel belonged to the British squadron which was ordered to the American coast to break up the trade from the United States to France; and the President was one of the few ships the government had for the protection of its commerce. The ships met a few miles south of Sandy Hook, chased each other in turn, then fired into each other without any reasonable pretext for the first shot, which each accused the other of having fired. The loss on board the English ship, in an encounter which lasted only a few minutes, was over thirty in killed and wounded, while only a single man was slightly wounded on board the President. It was, as Mr. Madison said, an "occurrence not unlikely to bring on repetitions," and that these would "probably end in an open rupture or a better understanding,[291] as the calculations of the British government may prompt or dissuade from war." This certainly was obvious enough; though it would be a great deal easier for England to bring on a war than to avert it, in the angry mood in which the majority of the Democratic party then was. But Mr. Madison preserved his equanimity. Considering his old proclivity for France, and his old dislike of England, his impartiality between them is rather remarkable. But his aim was still to keep the peace while he abated nothing of the well-founded complaints he had against both powers. When a new Congress assembled in the autumn he was careful to point out in his message the delinquencies of France as well as the offenses of England. He insisted that while England should have acknowledged the Berlin and Milan decrees to be revoked and have acted accordingly, France showed no disposition to repair the many wrongs she had inflicted upon American merchants, and had lately imposed such "rigorous and unexpected restrictions" upon commerce that it would be necessary, unless they were speedily discontinued, to meet them by "corresponding restrictions on importations from France."

This tone is even more pronounced in his letters for some following months. If anything, it is France rather than England that seems to be looked upon as the chief offender, with whom there was the greater danger of armed collision. A fortnight after Congress had assembled he wrote to[292] Barlow, the new minister to France, that though justified in assuming the French decrees to be so far withdrawn that a withdrawal of the British orders might be looked for, "yet the manner in which the French government has managed the repeal of the decrees, and evaded a correction of other outrages, has mingled with the conciliatory tendency of the repeal as much of irritation and disgust as possible." "In fact," he adds, "without a systematic change from an appearance of crafty contrivance and insatiate cupidity, for an open, manly, and upright dealing with a nation whose example demands it, it is impossible that good-will can exist; and that the ill-will which her policy aims at directing against her enemy should not, by her folly and iniquity, be drawn off against herself." French depredations upon American commerce in the Baltic were "kindling a fresh flame here," and, if they were not stopped, "hostile collisions will as readily take place with one nation as the other;" nor would there be any hesitation in sending American frigates to that sea, "with orders to suppress by force the French and Danish depredations," were it not for the "danger of rencounters with British ships of superior force in that quarter."

By this time, however, Congress, under the lead of younger, vigorous men—chief among them Clay and Calhoun—panting for leadership and distinction, was beginning its clamor for war with England. How much respect had Madison for[293] this movement, and how much faith in it? A letter to Jefferson of February 7 answers both questions. Were he not evidently amused, he would seem to be contemptuous. "To enable the Executive to step at once into Canada," he says, "they have provided, after two months' delay, for a regular force requiring twelve to raise it, and after three months for a volunteer force, on terms not likely to raise it at all for that object. The mixture of good and bad, avowed and disguised motives, accounting for these things, is curious enough, but not to be explained in the compass of a letter." This is not the tone of either hope or fear. If war was in his mind at that time, it was not war with England. Three weeks later he writes to Barlow at Paris. On various points of negotiation between that minister and the French government, he observes much that "suggests distrust rather than expectation." He complains of delay, of vagueness, of neglect, of discourtesy, of a disregard of past obligations as to the liberation of ships and cargoes seized, and of late condemnations of ships captured in the Baltic; and concerning all these and other grievances he says: "We find so little of explicit dealing or substantial redress mingled with the compliments and encouragements, which cost nothing because they mean nothing, that suspicions are unavoidable; and if they be erroneous, the fault does not lie with those who entertain them." He believed that France, in asking for a new treaty, which he thinks[294] unnecessary, is only seeking to gain time in order to take advantage of future events. The commercial relations between the two countries are so intolerable that trade "will be prohibited if no essential change take place." Unless there be indemnity for the great wrongs committed under the Rambouillet decree, and for other spoliations, he declares that "there can be neither cordiality nor confidence here; nor any restraint from self-redress in any justifiable mode of effecting it." The letter concludes with the emphatic assertion that, if dispatches soon looked for "do not exhibit the French government in better colors than it has yet assumed, there will be but one sentiment in this country; and I need not say what that will be."

Congress all this while was lashing itself into fury against England. The ambitious young leaders of the Democratic party in the House were, so to speak, "spoiling for a fight," and they chose to have it out with England rather than with France. Not that there was not quite as much reason for resentment against France as against England. Some, indeed, of the more hot-headed were anxious for war with both; but these were of the more impulsive kind, like Henry Clay, who laughed in scorn at the doubt that he could not at a blow subdue the Canadas with a few regiments of Kentucky militia. But war with England was determined upon, partly because the old enmity toward her made that intolerable[295] which to the old affection for France was a burden lightly borne; and partly because the instinctive jealousy of the commercial interest, on the part of the planter-interest, preferred that policy which would do the most harm to the North. On April 1, 1812, just five weeks after the writing of this letter to Barlow, Mr. Madison sent to Congress a message of five lines recommending the immediate passage of an act to impose "a general embargo on all vessels now in port or hereafter arriving for the period of sixty days." It was meant to be a secret measure; but the intention leaked out in two or three places, and the news was hurried North by several of the Federalist members in time to enable some of their constituents to send their ships to sea before the act was passed. Nor, probably, was it a surprise to anybody; for war with England had been the topic of debate in one aspect or another all winter, and the purpose of the party in power was plain to everybody. That the embargo was intended as a preparation for war was frankly acknowledged. An act was speedily passed, though the period was extended from sixty to ninety days. Within less than sixty days, however, another message from the President recommended a declaration of war. On June 3 the Committee on Foreign Relations, of which Calhoun was chairman, reported in favor of "an immediate appeal to arms," and the next day a declaratory act was passed. Of the seventy-nine affirmative votes in the House, forty-eight[296] were from the South and West, and of the other thirty-one votes from the Northern States, fourteen were from Pennsylvania alone. Of the forty-nine votes against it, thirty-four were from the Northern States, including two from Pennsylvania. On the 17th, a fortnight later, the bill was got through the Senate by a majority of six.

Mr. Madison for years had opposed a war with England as unwise and useless,—unwise, because the United States was not in a condition to go to war with the greatest naval power in the world; and useless, because the end to be reached by war could be gained more certainly, and at infinitely less cost, by peaceful measures. The situation had not changed. Indeed, up to within a month of the message recommending an embargo as a precursor of war, his letters show that, if he thought war was inevitable, it must be with France, not England. But the faction determined upon war must have at their command an administration to carry out that policy. Their choice was not limited to Madison for an available candidate. Whoever was nominated by the Democrats was sure to be chosen, and Madison had two formidable rivals in James Monroe, secretary of state, and De Witt Clinton, mayor of New York, both eager for war. The choice depended on that question and between the embargo message of April 1 and the war message of June 1, the nomination was given to Madison by the congressional caucus. It was understood, and openly asserted at the time by the[297] opponents of the administration, that the nomination was the price of a change of policy. At the next session of Congress, before a year had passed away, Mr. Quincy said in the House: "The great mistake of all those who reasoned concerning the war and the invasion of Canada, and concluded that it was impossible that either should be seriously intended, resulted from this, that they never took into consideration the connection of both those events with the great election for the chief magistracy which was then pending. It was never sufficiently considered by them that plunging into a war with Great Britain was among the conditions on which the support for the presidency was made dependent." The assertion, so plainly aimed at Madison, passed unchallenged, though the charge of any distinct bargain was vehemently denied.

If Mr. Madison's conscience was not always vigorous enough to enable him to resist temptation, it was so sensitive as to prompt him to look for excuses for yielding. In a sense this was to his credit as one of the better sort of politicians, without assuming it to be akin to that hypocrisy which is the homage vice pays to virtue. Perhaps it was this sentiment which led him to accept so readily the pretended disclosures of John Henry, and to make the use of them he did. These were contained in twenty-four letters, for which the President, apparently without hesitation, paid fifty thousand dollars. On March 9 he sent them to Congress with a message, and on the same day, in[298] a letter to Jefferson, alludes to them as "this discovery, or rather formal proof of the co?peration between the Eastern Junto and the British cabinet." In the message he intimates that this secret agent was sent directly by the British government to Massachusetts to foment disaffection, to intrigue "with the disaffected for the purpose of bringing about resistance to the laws, and eventually, in concert with a British force, of destroying the union" and reannexing the Eastern States to England. In the war message of June 1 these charges are repeated as among the reasons for an appeal to arms. Mr. Calhoun's committee followed this lead and improved upon it in the report recommending an immediate declaration of war. The Henry affair was declared an "act of still greater malignity" than any of the other outrages against the United States of which Great Britain had been guilty, and that which "excited the greatest horror." The incident was seized upon, apparently, to answer a temporary purpose, and then, so far as Mr. Madison was concerned, was permitted to sink into oblivion. In the hundreds of pages of his published letters, written in later life, in which he reviews and explains so many of the events of his public career, there is no allusion whatever to the Henry disclosures, which in 1812 were held, with the ruin of American commerce and the impressment of thousands of American citizens, as an equally just cause for war. In truth there was nothing whatever in these disclosures, for which[299] was paid an amount equal to the salary of half a presidential term, to warrant the assumptions of either Mr. Madison's messages or Mr. Calhoun's report. The man had been sent, at his own suggestion, early in 1809, by the governor of Canada to Massachusetts to learn the state of affairs there and observe the drift of public opinion. His national proclivity—he was an Irishman—to conspiracy and revolution had led him to see in the dissatisfaction with the embargo a determination in the New England people to destroy the union, reannex themselves to England, and return to the flesh-pots of the colonial period. To learn how far gone they were in these designs, to put himself in intimate relations with the leading conspirators and to bring them into communication with Sir James Craig, the governor-general of Canada, that sufficient aid should come through him at the proper moment from the British government, was He............