Читать книгу Rough Waters - Rodney Carisle - Страница 13
ОглавлениеAt the diplomatic level, the central issues leading to the War of 1812 were in fact maritime. The blockades of Britain against France and France against Britain affected U.S. commerce and shipping. The U.S. effort to remain neutral collapsed, and the country was drawn into war against Britain. The impressment, right of search, and blockade issues were presented and conceived as matters of honor.1
For many prominent politicians, the issues that led to the War of 1812 were, simply put, matters of national honor. For example, Congressman George Bibb from Kentucky echoed the national view that the only honorable course in the face of British actions was “a most base and disgraceful submission” or war. John C. Calhoun used similar rhetoric: “God grant that the people may have spirit to maintain our interest and honor in this momentous period.” Henry Clay argued, “Not a man in the nation could really doubt the sincerity with which those in power have sought, by all honorable pacific means, to protect the interests of the country.” Quoting these men and others, historian Roger H. Brown argues in The Republic in Peril, “A concern for national honor also led Republicans toward war. Many anticipated that failure to resist would degrade and demoralize Americans. They could reason from their own sense of honor.”2
Republicans had largely opposed the construction of a large navy, and most navalists were found in the Federalist camp, even though Republicans tended to support the war and Federalists opposed the war. Historian Craig Symonds has argued that “emotional navalism,” seeking a greatly expanded navy based on appeals to national honor, had not won great support in the period; the practical view that the world’s seas could be better patrolled by the British navy prevailed in the years following the War of 1812. What Symonds identifies as “emotional navalism” was not revived until the 1880s. As we will see, the more strident navalism that emerged in the post–Civil War era was intimately wrapped up in, and expressed in terms of, national honor.3
In the War of 1812, the U.S. Navy had a distinguished record of victories against the British, in striking contrast to the Army’s failure to effectively fight land battles. Among notable U.S. naval victories were the following: The frigate Essex accepted the surrender of the HMS Alert on August 13, 1812, off the Azores. The Constitution captured the HMS Guerrière on August 19, 1812, about five hundred miles southeast of Newfoundland. The Wasp accepted the surrender of the HMS Frolic on October 18, 1812, about three hundred miles north of Bermuda. The United States defeated the HMS Macedonian on October 25, 1812, after a two-hour battle about five hundred miles west of the Canary Islands. The Constitution so damaged the HMS Java on December 29, 1812, off the coast of Brazil that her master ordered her scuttled. The two sloops the Hornet and the HMS Peacock met on February 24, 1813, off South America; the Hornet sank the Peacock, rescued most of the Peacock survivors, and took them to the United States as prisoners. Differences in size and rigging in several of these engagements were part of British complaints that the actions were not between equivalent ships.
In contemporary news accounts, these major naval battles, as well as others, provided a vindication of U.S. honor, with the reports couched in exactly that language. In later historical accounts, U.S. historians continued to portray these victories as properly fought duels in which the U.S. victory resulted from superior seamanship and valor. By contrast, several U.S. naval defeats were depicted as due to the superior armament or fighting condition of the British ship, the result of an “unfair” match. The body of historiography on these battles is as redolent of the maritime code of honor as contemporary accounts, from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first century.
For example, in repeated treatments of naval engagements, Edgar Stanton Maclay, in his A History of the United States Navy from 1775 to 1898, carefully enumerated the number and weight of cannon on board the opposing vessels in two-ship encounters, or duels, and recorded to the extent possible precise casualty figures in the U.S.-British naval encounters of the War of 1812. An undercurrent of such a presentation was the “manhood” displayed by U.S. sailors, especially when they emerged victorious from an encounter in which they operated at a disadvantage in armament or size and weight of ship. Maclay repeatedly described a success in such battles as “gallant.”
The language of Maclay, writing in 1893–1898 about affairs eight decades earlier, might be thought to reflect the jingoistic sentiment of the 1890s, with all its sensitivities, values, ideas, concepts, and rhetoric. The full-blown “cult of the flag” had taken hold by the 1890s, and perhaps Maclay represented that era, not the earlier one, with his interpretation and focus. However, Maclay’s concern with “indignities,” “insults,” and “outrages” suffered by the U.S. flag and their role in causing conflict was not simply an imposition of a later point of view on evidence from an earlier era. Although that historiographic perception is correct in that Maclay did reflect values of his own era, the same rhetoric had been applied in precisely the same fashion in the first decades of the 1800s and had taken root in that period. The primary documents that Maclay and other later historians cited, as well as Maclay’s and other historians’ own text, used language reflecting ship duels, gallant officers, and dozens of turns of phrase and descriptions of incidents that reflected the honor code values.
Maclay provided mind-numbing detail on the equality of armament of the Frolic and the Wasp and the Wasp victory. He went to great lengths to detail manpower, tonnage, armament, and casualty figures in each encounter, generally in order to demonstrate that U.S. sailors fought in equal encounters or in encounters in which they were outgunned with great success.4
Later historians have continued to describe the War of 1812 naval encounters in maritime honor code terms. The War of 1812, written by John K. Mahon and published in 1991, references the “gentleman’s code of naval warfare” violated by the British in the eyes of Capt. David Porter off South America on March 28, 1814.5 Roy Adkins and Lesley Adkins, in their The War for All the Oceans, repeat many of the classic analyses that evoked the maritime code duello, often through direct quotes from contemporary sources. For example, an officer on board the President wrote to the New York Herald demonstrating that he wanted an equal match in accord with the code: “We have made the complete preparation for battle. Every one wishes it. She is exactly our force, but we have the Argus [sloop] with us, which none of us are pleased with, as we wish a fair trial of courage and skill. . . . The commodore [John Rodgers] will demand the person impressed; the demand will doubtless be refused, and the battle will instantly commence.”6
As another example, the following passage from The War for All the Oceans demonstrates the parallel between exposing oneself in a duel and gentlemen in a gun battle at sea: “[The master] in an encounter between Amphion and French Flore, ordered gun crews to lie down ‘as by standing they were uselessly exposed, it being impossible to bring a gun to bear on the enemy at the moment. With the young gentlemen [midshipmen] or officers I left it optional to act as they pleased, and they remained erect with me, and I lament to say suffered in consequence of their gallantry, for Messrs. Barnard and Farewell, two promising young men, were immediately knocked down and taken to the cockpit, badly, though not mortally wounded.’”7
The sources cited in the Adkinses’ study of the War of 1812 as well as many other works are replete with examples of terminology and rhetoric that consciously or unconsciously reflected the honor code.8
Honor, the Flag, and Policy
With the (perceived) victorious end of the War of 1812, there was a change in the tone of editorialists, politicians, and public assemblies regarding the issue of the flag and honor. The first generation of those who had fought in the Revolution had begun to die off. Having survived a second war with Britain, journalists, politicians, and probably most of the American public no longer seemed quite as sensitive to affronts to honor.9
Americans now had reason to believe that the republic would survive; recognition by foreign powers had increased, and it was clear that the U.S. Navy had proved itself a match for the world’s strongest maritime power, Great Britain. With attention turning to issues such as the suppression of piracy, the removal of Indians from the Old Southwest and newly acquired Florida, the expansion of the cotton frontier, and the settlement of the trans-Mississippi West, the tone of insecurity and chip-on-the-shoulder defensiveness in editorials declined to an extent.
Nevertheless, the honor code persisted and shaped not only personal values but national attitudes and policies as well. Duels were still fought, scoundrels and poltroons were publicly thrashed by self-defined gentlemen, and the general informed public still expected that the United States and its honor would be respected abroad. As will be seen, the code of honor persisted to shape the logic of encounters at sea, while on land a code of behavior based on honor still not only shaped the conduct of personal affairs and polite discourse but also cropped up in public discussion of military action and international relations.
Joanne Freeman argues in Affairs of Honor, “The resulting style of politics—self-conscious, anxious, and inter-twined with the rites and rituals of the honor code—fell to the wayside with the acceptance of political parties.”10 The research and findings in the present work show that the honor code and its associated rhetoric continued to shape much of political discourse far longer, particularly when it came to the role of U.S. merchant shipping on the world’s oceans.
Presidents, secretaries of state, members of Congress, and other public figures judged their own actions and those of domestic and foreign opponents by the standards of the unwritten, but understood, code of honor. Accordingly, when the maritime flag, as the symbol of the nation, was disrespected, affronted, or dishonored, the outrage became a cause for editorial outbursts from journalists, public dismay, and sometimes executive action leading to military engagement. This pattern was at work through the maritime disputes of the antebellum period, during the Civil War, into the late nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth century.
The Merchant Flag, 1815–60
In the four decades following the War of 1812, a variety of events and developments shaped the standing of the American merchant marine. The division between the interests of seaboard states and territories and those of interior states and territories became clear in congressional debates over tariffs and internal improvements. As new western states were admitted to the union, representatives in the coastal states had increased incentive to portray the maritime issue as one of national pride and status in order to enlist (or shame) representatives of the interior into supporting a navy and other policies beneficial to the seaport cities.
Steam propulsion of ships began with Robert Fulton’s river steamers on the Hudson in 1807, and soon the extensive U.S. river system was busy with dozens, then hundreds, of paddlewheel-driven steamboats. The seemingly inexhaustible supply of firewood along the riverbanks allowed fueling. In seaports, steam tugs and local excursion boats and ferries soon clogged the harbors; some began using coal as fuel. However, America’s foreign trade was conducted across oceans, and steam propulsion was not practical for most transoceanic travel, simply because the tons of fuel required for such a trip left little space for cargo. Engines and propulsion improved rapidly, but even by the 1850s, U.S.-owned transoceanic cargo ships remained either sailing vessels or combined sail-and-steam vessels.
So, despite the development of a new technology that would revolutionize ocean travel and maritime warfare in later decades, the oceangoing trade of the United States before the Civil War was almost entirely conducted in wind-powered brigs, schooners, barks, and clipper ships, with some conducted on board the hybrid sail-and-steam ships. The clippers were particularly used in runs around Cape Horn to and from China and to California, following the gold rush of 1849, while sail-and-steam ships ran packet services between East and Gulf Coast cities, Havana, and Panama.
As steam railroads and river steamboats facilitated westward expansion, the dominating influence of the seaboard maritime states slowly diminished. Between 1791 and 1837, thirteen new states were admitted to the Union to join the original thirteen. Of the thirteen new states, only Maine, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama had seacoasts. This basic geopolitical reality meant that by 1837 coastal states had a somewhat diminished power in the Senate. Whereas in 1789 all twenty-six senators were from coastal states, by 1837 the tally was thirty-four seacoast senators and eighteen inland senators. An ever slimmer majority in the House of Representatives represented seaport constituencies.11 The balance between slave states and nonslave states was carefully maintained in the Senate, but the Senate had gone from 100 percent representation of seaboard states to 73 percent seaboard, and the number was declining.
Of course, there was no effort to maintain a balance of maritime states with interior states similar to the effort to maintain the slave-holding-nonslaveholding balance. The trend for the gradual increase of inland representation would continue. Although many inland states, particularly in the Ohio and Mississippi River basins, shipped products by river to New Orleans for transshipment by sea to overseas destinations, the country’s ocean or maritime focus had begun to diminish somewhat by the 1850s. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of honor, with its focus on the flag at sea, still had considerable power to evoke political support and remained a staple of both journalistic and historical writing throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.
The Flag as a National Emblem
In the years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, editorialists, politicians, and others made it clear that the flag itself had come to symbolize the nation and had become even more deeply revered. Arctic and Antarctic explorers proudly reported that they had “carried the flag” to these previously unexplored regions. U.S. ambassador to Mexico Joel Roberts Poinsett offered sanctuary to Spanish civilians when they were attacked by a mob; he claimed to have awed the mob into submission by waving the U.S. flag from the balcony of the embassy. In the Mexican War, the conquest of California was symbolized by the raising of the U.S. flag there; the victory in Mexico City was represented by raising the U.S. flag over the castle at Chapultepec. The advance of the Panama Railroad across the Isthmus of Panama was marked by the progress of the flag there. In each of these cases, the flag itself was prominently displayed and written about as the emblem of American enterprise, fortitude, and courage.12 These and many other episodes in the period reflected the strong association between the flag and American national identity formed in the first decades and well embedded in discourse and national sentiments. The development was not unique to the United States, as the French Tricolor and the British Union Jack, among other imperial flags, were on display at coaling stations, embassies, consulates, and colonies all across the planet.
U.S. Navy Defense of the Merchant Ship Flag, 1831–60
The association between flag and national identity still extended clearly to the flag on board merchant ships at sea. When Sumatran pirates attacked the U.S. merchant ship Friendship at Kuala Batu in 1831, seizing the cargo and killing the crew, President Andrew Jackson ordered retaliation.13 The Potomac, disguised as a merchant ship, conducted a raid on the pirate haven in 1832, destroying five forts and slaughtering more than a hundred villagers.14 However, the chastisement seemed to have little effect. In August 1838 the U.S. merchant ship Eclipse was attacked in the same area, its master murdered, and the ship plundered of opium and some $18,000. Hearing of this second outrage, the commander of U.S. frigate Columbia sailed from Ceylon, bombarded Kuala Batu again, and destroyed another nearby town, Muka, in retaliation.15 The Kuala Batu raids of 1832 and 1838 illustrated that the merchant flag, like the flags of railroad entrepreneurs, explorers, ambassadors, and U.S. troops abroad, represented the United States and that the underlying honor code would continue to determine the appropriate response to affronts to the flag. Considering that the Sumatran pirates had no commerce that the United States could effectively interdict, no diplomatic channels through which protests could be made, and no regime from which restitution or reparations could be obtained, a direct reprisal with force was the only alternative.
U.S. merchant ships were often subject to blockades, harassment, and sometimes outright confiscation during the many rebellions, conflicting claims of jurisdiction, and civil conflicts in Latin America from 1831 to 1859, and the U.S. Navy responded to affronts to the merchant flag on just a few occasions in these years. Historian John H. Schroeder has detailed several such episodes. Among them was one that followed after Argentine officials seized the U.S. sealer Harriet in 1831 in the Falkland Islands for killing seals on the island shores. In retaliation, Capt. Silas Duncan, in command of the Navy’s Lexington, ordered his ship to the islands, where he spiked the guns of the fort and posted a notice that interference with U.S. sealers was an act of piracy. The episode led to a break in diplomatic relations between the United States and Argentina that lasted until 1844.16
In 1841, in an episode in what is now the Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire), the U.S. merchant schooner Mary Carver was captured and its crew murdered. Finally, more than a year later, Commo. Matthew C. Perry took his antislavery squadron of four naval ships and anchored off the offending village of Berebee on December 13, 1843. When an attempt to negotiate turned into a brawl, Perry’s sailors killed the local king and burned the village.17
As noted by historian Brian Rouleau, as “representatives” of U.S. culture, early nineteenth-century merchant crew members far outnumbered officials and more polite citizens, like missionaries and government representatives such as consuls, ministerial staff, and naval officers. While Yankee tars perceived their trips to foreign ports as carrying the flag abroad, often their antics had adverse effects. Sometimes U.S. merchant seamen, sealers, and whalers in ports abroad created local incidents that had the making for international incidents. Minstrel shows by seamen, disputes over theft, fistfights and barroom or brothel brawls in many ports, and a full-scale riot by merchant sailors ashore in Hawaii in 1852 all led to objections or protests by local authorities. In some of the more violent cases, U.S. merchant sailors were tried before U.S. consular courts and condemned to local prison or work gangs. The cultural contacts were often insulting to the local peoples, sometimes very contentious, and now and then bloody.18
When episodes of conflict between U.S. seamen (naval or merchant) and peoples abroad reached the U.S. press, ethnic and racist preconceptions created a natural tendency to place blame on the “natives.” Even so, in terms of potential for armed conflict, the treatment of the U.S. flag on board merchant ships while at sea or in ports was far more crucial than the encounters of American tars with sailors from other nations or with local residents, whether primitive or modern. Journalists and statesmen were more likely to become engaged when the flag was challenged than when one or more American tars got in trouble ashore.
The Right of Search as Insult to the Flag
In a series of episodes involving the American merchant flag at sea in the 1840s and 1850s, Britain challenged U.S. national honor to the extent that it became a national concern. The protection the U.S. flag offered to merchant ships was tested when the British sought to interdict the continuing African slave trade from West Africa to Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Brazil in the 1840s. U.S.-owned and U.S.-flagged ships were active in this trade, and even Spanish slave traders, operating ships not regularly registered in any port, flew the U.S. flag in hopes of preventing British search and seizure of their vessels. The American response to the British challenge illustrated exactly how far the United States would go to protect its merchant flag at sea.
Howard Jones wrote, “Southerners protested British search tactics as an infringement of America’s freedom of the seas—a reminder of impressment—and called on the Washington government to defend national honor. Their sincerity is impossible to determine, but some Southern papers argued for maritime rights and national integrity.”19 The southerners’ outrage was also shared by politicians and journalists in the North, whose anti-British sentiment was aroused over both British treatment of the merchant ship flag on board suspected slave ships and the issue of the U.S. border with the British colony of New Brunswick.
At its height in 1841, the “right of search” controversy became one of several possible casus belli for a third war between Great Britain and the United States. After the issue had apparently been resolved with the signing of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty in 1842, it lay dormant for more than a decade, until it resurfaced in 1857 and 1858. Although the maritime issue was only one of several problems generating tensions between the United States and Britain, the controversy revealed that affronts to the flag and the honor due to the flag at sea continued to excite public, journalistic, and political outcry in the United States.
As noted earlier, the British exercise (and, in American eyes, misuse) of the right of search had been one of the reasons for the War of 1812. The British did not officially claim a right of search on a warship of a nation with which they were at peace, but even so, they did not officially apologize or make restitution for the violation of the principle in seizing deserters from the Chesapeake in 1807. The treaty that resolved the War of 1812 did not include a clause prohibiting the searching of ships in peacetime in the future. The British regarded such an explicit prohibition as unnecessary or redundant. Searching a foreign merchant ship in international waters during peacetime was a practice not even countenanced in British law unless the ship flew the flag of a nation that had entered a treaty allowing such a search. Therefore, the Royal Navy’s detention and examination of merchant ships that flew the U.S. flag on the high seas in the 1840s and 1850s was indeed an extraordinary departure from commonly accepted international practice and Britain’s own regular procedures.
Off the coast of West Africa and later in the West Indies, British warships did in fact stop and detain many merchant ships flying the U.S. flag; British officers then boarded the ships to inspect documentation to verify whether or not the ships were entitled to fly the flag. The British claimed that the detention, visitation, and searches of suspected slave ships were all done to determine proper documentation of the ships’ right to fly the U.S. flag.20
During the Napoleonic Wars, seamen from U.S. merchant ships were impressed under the wartime right of search, but in 1839–1840 the United States and Britain were at peace. Americans believed that Britain had absolutely no right to permit or order its warships to detain, inspect, or board ships flying the U.S. flag in international waters during time of peace. The affront was manifest; the heated rhetorical responses to these episodes at the time repeatedly evoked the honor code. Editorialists and some officials urged the United States to reject “the insult to the flag.” The searches, they claimed, showed British contempt and failure to treat the United States as an equal.
The right of search issue first arose at the same time that a simmering border dispute over the boundary between the British colony of New Brunswick and the state of Maine threatened to boil over into a full-blown conflict between Britain and the United States, known as the Aroostook War. The state of Maine prepared to send militia units into the disputed zone and unilaterally adjust the boundary by force of arms; the New Brunswick colonists also prepared their local militia. As this border issue loomed, the anti-British U.S. press focused on the British outrages at sea and linked the obscure local boundary question to the more nationally inflammatory issue of outrageous insults to the flag. As in 1812 the rhetoric of honor, as applied to maritime affairs, was used to enlist wide support for a war from which inland regions had more to gain. One U.S. resident in the disputed Maine–New Brunswick zone flew the U.S. flag; when New Brunswick authorities arrested him and confiscated his flag, the insult to the flag—this one ashore—became further fuel for the rising war fever in Maine and the United States.21
The United States had outlawed the importation of slaves into the United States in 1808. To prevent slave export from Africa by U.S. ships, U.S. naval ships, beginning with the Cyane in 1820, patrolled off West Africa. Blacks rescued from slavers by U.S. warships were taken to Monrovia, Liberia, where the American Colonization Society had established a colony for resettled African Americans. British captures went to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where commissions ruled on whether there was sufficient evidence of slave trading to condemn the ship and award prize money to the capturing ship.
Until the late 1830s, the British refrained from confiscating slave ships off West Africa unless there were actually slaves on board; that is, an empty slave ship, outfitted for the trade, flying the flag of Spain or Portugal, was not confiscated in this early period. In 1835 Spain agreed that ships outfitted for the trade under the Spanish flag could be seized even if they carried no slaves; Portugal agreed to the same principles in 1836. British naval officers immediately began stopping and seizing such suspected slave ships and taking them to Freetown, Sierra Leone, for adjudication.
By the late 1830s, some of the Spanish slave traders’ ships had adopted the false use of the U.S. flag, especially when no slaves were on board, thereby hoping to avoid British inspection. As a consequence, in 1839–1841 at least five (and probably more) ships bearing the American merchant flag were stopped by the British West African Anti-Slavery Squadron and found to be in fact Spanish-owned slavers and slave-equipped ships falsely flying the U.S. flag. These five were the brigantines Douglass and Iago, searched by the HMS Termagant; the brig-sloop Susan, stopped by the HMS Grecian; the brigantine Mary, searched by the HMS Forester; and the brigantine Hero, searched by the HMS Lynx.22
The U.S. minister to England, Andrew Stevenson, protested vehemently against the British assumption of the right of search in these five cases, even though there had been no way to determine if the flag was legitimate without examining the ship papers. An exchange of diplomatic notes (often in not very diplomatic language) followed.
The right of search issue was divisive on both sides of the Atlantic, and the individuals involved contributed their personal tone to the debate. Among the most vehement defenders of the U.S. position were Andrew Stevenson, Daniel Webster, and Lewis Cass. On the British side, Lord Wellington and Lord Ashburton were conciliatory, whereas Lord Palmerston was intolerant of the U.S. position.23
For the British, the core question was this: How could British officers determine if a ship was fitted out for slavery or was flying the U.S. flag legitimately unless they searched the ship and inspected both it and the documents it carried? Traditional British practice accepted that the right of search existed only during war unless specifically conceded by treaty, as in the Spanish and Portuguese cases. In 1841 the United States took the position that only U.S. authorities had the right to investigate and punish false uses of the U.S. flag. The U.S. objection may seem rather technical now but simply illustrates the sensitivity over national honor that perceived insults to the flag could evoke during the nineteenth century. As a practical matter, the British held that searching suspected slavers was the best way to interdict the slave trade. Some U.S. officials and editorialists who opposed the British practice believed that Britain was exerting the right of search to interfere with legitimate American African trade, to impress naturalized U.S. citizens into the Royal Navy (no evidence of impressment in these cases exists), and to arrogantly and illegally insult U.S. national honor. Among the minority, William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and other antislavery and pro-British U.S. journals argued that the British were simply being practical.24
For other editorialists, the issues of British arrogance and trampling on U.S. maritime rights were of far greater importance than stopping the slave trade. Some of these writers might have hoped to provoke a war with Britain during which the United States could seize portions or all of Canada; regardless of their motives, these editorialists used a rhetoric of honor similar to the rhetoric of 1812.
By 1844 Britain had treaties with Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and some Spanish-American republics that either explicitly conceded the right of search or made arrangements for visitation to verify documents. However, Britain had no such treaty with the United States. The British acted as though they needed treaties with European and Latin American nations but could dispense with treaties when dealing with the United States. America’s status as a nation among nations was being disrespected.
Decline of the Controversy
Beginning in 1842 the right of search issue rather suddenly subsided. William Henry Harrison died after thirty days in office in 1841; his successor, John Tyler, did not share Jackson’s and Harrison’s strong anti-British views, and neither did the members of Tyler’s new administration. In fact, several of the most hostile individuals on both sides of the Atlantic were replaced with more conciliatory men, and this may have been the most striking contributor to the reduction of tensions. Under Tyler’s more conciliatory leadership, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty was signed August 9, 1842. The treaty settled the Maine–New Brunswick border dispute, established reciprocity of extradition for crimes, and implemented cooperation between British and U.S. naval officers on antislavery patrol. Although the treaty did not explicitly concede the right of search in peacetime, it did take a step toward resolution of the issue.
The treaty was initially successful largely because it defined the new border between Maine and New Brunswick. Before the treaty was signed, members of the Maine state legislature had received copies of a “Red Line” map conveniently found in French archives by Daniel Webster’s friend and fellow New Englander, the historian Jared Sparks. The map purported to show the British boundary claim more than conceded by Benjamin Franklin in 1783. Maine legislators who had threatened to fund a state militia to attack Canada backed down on being shown the map,25 and the new border was included in the treaty. With the Aroostook boundary settled, those editorialists who had sought to invoke the right of search issue to win anti-British support over the land dispute no longer had a motive to make such appeals. More broadly, the resolution of the Maine border issue and the apparent agreement to cooperate in suppressing the slave trade was seen as a “vindication of national honor.”26
For the British, there were several additional reasons for the controversy over the right of search to recede. Between 1815 and the 1860s, the British government faced major problems adjusting to a peacetime economy that was increasingly urban and industrial. Its response included the abandonment of the Navigation Laws in 1848 and nine major revisions of duties in 1860.27 Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, “The years from 1848 to the mid 1870s saw Britain involved in considerably more warfare than the preceding thirty or succeeding 40 years.” These incidents were “either brief operations decided by technological and organisational superiority . . . or mismanaged massacres on which even the patriotism of the belligerent countries has refused to dwell with pleasure, such as the Crimean War 1854–6.”28 With such pressures, the British did not want a conflict with the United States in which Canada would be subject to invasion. Although the United States had attempted and failed to seize Canada in 1812, the disparity in population by 1840 and the ease of transporting troops by rail and road as compared with ship made an American conquest of some or all Canadian territory a more formidable threat by the later period.29
Tyler’s administration was conciliatory in several ways. President Tyler replaced U.S. minister to Britain Andrew Stevenson. Stevenson was a hot-headed, slave-owning Democrat from Virginia who had been accused by Daniel O’Connell, the Irish leader and antislavery writer, of being a “slave-breeder.” In typical fashion, Stevenson subsequently challenged O’Connell to a duel, but O’Connell did not accept the challenge and instead offered a backhanded “clarification” of his public statement.30 Stevenson’s replacement, Edward Everett, by contrast, was a pro-British Massachusetts Whig. If right of search cases came up, as a New Englander, Everett was not inclined to get involved; he had no interest in defending slavery.
On the British side, Lord Palmerston (who was rather contemptuous of U.S. claims to rights of various kinds) was out of office by 1842. Lord Wellington, who was very conciliatory to the United States, was now minister without portfolio. Alexander Baring (Lord Ashburton), sent to Washington to negotiate as a minister with plenipotentiary powers, was also more conciliatory, as was U.S. secretary of state Daniel Webster. Webster was, like Everett, a Massachusetts Whig and a leading advocate of North-South compromise. Furthermore, Webster had been an opponent of the War of 1812. Like other conservative Massachusetts Whigs, he sought to avoid war with Britain and was no defender of slavery. Thus, cooler heads prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic.
Even so, some spokesmen for a strong anti-British position on the issue continued in office. Lewis Cass served as U.S. minister to France into 1842. There he published a pamphlet that was intended to influence French deputies to reject the Quintuple Treaty, which conceded the right of search.31 Lewis Cass was a “popular sovereignty” supporter of the rights of American slaveholders and a strong defender of American honor when it came to British insults. When the French did not include a distinct or explicit denial of the right of search in their negotiation of the Quintuple Treaty, Cass resigned his position as minister to France, claiming that the French negotiation of the treaty “compromised his position.”32 However, Cass’ position prevailed, as the treaty was not ratified by France, and the French foreign minister, François Guizot, informed General Cass that France would never concede the right of search during peacetime. In further diplomatic notes in 1845, the French made it clear that they rejected any British claim to a right of search during peace.33 That issue resurfaced in the 1890s with regard to the East African slave trade carried on under French flags on board dhows owned in Oman (discussed in chapter 5).
The British interpreted Clause 8 of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which established cooperation on the squadron level, as “conceding the Right of Search,” but President Tyler declared emphatically that no such right was conceded. In the Senate, Thomas Hart Benton, an outspoken defender of national honor, roundly criticized Daniel Webster for giving in to Britain.34 In response to Benton’s criticism, Webster released to the press a letter he sent to Everett showing that he did not regard the treaty as conceding any “right” to search or visitation and that he thought the cooperation of naval officers on the scene would put an end to false flag uses.35 In effect, Webster was claiming that the treaty resolved the issue, and at the same time he was publicly and officially stating to Britain that no right had been conceded. After Webster’s letter was published, the right of search issue subsided. Over the following years, the U.S. press turned to other concerns—the admission of Texas to the Union, the war with Mexico, the California gold rush, the admission of California to the Union, the Compromise of 1850, and the burning issue of slavery in the federal territories acquired from Mexico in the 1846–1848 war.
From 1842 to 1860, the U.S. West African Squadron (and other U.S. naval ships and government vessels such as revenue cutters) successfully seized and condemned or destroyed more than fifty slave ships.36 Some of them had been flying the U.S. flag as a false flag. Since U.S. naval ships were not allowed to detain any ships equipped for the trade but only those with slaves on board, often a slave transport ship so equipped would fly the U.S. flag as it approached the African coast, then, after the slaves had been loaded, the ship would be “sold” to a Spanish citizen and a Spanish flag hoisted. The ship would then sail past the U.S. squadron, which had no agreement with Spain to interdict slave ships. The Royal Navy could stop the Spanish-flagged ships, but U.S. naval officers were powerless to do so.37 The U.S. record of slave-ship interdiction was far surpassed by the British antislavery squadron, which captured and condemned more than fifteen hundred vessels.
Few scholars have offered interpretations of the decline of the right of search issue from the mid-1840s to the late 1850s. Historian W. E. B. DuBois, writing in 1896, suggested that one of the reasons for the decline was that members of Congress would not come to the defense of U.S.-flagged slave ships because the detentions had “revealed so much American guilt that it was deemed wiser to let the matter end in talk.” DuBois pointed out that in 1850 an investigation by the Fillmore administration showed that out of ten U.S.-flagged ships detained by the British, nine were proven to be slavers.38
Donald Canney, in his definitive work Africa Squadron: The U.S. Navy and the Slave Trade, 1842–1861, pointed out several factors that contributed to the decline of the issue from the mid-1840s to the late 1850s. With U.S. ships patrolling the coast, somewhat fewer slave ships resorted to the U.S. flag. There was a lull in the slave trade itself in the early 1850s. The gold rush of 1849–1855 drew many U.S.-built ships to the California route and away from the slave trade. Furthermore, legitimate U.S. traders were permitted to trade directly with Britain because of the British suspension of the Navigation Laws in 1849, also drawing ships away from the African trade.39
A thorough study of the debate over the British exercise of the right of search was written by Howard Hazen Wilson and published in the Journal of International Law. In this study, Wilson held that the Americans were correct to insist that there was no right of search in peacetime and to demand that the British inspections of potential slave ships displaying the U.S. flag not be conducted under some extension of the wartime right of search. Rather, he argued, the searches should have been justified in some other fashion.40
The Issue Revived and Resolved
After the issue had lain dormant for years, in 1857–1858 the British searched and detained several more ships flying the U.S. flag, and once again American tempers were raised.41 In these two years, at least another fifteen U.S. ships were boarded or visited by British officers, off West Africa and also in the West Indies, and numerous U.S. ship masters filed complaints or reports in the United States. Again, Lewis Cass, now secretary of state under President James Buchanan, took the lead in protesting the infringement of American rights, clarifying once again that the United States had not conceded the right of search in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. On April 10, 1858, he sent the following note to Lord Napier, the British minister in Washington: “To permit a foreign officer to board the vessel of another power to assume command of her, to call for and examine her papers, to pass judgment upon her character . . . to send her in at pleasure for trial, cannot be submitted to by any independent nation without injury and dishonor [italics in original]. The United States deny the right of the cruisers of any other power whatsoever, for any purpose whatsoever, to enter their vessels by force in time of peace.”42 The relative disappearance of the issue after 1843 and its sudden reappearance in 1857–1858 are striking, as is Lewis Cass’ evocation of the issue of honor.
Several developments together account for the revival of the issue in the mid- and late 1850s. First, there was another change in personnel. Not only was Cass secretary of state, but in Britain, Palmerston, back in the cabinet, was more aggressive on this score than others, and he was reputed to be emboldened by the British election results of March 1857.43 Second, slave transportation in the West Indies had recently resurged owing to increased prices for slaves in the United States and Cuba.44 Third, news reports showed the outfitting of an estimated forty to eighty-five U.S.-built ships a year through the 1850s to engage in the trade; simply raising the number of ships involved led to more episodes.45 Fourth, the equipping of the Royal Navy with steam-powered warships meant that they could effectively overhaul sailing vessels, particularly during the frequent calms off West Africa, within reach of their coal depot in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Fifth, the British decided to dispatch part of the antislavery squadron to the West Indies and to operate there as well as off Africa.46 And finally, the issue may have received more attention because of exaggerated complaints by slave traders themselves, reflecting a movement in the slave states to repeal the prohibition on the Atlantic slave trade. This effort to repeal the ban on the slave trade was itself a part of the 1850s effort of slaveholders to claim that slavery was a “positive good,” a development well treated in the literature surrounding the coming sectional crisis in the United States.47
The increased tension over the issue was grounded in a series of specific detentions on the high seas. The British boarded at least fifteen U.S.-flagged ships in 1858, and probably more.48 After the flurry of press concern over repeated affronts to U.S. honor in the spring of 1858, the issue once again subsided, and there were only scattered further reports of British searches of ships flying (honestly or not) the U.S. flag. The settlement of the revived dispute came on June 17, 1858, during a discussion in the British Parliament of U.S. concern over the right of search. Several members of Parliament made it clear that Britain recognized no right of search in time of peace but that inspection of papers to ensure that a flag was legitimate had to be accomplished or all sorts of pirates and smugglers would use false flags, knowing they could never be boarded to determine if the flag was legitimate. Although this had always been the British position, the explicit recognition in Parliament that there was no right of search in time of peace satisfied some northern editorialists and, according to reports, also President James Buchanan and even his testy secretary of state, Lewis Cass.49 At least, the U.S. politicians who had been outraged by the British insult could now correctly assert that the British had conceded that they had no right of search in peacetime.
The British indicated that while they accepted the U.S. position, they hoped to work out some practical means of determining the legitimacy of the flag, without giving offense. The United States rejected a British suggestion that a man-of-war’s boat could approach alongside the suspected vessel and request the papers to be handed down (without boarding).50
Secretary Cass, in his complaint to the British, stated that like police approaching a suspect on a public street, naval officers could only visit a ship to confirm the legitimacy of the flag, and only if there was reasonable suspicion that the flag was misused.51 Cass admitted that the legitimacy of the flag could be determined only by examining papers, but if a ship was wrongly boarded, the boarding officer and the British government would be liable for the financial damage from delay and a full diplomatic apology would be expected. This communication provided a final way through the impasse—indicating that officially the U.S. government would not object if a search revealed that a flag had been falsely employed but would expect an apology and restitution for any damages in cases of error. Although U.S. editorialists believed the British had stopped many innocent vessels, such complaints greatly diminished after the exchange of notes. For students of international law, the concession of inspection, especially when it revealed a false use of the flag, without conceding a right of search—Cass’ solution—was entirely correct and fully justified, according to Wilson in his modern analysis of the issue. The fact that several British parliamentarians had agreed that Britain could not claim a right of search in peacetime also helped put the issue at rest.52
The Buchanan administration began to use steamers, and the U.S. Africa Squadron was much more active in 1859–1860 in apprehending ships, taking twelve vessels with more than three thousand slaves on board.53 The number of reported English-on-American-flag incidents declined, although from time to time one would still make the news. One of the last was in 1859. The New York Times reported a “British Outrage” (noting the phrase with quote marks in the headline and thus mocking the concept) when the steamer HMS Viper overhauled, examined, evacuated, and burned the brigantine Rufus Soule off West Africa on October 11 or 12, 1858, later landing the crew on a beach. A ship of the U.S. West African Squadron rescued the stranded mariners. The news of the event did not reach the United States until February 1859. In that case, the master of the brigantine had tossed his papers overboard, certainly an indication they were fraudulent, according to Lieutenant Commander Austin B. Hodkinton, commander of the British steamer. No doubt the fact that the ship was obviously a slaver contributed to the mocking tone of the headline. In the growing antislavery climate of the North in 1859, it was hardly an “outrage” that the British interdicted an obvious slave ship.54 The few continuing episodes of inspection to determine the legitimacy of registration no longer raised the specter of war, and the U.S. press turned its attention to the internal impending crisis with John Brown’s raid on October 16, 1859.
The right of search controversies of the 1840s and 1850s demonstrated several underlying facts about the official and public attitudes toward the maritime flag at sea. First, the maritime code of honor was still strongly in place, despite the decreasing acceptance of the practice of dueling, especially in the Northeast. Second, the symbolic nature of the flag remained firmly entrenched in the public mind. The flag was flown proudly on exploration ships to the Arctic and Antarctic and, in 1846–1848, was planted in Chapultepec and throughout the new territories gained from Mexico. Third, at least some Americans regarded infringement of U.S. sovereignty at sea, as represented by the merchant flag, as an outrage sufficient to threaten armed conflict. Yet diplomacy prevailed. Even the strongly anti-British U.S. secretary of state, Lewis Cass, who saw the British actions as clear infringements of U.S. maritime rights, was willing, in the interests of maintaining peace, to find a diplomatic pathway through the issues. The U.S. Civil War, however, would bring further nuances to the relationship between the merchant flag and U.S. national identity.
Portions of this chapter appeared in conference presentations and in two articles by the author and are reused with permission: “The American Maritime Code Duello,” Northern Mariner 21, no. 2 (April 2011): 159–69; and “The Right of Search Controversies, 1841–42 and 1857–58,” Northern Mariner 22, no. 4 (October 2012): 409–20.
