Читать книгу Abridgement of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856 (4 of 16 vol.) - United States. Congress - Страница 27

The credentials of Joseph Anderson, appointed a Senator for the State of Tennessee, by the Executive of that State, from and after the expiration of the time limited in his present appointment, until the end of the next session of the Legislature thereof, were presented and read, and ordered to lie on file.

Franking Privilege to Mr. Jefferson

The bill freeing from postage all letters and packets to Thomas Jefferson was read the second time, and considered as in Committee of the Whole; and no amendment having been proposed, on the question, Shall this bill be engrossed and read a third time? it was determined in the affirmative.

Non-Intercourse

Mr. Tiffin, from the committee, reported the bill to interdict the commercial intercourse between the United States and Great Britain and France, and their dependencies, and for other purposes, correctly engrossed; and the bill was read the third time, and the blanks filled – section three, with the words twentieth and May in two instances.

On motion by Mr. Bradley, the words, "or being pursued by the enemy," were stricken out of the first and third sections, by unanimous consent.

Mr. Lloyd addressed the Senate as follows:

Mr. President: When the resolution on which this bill is founded was brought forward, I had expected it would have been advocated – as a means of preserving peace – as a menace to the belligerents, that a more rigorous course of conduct was about to be adopted towards them, on the part of the United States, provided they continued to persist in their injurious decrees, and Orders in Council – as giving us time to prepare for war – or as a covert, but actual war, against France and Great Britain.

I feel indebted to the honorable gentleman from Virginia, (Mr. Giles,) for not only having very much narrowed the consideration of this subject, but for the open, candid, and manly ground he has taken, both in support of the resolution and the bill. I understood him to avow, that the effect must be war, and that a war with Great Britain; that, notwithstanding the non-intercourse attached to this bill, the merchants would send their vessels to sea; those vessels would be captured by British cruisers; these captures would be resisted; such resistance would produce war, and that was what he both wished and expected. I agree perfectly with the gentleman, that this is the natural progress, and must be the ultimate effect of the measure; and I am also glad, that neither the honorable Senate nor the people of the United States can entertain any doubts upon the subject.

I understood the gentleman also to say, that this was a result he had long expected. Now, sir, as there have been no recent decrees, or Orders in Council issued, if war has been long looked for, from those now in operation, I know not what excuse those who have the management of our concerns can offer to the people of the United States, for leaving the country in its present exposed, naked, and defenceless situation.

What are our preparations for war? After being together four-fifths of the session, we have extorted a reluctant consent to fit out four frigates. We have also on the stocks, in the navy yard and elsewhere scattered along the coast, from the Mississippi to the Schoodick, one hundred and seventy gunboats, which, during the summer season, and under the influence of gentle western breezes, may, when in commission, make out to navigate some of our bays and rivers, not, however, for any effectual purposes of defence, for I most conscientiously believe, that three stout frigates would destroy the whole of them; and of the enormous expense at which this burlesque naval establishment is kept up, we have had a specimen the present session, by a bill exhibited to the Senate, of eight hundred dollars for medical attendance, on a single gunboat for a single month, at New Orleans. If other expenditures are to be made in this ratio, it requires but few powers of calculation to foretell that, if the gunboats can destroy nothing else, they would soon destroy the public Treasury.

We have also heard of a project for raising fifty thousand volunteers, which has, I believe, been very properly stifled in its birth, and we have appropriated, during the present session, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars towards the erection, repairing, and completion of our fortifications. A sum about equal to the expenditure of the British Government for six weeks, or two months, on a single fortress in the Province of Canada, and which sum, with us, is to put into a state of defence, against the naval power of Great Britain, an exposed and accessible maritime frontier of two thousand miles in extent!

In contemplating war, it is also proper to advert to the state of the Treasury. Under such an event, and with any serious preparation for war or actual prosecution of it, the present funds would soon be exhausted. How soon cannot be stated, because the amount of them cannot be accurately ascertained. A part, and a considerable part, of the money now on hand, does not belong to the public. It is the property of the merchants; it is deposited in the Treasury as in a bank, to be checked for, whenever that commerce, which Mr. Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia, most emphatically says, our country will have, shall be again reopened.

And thus situated, what are the projects offered for replenishing the public coffers in future? It is the duty of the Secretary of the Treasury to develop the resources of the nation, and to point out new sources of supply, whenever the usual channels are impeded. He has designated three modes. The first, if executed, embraces, in my view, and I am sorry to say it, a marked violation of the public faith. It is the suggestion of stopping drawbacks on merchandise, which, in many instances, the merchants, from a reliance on the stability of your laws, and the integrity of the Government, have imported expressly for exportation, and not for domestic use or consumption in this country, and which exportation you have prevented them, alike contrary to their inclinations and their interests, from making for a longer period than ever was known or endured in any other nation.

The second project is one which, in my opinion, would do little honor to the genius of any man. It is a sweeping project for doubling, at the moment, the duties on every description of imported merchandise, on which a duty is now payable. Without notice to the merchant, without inquiry, without discrimination, without distinction between the necessaries of the poor man and the luxuries of the rich one; between the indispensable raw materials of the manufacturer and the useless decorations of fashion. By which, bohea tea and Madeira wine, brown sugar and cosmetics, coaches and carpenters tools, are all, by a single stroke of the pen, raised in the same ratio; and a duty of 100 per cent. on the present rates, without favor or affection, equally recommended to be imposed on the whole of them.

The third project is certainly not a novel one; it is simply that of shifting the burden off our own shoulders on to those of our successors: it is that of borrowing money on loans.

I have been, sir, among those who have respected the intelligence and acuteness of the Secretary of the Treasury. I have thought the office very ably filled; nor has my estimation of his talents been diminished from the few personal conferences I have had with him since I have been in this city; but if his fame rested on no firmer a basis than the reports made to Congress the present session, in relation to enforcing the embargo laws, and to our fiscal concerns, then an infant's breath might easily burst the bubble. At any rate, it may very truly be said, that if such are our preparations for commencing, and our resources for continuing a war, they are those which will serve neither to inspirit ourselves, nor to frighten our enemies.

If we are to have war, with whom is it to be prosecuted – not in terms I mean, but in fact? Certainly not with France. Her few possessions in the West Indies have probably, by this time, ceased to belong to her, and between her European territories and the United States a gulf intervenes, a power is interposed, which neither the Emperor of the West nor the King of the two Americas can either fathom or resist.

It then appears, if we are to have war, it is to be a covert war with the two belligerents, but in reality an actual war with Great Britain alone, and not a war with both France and Great Britain, as the face of this bill seems to import.

If this be the determination of our Government, and the war is to commence at a future day, and not instantly, what is the course which policy would dictate to this country to pursue? Certainly not a prohibition of the importation of her manufactures. A long period of years must elapse before we can furnish for ourselves many articles we receive from her even of the first necessity, or those which, from habit, have become such to us. We should, therefore, sedulously endeavor, not only to guard against exhausting our present stock, but to adopt every means in our power to replenish it.

It would be expedient to throw wide open the entrance of our ports for importations, to overstock as much as possible the United States with British manufactures. This would procure for us a double advantage; it would promote our own accommodation, by giving us the means of commencing and prosecuting war with fewer privations, and it would powerfully tend to unite the interests of a certain class of the inhabitants of that country with our own – for, as the mass of importations from Great Britain are made on long credits, should a war ensue before such credits are cancelled, it is obvious that, until the conclusion of the war, those debts could not be collected, and this circumstance alone, to a certain extent, might operate as a preventive check to war, or, at any rate, would secure in the bosom of the British nation a party whose interests and feelings would be intimately connected with a speedy return of peace.

By adopting a non-intercourse antecedent to a state of war, our own stock of supplies becomes exhausted, the British merchants have time and notice given them to collect, or alienate, by assignment, their debts in this country. A warning is given them to buckle on their armor; their good disposition towards us is not only changed, but embittered, and the very persons who, in the one case, might possibly prevent a war, or be instrumental in effecting the restoration of peace, would, in the other, probably be among the most willing to rush into the contest, from the impulse of temper, and from the conviction that their own circumstances would not be deteriorated by its consequences.

A non-intercourse would also be attended with great hazard and disadvantage. It would be as well understood by others as by ourselves; it could alone be considered as the precursor of war; and the blow would be struck, not when we were prepared, but when our opponents were ready for the contest; and should this bill go into operation, it is very possible that during the ensuing summer, some of our cities may exhibit heaps of ruins and of ashes, before expresses could convene at the seat of Government even the heads of our departments.

Another evil would arise, and that a permanent one; whether a non-intercourse eventuated in war or peace, it would materially and adversely affect both the habits of the people and the revenue of the State. Many of the articles which are now imported from Great Britain are indispensable for our comfort, and some of them for our existence. The people cannot do without them: the consequence must be, that, instead of being regularly imported, the articles will be smuggled into this country, and thereby the price not only becomes greatly enhanced to the consumer, but the duties are wholly lost to the Government.

Hitherto, the revenue of the United States, arising from impost, has been collected with a degree of integrity and punctuality highly honorable and unexampled in the history of commercial nations. This successful collection of duties has not however been effected by the employment of swarms of revenue officers, spies, and informers, as in other countries; it has been infinitely more effectually secured, by an honorable pride of character, and that sentiment of affection which was naturally excited in the hearts of freemen towards the Government of their choice, and a Government under which, in the main, they have experienced much prosperity. But barriers of this description, like other high-toned sentiments of the mind, being once broken down, can with difficulty be restored, and the chance of materially impairing this, in reality, "cheap defence of nations," should, in my opinion, of itself, afford a sufficient reason for the rejection of all measures of doubtful policy.

In a country nearly surrounded by, and everywhere intersected with navigable waters, encompassed by a frontier beyond the ability of ten Bonapartean armies to guard, and inhabited by a race of men unrivalled for hardihood and enterprise, and at present in a state of poverty, the temptation of great prices will be irresistible – for there is no truism in morals or philosophy better established than the commercial axiom, that demand will ultimately furnish a supply.

There are, undoubtedly, periods in the history of a nation, in which a contest would be both honorable and indispensable, but it should ever be the result of great deliberation, and in an extended republic, perhaps, of necessity. That government is most wise and most patriotic, which so conducts the affairs of the nation over which it presides, as to produce the greatest ultimate good; and when a nation is attacked at the same time by two assailants, it is no reflection on its honor or its bravery, to select its opponent; and on principles of reciprocity, independently of those of interest, the first aggressor would undoubtedly be entitled to the first notice.

Who then has been the first aggressor? I answer, France. The Berlin Decree is in a great measure the cause of our present difficulties. In justification of France in doing this, I know gentlemen resort to the convention between Russia and Great Britain in 1793, to prohibit a supply of grain to France; but this is by no means sufficient justification to France, even without referring to a decree to the same effect issued in May of the same year by France, while she was ignorant of the secret stipulation between Russia and Great Britain.

For a long period, and among most of the maritime nations of Europe, the right of inhibiting a supply of provisions to an enemy, was tacitly acquiesced in, or expressly admitted. This practice existed even so long ago as the Mithridatic war, and has probably been followed up, without an interval at any one time of fifty years, from the commencement of the Christian era to the present day. This attempt, therefore, of Great Britain to injure France, formed no excuse for France to attempt to injure Great Britain by violating the commerce of the United States.

On the 31st of December, 1806, the British Government formally notified the American Government, that Great Britain would consider an acquiescence in the Berlin Decree on the part of neutral nations, as giving to her (Great Britain) the right to retaliate in the same way against France.

Had the American Government, at this period, manfully and explicitly made known its determination to support our rights at all hazards, I have no belief that our present difficulties would ever have existed.

In May succeeding, advices were received of French privateers, under this decree, depredating upon American vessels in the West Indies; and during the same month the ship Horizon, in distress, was thrown by the act of God on the French coast, and was seized under the same authority.

In November, 1807, the British, in conformity with their notice, issued their retaliating order. A prior Order in Council of January, 1807, had been issued, but this only affected vessels trading between different ports of France, or between ports of France and her allies; a trade always obnoxious to suspicion, and one which during war must ever be expected in a great degree to be restricted, and which is also interdicted by a standing law of the French Government, passed in 1778, and confirmed by the present Emperor.

Then followed in succession, on the part of France, the Milan and Bayonne decrees. The last of which dooms an American vessel to condemnation from the exercise of a right universally acknowledged to belong to belligerents, and one which the neutral has no possibility of preventing, that of being spoken with by an enemy cruiser, which from her superior sailing there was no possibility of avoiding. In point of principle, this is the most outrageous violation of neutral rights ever known, and this, too, took place under the existence of a treaty made within a few years by the same person who issued these very decrees. While with Great Britain we have no treaty, and whose orders are expressly bottomed upon and limited in duration by the French decrees, and issued after having given twelve months' notice of her intention to oppose them in this way, and the Orders in Council are even as yet not co-extensive in principle with the French decrees.

I have, in taking this brief view, confined myself exclusively to the decrees and orders of the two Governments, without adverting to other causes of complaint on either side. I consider myself as warranted in doing this, from the American Government having explicitly taken this ground, and made known that, on the removal of the decrees and orders, it would, on our part, remove the embargo, and restore the accustomed intercourse between the two countries.

From this consideration of the subject, it irresistibly follows, that France was the first aggressor on us, in issuing her decrees – that in point of principle, they are much more outrageous violations of right than the British Orders in Council – that the latter originate from, and co-exist only with the former, and that France should of consequence be the first object of our vengeance.

The effects of a war with one or the other nation, would be as distinctly perceptible. With France it would make no difference to us. For as long as she continues her decrees, commerce with her could not be prosecuted – no man would be mad enough while her coast is lined, and the ocean covered with British cruisers, to send his vessel to France, where she would meet with certain condemnation for being even seen and spoken with by a British frigate. With France, therefore, the actual difference arising from passing this bill, and declaring a non-intercourse, would be next to nothing.

With Great Britain the effects would be reversed. No one now doubts her ability or disposition to carry her orders into effect, nor her preparation to extend the theatre of war. If we commenced war upon France, as she would be the common enemy of both nations, there is no doubt in my mind that our differences with Great Britain would be favorably settled, that the commerce of the world, excepting as it respects France and her allies, would be again open to us, and that a trade, which has hitherto employed nearly seventy millions of our capital, might be again accessible to the industry and enterprise of our citizens.

Reverse this picture, admitting that you have a war with Great Britain, what will be its consequences? If your citizens are united, you can capture Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick; when you have effected this, what remains next to be done? You have reached the ne plus ultra of your ability. Thenceforward your ports are hermetically sealed. Privateering, from the convoy system adopted by Great Britain, could not be successfully prosecuted; no food for enterprise remains, and thus you would remain, five, ten, or fifteen years, as the case might be, until the wisdom and good sense of the nation predominated over its passion, when an accommodation would be made with Great Britain, following her example with regard to her West India conquests, restoring the captured provinces, enriched by American population and industry, and giving us perhaps a treaty still less favorable than the much execrated instrument of 1794, which, bad as it was said to be, has proved a cornucopia of wealth to our country, if it produced nothing less than a thirteen years' peace, and which, to my view, is vastly preferable to its abortive successor of the year eighteen hundred and six.

The question was now taken on the passage of the bill, and determined in the affirmative – yeas 21, nays 12, as follows:

Yeas. – Messrs. Anderson, Condit, Franklin, Gaillard, Giles, Gregg, Howland, Kitchel, Leib, Mathewson, Meigs, Milledge, Mitchill, Moore, Pope, Robinson, Smith of Maryland, Smith of New York, Smith of Tennessee, Thruston, and Tiffin.

Nays. – Messrs. Bayard, Crawford, Gilman, Goodrich, Hillhouse, Lloyd, Parker, Pickering, Reed, Sumter, Turner, and White.

So it was resolved that this bill pass, and that the title thereof be, "An act to interdict the commercial intercourse between the United States and Great Britain and France, and their dependencies, and for other purposes."