THE SEEDS OF WAR

By John Quincy Adams.

IT is in his biography of James Madison that J. Q. Adams, sixth President of the United States and son of our second President, discusses the origin of the War of 1812 and reviews its long period of brewing. American grievances had been accumulating steadily since Trafalgar.

More than 900 American ships had been seized by the British and more than 550 by the French, while, as Carl Schurz records, in his "Life of Henry Clay," who was John Quincy Adams's Secretary of State, "the number of American citizens impressed as British seamen, or kept in prison if they refused to serve, was reported to exceed 6,000." It was estimated that "as many more had been impressed of whom no information had been obtained." Remonstrances made by the American government "had been treated with haughty disdain."

IN the first wars of the French revolution Great Britain had begun by straining the claim of belligerent, as against neutral rights, beyond all the theories of international jurisprudence, and even beyond her own ordinary practice. There is in all war a conflict between the belligerent and the neutral right, which can in its nature be settled only by convention. And in addition to all the ordinary asperities of dissension between the nation at war and the nation at peace, she had asserted a right of man-stealing from the vessels of the United States. The claim of right was to take by force all sea-faring men, her own subjects, wherever they were found by her naval officers, to serve their king in his wars. And under color of this tyrant's right, her naval officers, down to the most beardless midshipman, actually took from the American merchant vessels which they visited, any seaman whom they chose to take for a British subject. After the treaty of November, 1794, she had relaxed all her pretensions against the neutral rights, and had gradually abandoned the practice of impressment till she was on the point of renouncing it by a formal treaty stipulation.

At the renewal of the war, after the Peace of Amiens, it was at first urged with much respect for the rights of neutrality, but the practice of impressment was soon renewed with aggravated severity, and the commerce of neutral nations with the colonies of the adverse belligerent was wholly interdicted on the pretense of justification, because it had been forbidden by the enemy herself in the time of peace. This pretension had been first raised by Great Britain in the Seven Years' War, but she had been overawed by the armed neutrality from maintaining it in the war the American Revolution.

In the midst of this war with Napoleon, she suddenly reasserted the principle, and by a secret order in council, swept the ocean of nearly the whole mass of neutral commerce. Her war with France spread itself all over Europe, successively involving Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Prussia, Austria, Russia, Denmark and Sweden. Not a single neutral power remained in Europe and Great Britain, after annihilating at Trafalgar the united naval power of France and Spain, ruling thenceforth with undisputed dominion upon the ocean, conceived the project of engrossing even the commerce with her enemy by intercepting all neutral navigation. These measures were met by corresponding acts of violence, and sophistical principles of national law, promulgated by Napoleon, rising to the summit of his greatness, and preparing his downfall by the abuse of his elevation.

Through this fiery ordeal the administration of Mr. Jefferson was to pass, and the severest of its tests were to be applied to Mr. Madison. His correspondence with the ministers of Great Britain, France and Spain, and with the ministers of the United States to those nations during the remainder of Mr. Jefferson's administration, constitute the most important and most valuable materials of its history. His examination of the British doctrines relating to neutral trade will hereafter be considered a standard treatise on the law of nations; not inferior to the works of any writer upon those subjects since the days of Grotius, and every way worthy of the author of Publius and Helvidus. There is indeed, in all the diplomatic papers of American statesmen, justly celebrated as they have been, nothing superior to this dissertation, which was not strictly official. It was composed amid the duties of the Department of State, never more arduous than at that time in the summer of 1806. It was published unofficially, and a copy of it was laid on the table of each member of Congress at the commencement of the session in December, 1806.

The controversies of conflicting neutral and belligerent rights continued through the whole of Mr. Jefferson's administration, during the latter part of which they were verging rapidly to war. He had carried the policy of peace perhaps to an extreme. His system of defense by commercial restrictions, dry-docks, gunboats and embargoes, was stretched to its last hair's breadth of endurance. Far be it from me to speak of this system or of its motives with disrespect. If there be a duty, binding in chains more adamantine than all the rest the conscience of a Chief Magistrate of this Union, it is that of preserving peace with all mankind peace with the other nations of the earth peace among the several States of this Union peace in the hearts and temper of our own people. Yet must a President of the United States never cease to feel that his charge is to maintain the rights, the interests and the honor no less than the peace of his country nor will he be permitted to forget that peace must be the offspring of two concurring wills; that to seek peace is not always to ensure it.

He must remember, too, that a reliance upon the operation of measures, from their effect on the interests, however clear and unequivocal of nations, can not be safe against a counter-current of their passions; that nations, like individuals, sacrifice their Peace to their pride, to their hatred, to their envy, to their jealousy, and even to the craft, which the cunning of hackneyed politicians not unfrequently mistakes for policy; that nations, like individuals, have sometimes the misfortune of losing their senses, and that lunatic communities, which can not be confined in hospitals, must be resisted in arms, as a single maniac is sometimes restored to reason by the scourge; that national madness is infectious, and that a paroxysm of it in one people, especially when generated by the Furies that preside over war, produces a counter-paroxysm in their adverse party. Such is the melancholy condition as yet of associated man. And while in the wise but mysterious dispensations of an overruling Providence, man shall so continue, the peace of every nation must depend not alone upon its own will, but upon that concurrently with the will of all others.