Alfred Thayer Mahan - Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812. Volume 1

The New Englanders, like their countrymen farther south, were mostly farmers; but the more rugged soil and severer climate gave them little or no surplus for export. For gain by traffic, for material for exchange, they therefore turned to the sea, and became the great carriers of America, as well as its great fishers. An English authority, writing of the years immediately preceding the War of Independence, states that most of the seamen sailing out of the southern ports were British; from the middle colonies, half British and half American; but in the New England shipping he admits three-fourths were natives. 48 48 Sheffield, Commerce of the American States, p. 108. This tendency of British seamen to take employment in colonial ships is worthy of note, as foreshadowing the impressment difficulties of a later day. These, like most of the disagreements which led to the War of 1812, had their origin in ante-revolutionary conditions. For example, Commodore Palliser, an officer of mark, commanding the Newfoundland station in 1767, reported to the Admiralty the "cruel custom," long practised by commanders of fishing ships, of leaving many men on the desert coast of Newfoundland, when the season was over, whereby "these men were obliged to sell themselves to the colonists, or piratically run off with vessels, which they carry to the continent of America. By these practices the Newfoundland fishery, supposed to be one of the most valuable nurseries for seamen, 49 49 That is, for the navy. has long been an annual drain." 50 50 Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, vol. iii. p. 472. In the two years, 1764-65, he estimates that 2,500 seamen thus went to the colonies; in the next two years, 400. The difference was probably due to the former period being immediately after a war, the effects of which it reflected.

The general conditions of 1731 remained thirty years later, simply having become magnified as the colonies grew in wealth and population. In 1770 twenty-two thousand tons of shipping were annually built by the continental colonists. They even built ships for Great Britain; and this indulgence, for so it was considered, was viewed jealously by a class of well-informed men, intelligent, but fully imbued with the ideas of the Navigation Act, convinced that the carrying trade was the corner-stone of the British Navy, and realizing that where ships were cheaply built they could be cheaply sailed, even if they paid higher wages. It is true, and should be sedulously remembered, especially now in the United States, that the strength of a merchant shipping lies in its men even more than in its ships; and therefore that the policy of a country which wishes a merchant marine should be to allow its ships to be purchased where they most cheaply can, in order that the owner may be able to spend more on his crew, and the nation consequently to keep more seamen under its flag. But in 1770 the relative conditions placed Great Britain under serious disadvantages towards America in the matter of ship-building; for the heavy drafts upon her native oak had caused the price to rise materially, and even the forests of continental Europe felt the strain, while the colonies had scarcely begun to touch their resources. In 1775, more than one-third of the foreign trade of Great Britain was carried in American-built ships; the respective tonnage being, British-built, 605,545; American, 373,618. 51 51 Macpherson, vol. iv. p. 11. The great West India cargo of 1772, an especial preserve of the Navigation Act, was carried to England in 679 ships, of which one-third were built in America.

British merchants and ship-owners knew also that the colonial carriers were not ardent adherents of the Navigation Act, but conducted their operations in conformity with it only when compelled. 52 52 "The contraband trade carried on by plantation ships in defiance of the Act of Navigation was a subject of repeated complaint." "The laws of Navigation were nowhere disobeyed and contemned so openly as in New England. The people of Massachusetts Bay were from the first disposed to act as if independent of the mother country."—Reeves, pp. 54, 58. The particular quotations apply to the early days of the measure, 1662-3; but the complaint continued to the end. In 1764-5, "one of the great grievances in the American trade was, that great quantities of foreign molasses and syrups were clandestinely run on shore in the British Colonies."—p. 79. They traded with the foreigner as readily as with the British subject; and, what was quite unpardonable in the ideas of that time, after selling a cargo in a West Indian port, instead of reloading there, they would take the hard cash of the island to a French neighbor, buying of him molasses to be made into rum at home. In this commercial shrewdness the danger was not so much in the local loss, or in the single transaction, for in the commercial supremacy of England the money was pretty sure to find its way back to the old country. The sting was that the sharp commercial instinct, roving from port to port, with a keen scent for freight and for bargains, maintained a close rivalry for the carrying trade, which was doubly severe from the natural advantages of the shipping and the natural aptitudes of the ship-owners. Already the economical attention of the New Englanders to the details of their shipping business had been noted, and had earned for them the name of the Dutchmen of North America; an epithet than which there was then none more ominous to British ears, and especially where with the carrying trade was associated the twin idea of a nursery of seamen for the British Navy.

A fair appreciation of the facts and relations, summarized in the preceding pages from an infinitude of details, is necessary to a correct view of the origin and course of the misunderstandings and disagreements which finally led to the War of 1812. In 1783, the restoration of peace and the acknowledgment of the independence of the former colonies removed from commerce the restrictions incident to hostilities, and replaced in full action, essentially unchanged, the natural conditions which had guided the course of trade in colonial days. The old country, retaining all the prepossessions associated with the now venerable and venerated Navigation Act, saw herself confronted with the revival of a commercial system, a commercial independence, of which she had before been jealous, and which could no longer be controlled by political dependence. It was to be feared that supplying the British West Indies would increase American shipping, and that British seamen would more and more escape into it, with consequent loss to British navigation, both in tonnage and men, and discouragement to British maritime industries. Hence, by the ideas of the time, was to be apprehended weakness for war, unless some effective check could be devised.

What would have been the issue of these anxieties, and of the measures to which they gave rise, had not the French Revolution intervened to aggravate the distresses of Great Britain, and to constrain her to violent methods, is bootless to discuss. It remains true that, both before and during the conflict with the French Republic and Empire, the general character of her actions, to which the United States took exception, was determined by the conditions and ideas that have been stated, and can be understood only through reference to them. No sooner had peace been signed, in 1783, than disagreements sprang up again from the old roots of colonial systems and ideals. To these essentially was due the detailed sequence of events which, influenced by such traditions of opinion and policy as have been indicated, brought on the War of 1812, which has not inaptly been styled the second War of Independence. Madison, who was contemporary with the entire controversy, and officially connected with it from 1801 to the end of the war, first as Secretary of State, and later as President, justly summed up his experience of the whole in these words: "To have shrunk from resistance, under such circumstances, would have acknowledged that, on the element which forms three-fourths of the globe which we inhabit, and where all independent nations have equal and common rights, the American People were not an independent people, but colonists and vassals. With such an alternative war was chosen." 53 53 American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 82. The second war was closely related to the first in fact, though separated by a generation in time.