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

In 1783, therefore, the Navigation Act had become in general acceptance a measure not merely commercial, but military. It was defended chiefly as essential to the naval power of Great Britain, which rested upon the sure foundation of maritime resources thus laid. Nor need this view excite derision to-day, for it compelled then the adhesion of an American who of all in his time was most adverse to the general commercial policy of Great Britain. In a report on the subject made to Congress in 1793, by Jefferson, as Secretary of State, he said: "Our navigation involves still higher considerations than our commerce. As a branch of industry it is valuable, but as a resource of defence essential. It will admit neither neglect nor forbearance. The position and circumstances of the United States leave them nothing to fear on their land-board; … but on their seaboard they are open to injury, and they have there too a commerce (coasting) which must be protected. This can only be done by possessing a respectable body of citizen-seamen, and of artists and establishments in readiness for ship-building." 62 62 American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. i. p. 303. The limitations of Jefferson's views appear here clearly, in the implicit relegation of defence, not to a regular and trained navy, but to the occasional unskilled efforts of a distinctly civil force; but no stronger recognition of the necessities of Great Britain could be desired, for her nearness to the great military states of the world deprived her land-board of the security which the remoteness of the United States assured. With such stress laid upon the vital importance of merchant seamen to national safety, it is but a step in thought to perceive how inevitable was the jealousy and indignation felt in Great Britain, when she found her fleets, both commercial and naval, starving for want of seamen, who had sought refuge from war in the American merchant service, and over whom the American Government, actually weak and but yesterday vassal, sought to extend its protection from impressment.

Up to the War of American Independence, the singular geographical situation of Great Britain, inducing her to maritime enterprise and exempting her from territorial warfare, with the financial and commercial pre-eminence she had then maintained for three-fourths of a century, gave her peculiar advantages for enforcing a policy which until that time had thriven conspicuously, if somewhat illusively, in its commercial results, and had substantially attained its especial object of maritime preponderance. Other peoples had to submit to the compulsion exerted by her overweening superiority. The obligation upon foreign shipping to be three-fourths manned by their own citizens, for instance, rested only upon a British law, and applied only in a British port; but the accumulations of British capital, with the consequent facility for mercantile operations and ability to extend credits, the development of British manufactures, the extent of the British carrying trade, the enforced storage of colonial products in British territory, with the correlative obligation that foreign goods for her numerous and increasing colonists must first be brought to her shores and thence transshipped,—all these circumstances made the British islands a centre for export and import, towards which foreign shipping was unavoidably drawn and so brought under the operation of the law. The nation had so far out-distanced competition that her supremacy was unassailable, and remained unimpaired for a century longer. To it had contributed powerfully the economical distribution of her empire, greatly diversified in particulars, yet symmetrical in the capacity of one part to supply what the other lacked. There was in the whole a certain self-sufficingness, resembling that claimed in this age for the United States, with its compact territory but wide extremes of boundary, climates, and activities.

This condition, while it lasted, in large degree justified the Navigation Act, which may be summarily characterized as a great protective measure, applied to the peculiar conditions of a particular maritime empire, insuring reciprocal and exclusive benefit to the several parts. It was uncompromisingly logical in its action, not hesitating at rigid prohibition of outside competition. Protection, in its best moral sense, may be defined as the regulation of all the business of the nation, considered as an interrelated whole, by the Government, for the best interests of the entire community, likewise regarded as a whole. This the Navigation Act did for over a century after its enactment; and it may be plausibly argued that, as a war resort at least, it afterwards measurably strengthened the hands of Great Britain during the wars of the French Revolution. No men suffered more than did the West India planters from its unrelieved enforcement after 1783; yet in their vehement remonstrance they said: "The policy of the Act is justly popular. Its regulations, until the loss of America, under the various relaxations which Parliament has applied to particular events and exigencies as they arose, have guided the course of trade without oppressing it; for the markets which those regulations left open to the consumption of the produce of the colonies were sufficient to take off the whole, and no foreign country could have supplied the essential part of their wants materially cheaper than the colonies of the mother country could supply one another."

Thus things were, or were thought to be, up to the time when the revolt of the continental colonies made a breach in the wall of reciprocal benefit by which the whole had been believed to be enclosed. The products of the colonies sustained the commercial prosperity of the mother country, ministering to her export trade, and supplying a reserve of consumers for her monopoly of manufactures, which they were forbidden to establish for themselves, or to receive from foreigners. She on her part excluded from the markets of the empire foreign articles which her colonies produced, constituting for them a monopoly of the imperial home market, as well in Great Britain as in the sister colonies. The carriage of the whole was confined to British navigation, the maintenance of which by this means raised the British Navy to the mastery of the seas, enabling it to afford to the entire system a protection, of which convincing and brilliant evidence had been afforded during the then recent Seven Years' War. As a matter of political combination and adjustment, for peace or for war, the general result appeared to most men of that day to be consummate in conception and in development, and therefore by all means to be perpetuated. In that light men of to-day must realize it, if they would adequately understand the influence exercised by this prepossession upon the course of events which for the United States issued in the War of 1812.

In this picture, so satisfactory as a whole, there had been certain shadows menacing to the future. Already, in the colonial period, these had been recognized by some in Great Britain as predictive of increasing practical independence on the part of the continental colonies, with results injurious to the empire at large, and to the particular welfare of the mother kingdom. In the last analysis, this danger arose from the fact that, unlike the tropical West Indies, these children were for the most part too like their parent in political and economical character, and in permanent natural surroundings. There was, indeed, a temporary variation of activities between the new communities, where the superabundance of soil kept handicrafts in abeyance, and the old country, where agriculture was already failing to produce food sufficient for the population, and men were being forced into manufactures and their export as a means of livelihood. There was also a difference in their respective products which ministered to beneficial exchange. Nevertheless, in their tendencies and in their disposition, Great Britain and the United States at bottom were then not complementary, but rivals. The true complement of both was the West Indies; and for these the advantage of proximity, always great, and especially so with regard to the special exigencies of the islands, lay with the United States. Hence it came to pass that the trade with the West Indies, which then had almost a monopoly of sugar and coffee production for the world, became the most prominent single factor in the commercial contentions between the two countries, and in the arbitrary commercial ordinances of Great Britain, which step by step led the two nations into war. The precedent struggle was over a market; artificial regulation and superior naval power seeking to withstand the natural course of things, and long successfully retarding it.