1805.

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English agent with greater powers reached the island. In another month these two had made a secret treaty with L'Ouverture. To that treaty the American Consul did not appear as a party. But under it trade was at once renewed, food and clothing hurried in, and Toussaint was encouraged to go on. He began by attacking Rigaud, shut him up in Jacmel, and while he besieged the place by land the fleet of the United States blockaded the place by sea. Rigaud was starved out. Jacmel fell, and L'Ouverture promptly seized the French agent, Roume. He was now indeed absolute ruler of San Domingo. But he was not so long. The treaty of 1800 ended the quasi-war between the United States and France. The treaty of Amiens ended the actual war between Great Britain and France, and L'Ouverture was left to his fate. Late in January, 1802, a French and Spanish fleet and ten thousand men appeared off the island. A race war began, and five months later L'Ouverture was a prisoner on his way to Brest, and slavery again existed in the island.*

The peace of Amiens was speedily broken. In 1803 England was a second time at war with France. Once more an English fleet was sent to San Domingo. Once more the

French surrendered. Once more the negroes rose, declared themselves free, made of Hayti a negro empire, and opened their ports to neutrals. Scores of American merchants made haste to enjoy this privilege, and great fleets of merchantmen were soon passing back and forth between the island and New York. As the sea about the Antilles then swarmed with the privateers of France and Spain, and with pirates holding no commission whatever, the merchantmen went well manned, well armed, and in company. The greatest of these fleets set sail in the winter of 1805. The armament numbered eighty cannon. The crews numbered seven hundred men. In the cargoes were vast stores of goods clearly contraband of war, for no nation had yet formally recognized Dessalines as Emperor. Indeed, though not a French ship was to be seen in one of its ports nor a French soldier in one of its towns,

* A curious account of Toussaint is given in Buonaparte in the West Indies, or the History of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the African Hero. London, 1803.

Napoleon denounced Dessalines as a rebel and claimed San Domingo as his own.

Louis Marie Turreau, a general of the Republic, was then Minister of France to the United States. He reached our country in November, 1804, and one of his earliest acts was to protest against the trade with San Domingo. Madison promised that it should be stopped. Indeed, the President had already referred to it in the annual message, and the very day Turreau landed in America a bill to restrain it was reported in the House. The title was, An Act to regulate the Clearance of Armed Merchant Vessels. The friends of commerce protested strongly against so sweeping an act. Half the trade of the country, they declared, would be stopped by it. Let it pass, and not a merchant could trade to New Orleans, to Cuba, to Jamaica, to any of the Leeward Islands. The whole Spanish main swarmed with picaroons lying in wait for our ships. Already the losses of five Baltimore insurance companies amounted to four hundred and ninety thousand dollars. Not a day went by but new losses were added. One ship, on her way from Alexandria to Jamaica, had been seized and sent to Cuba; another, from Baltimore to St. Jago de Cuba, was, on her homeward voyage, captured and taken to Baracoa with a cargo worth forty thousand dollars. A third had been chased into the Savannah river by a picaroon. If these things took place when the trade was armed, what would happen when the trade was unarmed? The enemies of commerce did not care what happened, and passed the bill by a great majority. In the Senate an attempt to stop all trade, whether armed or unarmed, with San Domingo, an attempt instigated by Madison, at the request of Turreau, was defeated by the casting vote of Burr. As passed, the act provided that no armed merchantman should leave any port of the United States for San Domingo or Cuba or any island of the West Indies, or for ports on the continent of America between Cayenne and the south boundary of Louisiana, without giving heavy bonds to bring back the arms to the United States and not to use them save in self-defence.

When the letter of Turreau announcing the passage of the act reached Napoleon, he fell into a great rage. He called

1806.

SAN DOMINGO TRADE STOPPED.

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the trade scandalous. He described the conduct of the Americans as shameful, he declared he would make prize of every ship that came into or went out of a port of San Domingo, and commanded Talleyrand to say to Armstrong that it was time for the trade to stop. But Talleyrand did more. He told Armstrong that it must stop. He bade Turreau say to Madison that it must stop, and Turreau obeyed implicitly.

Having thus received the orders of Napoleon, Congress in turn made haste to obey, and on the last day of February, 1806, Jefferson signed another San Domingo bill. This stopped all trade for one year with every port in the island over which the French flag did not fly. Never since the United States had a President and a Congress had she been so disgraced. But there was no insult which Jefferson would not brook, no degradation to which he would not descend in order to please Napoleon and secure the Floridas.

The act appropriating two millions for their purchase passed the House on January sixteenth. The next day two members bore it, with an explanatory message, to the Senate. On their return they found the doors shut and the House in secret session, for another confidential message and another bundle of papers on foreign affairs had been sent in by the President. This time the papers related to Great Britain, and contained the evidence of the charges brought against her by Jefferson in his message at the ing of the session.

open

The restrictions laid on the neutral commerce of the United States by Great Britain in 1806 and 1807 are so bound up with like restrictions laid by France that it is now necessary to relate with some fulness the history of the conduct of these two nations toward foreigners from the earliest times. From the beginning of colonization in America down to the French and Indian war the colonizing powers of Europe had but one rule for colonial trade. By this rule the mother country, and the mother country alone, could traffic with her colonies. Neither England, nor France, nor Holland, nor Portugal, nor Spain would suffer goods to be carried to their colonies under a foreign flag nor under their own flag on account of a foreign importer. Nor would they suffer the produce of their

colonies to be carried in foreign ships to foreign countries unless the ship first touched at the parent state. In 1756, however, this rule was broken down. France, victorious on land, was ruined on the sea. Her merchant flag was well-nigh driven from the ocean. She could neither send supplies to her colonies nor bring their produce to the marts of Europe. Then, in desperation, she opened her colonial ports to neutrals under certain restrictions. Instantly the ships of Holland, Spain, and Portugal began to crowd her West Indian waters. But they were as quickly seized by British cruisers and sent to the nearest Admiralty Court. There both ship and cargo were condemned. They were enjoying in time of war a trade from which they had been shut out in time of peace. The courts therefore pronounced them French by adoption, and laid down what has ever since been known as the "rule of 1756." In substance this rule is that a neutral has no right to deliver a belligerent from the pressure of his enemies' hostilities by trading with his colonies in time of war in a manner not allowed in time of peace.

When France joined us in the war for independence a new chance was given to Great Britain to apply the rule of 1756. France, however, was far from being hard pressed on the sea, the armed neutrality of the Baltic was not to be despised, and the chance went by unused. But, when the next war began, the rule was applied, and applied most rigorously. On February first, 1793, France declared war against England, and followed up the declaration by throwing open all her colonial ports to neutral commerce. England retaliated promptly, and in March made a treaty with Russia which bound the contracting parties to stop all neutral trade with France. In May, France struck back, and by a decree ordered the detention of neutral ships, the seizure of enemies' property, and the sale of neutral provisions for worthless assignats, and so began that series of commercial depredations which form the basis of the spoliations claims assumed and but now being paid by the United States. Gouverneur Morris was then our Minister at Paris, and protested so vigorously that in the space of eight weeks the decree was twice repealed and twice enforced against us. Meantime England began to execute the

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Russian treaty, and in June commanded her cruisers to bring into port every neutral ship found carrying flour, corn, meal, to any port of France. Not content with this, she issued, in November, 1793, a new order in council, ruinous to the French colonial trade of neutrals. Commanders of British cruisers and privateers were now bidden to send in for condemnation neutral vessels taking provisions to a French colony, or bringing away anything a French colony produced. France then laid the embargo on the port of Bordeaux, and the year 1793 closed with one hundred and three American ships in French hands. Hundreds more were in the ports of the French Antilles, and these, as they came forth on their homeward voyage, were seized by English cruisers and hurried to the nearest vice-admiralty court for judgment. For months the maritime news of the Advertisers and the Gazettes consisted chiefly of accounts of ships condemned at Halifax, at New Providence, at Nassau, at St. Kitts. A great cry went up from ruined merchants; Congress laid the embargo of 1794; Madison moved for a discriminating tonnage duty; Dayton moved the sequestration of British debts; Clark moved for non-intercourse with England; the people fortified their ports and seaboard towns, and, in the midst of the excitement, Great Britain revoked her order and issued a new one. Naval officers and masters of privateers were now instructed to send in for judgment such neutral vessels, and such only, as were found trading directly between any port in the French West Indies and any port in Europe. With this prohibition on direct trade she stopped, and during four years the orders remained in force. But France did not stop. In 1794 she decreed that free ships did not make free goods, and that an enemy's property might be taken from the hold of a neutral ship. In 1795 she modified this and laid down three rules to be observed toward American ships. They were that free ships made free goods; that paper blockades were invalid; that no articles should be deemed contraband of war unless so specified in the treaty of 1778. Such tenderness, unhappily, soon passed away, and in 1796 all neutrals were notified that they would be treated by France in just such manner as they suffered Great Britain to treat them.