The Czar of Russia offered his services as mediator, through John Quincy Adams, our minister to Russia, in September, 1812, virtually as soon as he heard of it. The delays of winter mails brought his friendly offer to Washington in March, 1813. It was instantly accepted, and James A. Bayard and Albert Gallatin were sent to help Adams in the negotiations. They reached St. Petersburg late in July, and there learned that England had declined the czar's offer. Hoping that the refusal was not final, they waited. In November England proposed to reopen negotiations, this time directly with the United States. British diplomatic dignity and the slow course of communication again delayed matters, so that it was early August, 1814, before the English and American commissioners began their joint sessions in Ghent. Two more Americans, Henry Clay, leader of the war party in Congress, and Jonathan Russell, minister to Sweden, had been sent to join Adams, Bayard, and Gallatin. The mutual relations of these five men were not free from friction. Adams and Clay were especially uncongenial. Adams, son of the former President, middle-aged, learned, and precise, "one of the kind of men that keep diaries," was dominated by Puritan austerity. Clay, ten years his junior, hot-tempered, and brilliant, though only superficially educated, according to Adams's standard, was emphatically no Puritan, and outraged Adams's sense of fitness a dozen times a day. Russell, a man of only ordinary attainments, was under the influence of Clay. Bayard showed a disposition to stick to his own opinion when it differed from that of the rest. To the genial and patient Albert Gallatin fell the difficult lot of peacemaker not only in acrid private disputes among themselves, but at the tedious formal dinners through which etiquette compelled the Americans to sit with their British antagonists and jest over the impossibility of ever agreeing. Thus weeks and months dragged on as they fought their way point by point to final settle ment. The treaty as signed on the twentyeighth of December was variously regarded. Clay thought it "a damned bad treaty," and did not hesitate to say so. In certain high quarters in England, on the other hand, it was looked upon as a great opportunity thrown away. "An able minister would have continued the war," Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Napier declared, "until the Northern States withdrew from the Union, making a separate treaty with England; after which England could have raised the negroes of the South, marched to Washington at the head of an immense force of armed and disciplined black regiments, and dictated peace, making Delaware an independent black State in alliance with England." So much depends upon the point of view! The treaty was certainly a great gain over Great Britain's original demand that the United States set apart all the territory now occupied by Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, with large portions of Ohio and Indiana, to be a buffer between Canada and the Union, and for perpetual use of the Indians; that the United States, moreover, give Canada a piece of Maine through which to make a road from Halifax to Quebec; that it renounce the right to keep armed vessels on the Great Lakes, and assure to British subjects the right to free navigation of the Mississippi. As finally agreed upon, it left the question of territory exactly where it had been at the beginning of the war, and it failed. to mention impressment or the rights of neutrals, for which the United States had taken up arms. But it carried our point in fact if not in words. A speaker in the House of Lords declared that the Americans had "shown a most astonishing superiority over the British during the whole of the conference," and in Canada it was predicted that such a disgraceful peace could not last. "Torrents of blood must flow" on both sides, the Montreal “Herald" declared, before a real peace could be obtained. Despite the chagrin of those Americans who had talked so grandly about invading at dinner after her transformation into a woman of fashion. "Here's to thy broad beaver, Friend !" she said merrily, raising her glass. To which he replied, letting his glance just sweep her bare bosom, to rest quizzically upon the paradise feather in her turban, "And here's to thy absent kerchief, Friend Dorothy!" But the strictest could not make serious objection to her frank and open pleasure in pretty things, and all were forced to admire the sogeneralship cial with which she helped on her husband's projects. She did not invade the realm of politics. That was her husband's business. Hers ended in the drawing-room. Madison's ability proved to be intellectual rather than executive. His been established by Hamilton for a period of twenty years, was to end by law in 1811, questions of finance would naturally have loomed large in this administration; but in retrospect Madison's term of office is occupied, to the virtual exclusion of James Madison long experience had been with public measures, not in directing men; and while Jefferson concluded the eight years of his Presidency with virtually the same cabinet he chose at the outset, Madison's counselors changed with the frequency of April weather, and, like April weather, not always for the better. One secretary of state, two secretaries of war, and one each of the navy and the treasury retired in haste, either voluntarily or by request, and there were other changes of a less painful character. As the years went on, the war department became the post of greatest difficulty; and after Monroe entered the cabinet as Madison's secretary of state, circumstances compelled him to act also as secretary of war at three or four separate periods. Since the National Bank, which had other matters, with the preliminaries, the fighting, and the aftermath of the War of 1812. The greater part of his first term slipped away in seasons of alternate hope and gloom. War had seemed almost inevitable when Jefferson retired from office; then for a time the cloud seemed to be lifting. The Embargo had given way to the less stringent Non-Intercourse Act, which forbade American ships to trade with England or France, but permitted trade elsewhere. The British minister at Washington, over-sanguine, promised that if this act were not enforced, his country would stop its tactics of capture and search and allow our ships to go where they would, unmolested. Madison, believing he had authority to make this promise, agreed to the terms, and American vessels to the number of a thousand or more joyfully shook out their white sails and put to sea, only to find that the agreement was disavowed and that the English captured our vessels and impressed our seamen more vigorously than before. Such acts had already exasperated the country to the limit of endurance. At this renewal of them the war party clamored louder than ever. Henry Clay, who was now leader of the Young Republicans in Congress, made speeches bristling with ag ington, resident and official, crowded around Mrs. Madison, who did the honors while her husband and the cabinet, in another room, sat in judgment on the treaty. All were in gala attire, ladies in their choicest finery, judges in their robes, major-generals and aides and foreign ministers in their uniforms. Quarrels were forgotten and political animosities buried in hearty and general rejoicing. In his character of newspaper editor, Mr. Gales was summoned from this happy assembly to the room where the President conferred with his cabinet. Subdued joy sat upon the faces of every one of them. The President, after kindly WE stating the result of their deliberations, addressed himself to the secretary of the treasury in a sportive tone, saying to him: "Come, Mr. Dallas, you with your knowledge of the contents of the treaty derived from the careful perusal of it, and who can write with so much ease, take the pen and indite for this gentleman a paragraph for the paper of to-morrow to announce the reception and probable acceptance of the treaty." This Mr. Dallas did in terms as stilted as those in which the command was given, for in such dignified and leisurely fashion was American journalism conducted in the year of grace 1815. (To be continued) After a Quarrel By ALICE DUER MILLER WE have quarreled; ugly things have been said, We have quarreled over a trifle, one of those trifles Oh, human creatures must quarrel, my dear, I know; Locked together, joined, putting forth all their might keeping with the numbers involved or the intensity of the contest. Of course such inconsistencies are only apparent. As Admiral de la Gravière remarked, "Fortune was not fickle, merely logical." Injuries had made the innocent bystander an active participant, and protests and retaliation having failed, the alternatives were war or complete withdrawal from the seas. England and France had treated our commerce in the same way, but England was the stronger. It had passed into a saying that when France launched a warship she was only adding it to the British navy, and in the long run England captured nine hundred of our vessels as against five hundred and fifty seized by the French. England, moreover, added to injury of our trade the insult of habitually taking from our vessels such sailors as she chose to impress into her own navy. Henry Clay from British depredations, was most bitterly opposed to it. In Rhode Island bells were tolled as for a funeral. In Massachusetts the governor proclaimed a fast. In Connecticut representatives of all the disaffected regions met in the Hartford Convention and proposed to break up the Union as a lesser evil. The United States was virtually without a navy, yet by some miracle our ships accomplished incredible things on every ocean of the globe; while on land, where we had an entire population to oppose to an enemy that came by ship-loads a distance of three thousand miles, we seemed unable to fire an effective shot. Fighting ended by common consent, not because of our success in battle. Our one brilliant land victory did not take place until the signatures upon the treaty of peace had been drying eleven days. That treaty failed even to mention the chief cause of the war, and the outcome of the whole topsyturvy struggle was to gain for us an amount of consideration quite out of Although we had a whole population to draw upon, it was poorly trained for fighting, if, indeed, it could be said to be trained at all. The regular army was a mere handful, and its higher officers were most of them incapacitated by age or infirmity. The militia lacked everything a militia should have except individual courage. Hence it is not strange that what little fighting took place on land did not redound greatly to our credit. The young and enthusiastic war party had declared that there was no need for a navy; this was to be a land war. But the fighting refused to stay on land; even the long Canadian border, by a Hibernicism worthy of the other eccentricities of the conflict, resolved itself into a land frontier composed mainly of water, lakes Ontario, Erie, St. Clair, and Champlain, with the Detroit and Niagara rivers, being strate |
