What is the purpose of President James Madisons 1812 speech to Congress
A confidential bulletin was received from the President of the United States, by Mr. Coles, his Secretary:
To the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States:
I communicate to Congress certain documents, being a continuation of those heretofore laid before them, on the subject of our affairs with U.k..
Without going back across the renewal, in 1803, of the state of war in which Bang-up Uk is engaged, and omitting unrepaired wrongs of junior magnitude, the conduct of her government presents a series of acts hostile to the United states as an independent and neutral nation.
British cruizers have been in the continued practice of violating the American flag on the keen highway of nations, and of seizing and carrying off persons sailing under it; not in the exercise of a belligerent right, founded on the law of nations against an enemy, simply of a municipal prerogative over British subjects. British jurisdiction is thus extended to neutral vessels, in a state of affairs where no laws tin can operate but the law of nations, and the laws of the land to which the vessels vest; and a cocky redress is assumed, which, if British subjects were wrongfully detained and solitary concerned, is that substitution of forcefulness for a resort to the responsible sovereign, which falls inside the definition of war. Could the seizure of British subjects, in such cases, be regarded as within the exercise of a belligerent right, the acknowledged laws of war, which forbid an commodity of captured property to be adjudged without a regular investigation before a competent tribunal, would imperiously demand the fairest trial where the sacred rights of persons were at issue. In place of such a trial, these rights are subjected to the volition of every footling commander.
The do, hence, is so far from affecting British subjects alone, that, nether the pretext of searching for these, thousands of American citizens, under the safeguard of public law, and of their national flag, accept been torn from their state, and from every thing love to them; have been dragged on board ships of war of a foreign nation, and exposed, under the severities of their subject field, to exist exiled to the virtually afar and deadly climes, to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors, and to exist the melancholy instruments of taking away those of their ain brethren.
Against this crying enormity, which Cracking Britain would be so prompt to avenge if committed against herself, the U.s. have in vain exhausted remonstrances and expostulations; and that no proof might be wanting of their conciliatory dispositions, and no pretext left for a constancy of the practice, the British government was formally assured of the readiness of the United States to enter into arrangements, such every bit could non be rejected if the recovery of British subjects were the real and the sole object. The advice passed without effect.
British cruisers have been in the practice too of violating the rights and the peace of our coasts. They hover over and harass our inbound and parting commerce. To the nearly insulting pretensions, they have added the virtually lawless proceedings in our very harbors: and have wantonly spilt American blood inside the sanctuary of our territorial jurisdiction. The principles and rules enforced by that nation when a neutral nation, against armed vessels of belligerents hovering nigh her coasts and disturbing her commerce, are well known. When called on, withal, by the United States, to punish the greater offence committed by her own vessels, her government has bestowed on their commanders boosted marks of honor and conviction.
Under pretended blockades, without the presence of an acceptable force, and sometimes without the practicability of applying one, our commerce has been plundered in every sea; the great staples of our state have been cut off from their legitimate markets; and a destructive blow aimed at our agricultural and maritime interests. In aggravation of these predatory measures, they have been considered equally in force from the dates of their notification; a retrospective effect being thus added, every bit has been done in other important cases, to the unlawfulness of the course pursued. And to render the outrage the more than signal, these mock blockades take been reiterated and enforced in the face up of official communications from the British authorities, declaring, every bit the true definition of a legal blockade, "that particular ports must be actually invested, and previous alarm given to vessels jump to them, not to enter."
Not content with these occasional expedients for laying waste our neutral trade, the cabinet of Great Britain resorted, at length, to the sweeping system of blockades, under the proper noun of orders in council; which has been moulded and managed equally might best arrange its political views, its commercial jealousies, or the avidity of British cruisers.
To our remonstrances against the complicated and transcendant injustice of this innovation, the first reply was, that the orders were reluctantly adopted by Great britain every bit a necessary retaliation on decrees of her enemy, proclaiming a general blockade of the British isles at a time when the naval forcefulness of that enemy dared non to result from his own ports. She was reminded, without effect, that her ain prior blockades, unsupported by an adequate naval strength actually practical and continued, were a bar to this plea: that executed edicts confronting millions of our belongings could not be retaliation on edicts confessedly impossible to be executed; that retaliation, to be just, should fall on the party setting the guilty example, not on an innocent party, which was not even chargeable with an acquiescence in it.
When deprived of this flimsy veil for a prohibition of our trade with her enemy, past the repeal of his prohibition of our trade with Great U.k., her cabinet, instead of a corresponding repeal, or a practical discontinuance of its orders, formally avowed a determination to persist in them confronting the United States, until the markets of her enemy should be laid open up to British products; thus, asserting an obligation on a neutral power to require one belligerent to encourage, past its internal regulations, the trade of another belligerent; contradicting her own practise towards all nations, in peace besides equally in war; and betraying the insincerity of those professions which inculcated a belief that, having resorted to her orders with regret, she was anxious to detect an occasion for putting an end to them.
Abandoning, nonetheless more, all respect for the neutral rights of the United States, and for its own consistency, the British government now demands, as prerequisites to a repeal of its orders, as they relate to the United States, that a formality should be observed in the repeal of the French decrees, no wise necessary to their termination, nor exemplified past British usage; and that the French repeal, too including that portion of the decrees which operate within a territorial jurisdiction, as well as that which operates on the high seas, against the commerce of the U.s.a., should non exist a unmarried and special repeal in relation to the U.s.a., but should exist extended to whatever other neutral nations, unconnected with them, may be afflicted by those decrees. And, as an additional insult, they are called on for a formal disavowal of weather and pretensions advanced by the French government, for which the United states are and so far from having made themselves responsible, that, in official explanations, which have been published to the globe, and in a correspondence of the American Government minister at London with the British Minister for Foreign Diplomacy, such a responsibleness was explicitly and emphatically disclaimed
It has become, indeed, sufficiently certain, that the commerce of the United states of america is to be sacrificed, not as interfering with the belligerent rights of Great United kingdom; non as supplying the wants of her enemies, which she herself supplies; merely as interfering with the monopoly which she covets for her own commerce and navigation. She carries on a war confronting the lawful commerce of a friend, that she may the meliorate carry on a commerce with an enemy; a commerce polluted by the forgeries and perjuries, which are, for the near part, the only passports by which it tin succeed.
Broken-hearted to make every experiment, brusque of the final resort of injured nations, the United states have withheld from Great United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, under successive modifications, the benefits of a gratis intercourse with their marketplace, the loss of which could not but out weigh the profits accruing from her restrictions of our commerce with other nations. And to entitle these experiments to the more favorable consideration, they were so framed as to enable her to place her adversary under the sectional performance of them. To these appeals her government has been as inflexible, as if willing to brand sacrifices of every sort, rather than yield to the claims of justice, or renounce the errors of a imitation pride. Nay, so far were the attempts carried to overcome the attachment of the British chiffonier to its unjust edicts, that it received every encouragement within the competency of the Executive branch of our government, to wait that a repeal of them would be followed by a war between the United States and French republic, unless the French edicts should also exist repealed. Even this communication, although silencing forever the plea of a disposition in the United States to acquiesce in those edicts, originally the sole plea for them, received no attending.
If no other proof existed of a pre-determination of the British regime against a repeal of its orders, information technology might be constitute in the correspondence of the Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States, at London, and the British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, in 1810, on the question whether the blockade of May, 1806, was considered equally in force, or every bit not in forcefulness. It had been ascertained that the French regime, which urged this blockade as the ground of its Berlin decree, was willing, in the result of its removal, to repeal that prescript; which being followed by alternating repeals of the other offensive edicts, might abolish the whole organization on both sides. This inviting opportunity for accomplishing an object and so important to the U.s.a., and professed so often to be the want of both the argumentative, was made known to the British government. As that regime admits that an actual application of an adequate strength is necessary to the existence of a legal blockade, and it was notorious, that if such a force had always been applied, its long discontinuance had annulled the blockade in question, there could be no sufficient objection on the part of Britain to a formal revocation of it; and no imaginable objection to a annunciation of the fact, that the blockade did non exist. The declaration would take been consistent with her avowed principles of blockade; and would have enabled the United states of america to demand from France the pledged repeal of her decrees; either with success, in which case the way would have been opened for a general repeal of the belligerent edicts; or without success, in which case the Usa would have been justified in turning their measures exclusively against France. The British authorities would, still, neither rescind the blockade, nor declare its non-existence; nor permit its not-beingness to be inferred and affirmed by the American plenipotentiary. On the contrary, by representing the occludent to be comprehended in the orders in quango, the United States were compelled so to regard it, in their subsequent proceedings.
There was a catamenia when a favorable modify in the policy of the British cabinet was justly considered every bit established. The Minister Plenipotentiary of his Britannic Majesty here proposed an adjustment of the differences more immediately endangering the harmony of the 2 countries. The suggestion was accepted with the promptitude and cordiality, corresponding with the invariable professions of this government. A foundation appeared to exist laid for a sincere and lasting reconciliation. The prospect, however, quickly vanished. The whole proceeding was disavowed by the British government without whatever explanations, which could, at that time, repress the conventionalities, that the disavowal proceeded from a spirit of hostility to the commercial rights and prosperity of the United states of america. And it has since come into proof that at the very moment, when the public minister was holding the linguistic communication of friendship, and inspiring confidence in the sincerity of the negotiation with which he was charged, a secret agent of his government was employed in intrigues, having for their object a subversion of our government, and a dismemberment of our happy Union.
In reviewing the conduct of Uk towards the United States, our attending is necessarily drawn to the warfare just renewed past the savages on one of our extensive frontiers; a warfare which is known to spare neither age nor sexual practice, and to exist distinguished past features especially shocking to humanity. Information technology is hard to account for the activity and combinations which take for some fourth dimension been developing themselves among tribes in abiding intercourse with British traders and garrisons, without connecting their hostility with that influence, and without recollecting the authenticated examples of such interpositions, heretofore furnished by the officers and agents of that authorities.
Such is the spectacle of injuries and indignities which have been heaped on our land; and such the crisis which its unexampled forbearance and conciliatory efforts have not been able to avoid. It might at least have been expected that an aware nation, if less urged by moral obligations, or invited past friendly dispositions on the part of the The states, would accept found, in its true interest alone, a sufficient motive to respect their rights and their repose on the high seas; that an enlarged policy would have favored that free and full general circulation of commerce in which the British nation is at all times interested, and which, in times state of war, is the best alleviation of its calamities to herself, besides every bit to other belligerents; and, more than especially, that the British cabinet would not, for the sake of a precarious and hugger-mugger intercourse with hostile markets, have persevered in a course of measures, which necessarily put at hazard the invaluable marketplace of a great and growing country, disposed to cultivate the mutual advantages of an active commerce.
Other counsels take prevailed. Our moderation and conciliation take had no other effect than to encourage perseverance and to enlarge pretensions. We behold our seafaring citizens nevertheless the daily victims of lawless violence, committed on the great common and highway of nations, even within sight of the country which owes them protection. Nosotros behold our vessels, freighted with the products of our soil and industry, or returning with the honest proceeds of them, wrested from their lawful destinations, confiscated by prize courts, no longer the organs of public law, but the instruments of arbitrary edicts, and their unfortunate crews dispersed and lost, or forced or inveigled in British ports into British fleets; whilst arguments are employed in support of these aggressions, which have no foundation but in a principle every bit supporting a claim to regulate our external commerce in all cases whatever.
Nosotros behold, in fine, on the side of U.k., a land of war against the United States; and on the side of the U.s.a., a state of peace towards U.k..
Whether the United States shall keep passive under these progressive usurpations, and these accumulating wrongs; or, opposing force to strength in defence of their national rights, shall commit a merely cause into the hands of the Omnipotent Disposer of events, avoiding all connections which might entangle it in the contests or views of other powers, and preserving a constant readiness to hold in an honorable re-establishment of peace and friendship, is a solemn question, which the constitution wisely confides to the legislative department of the government. In recommending it to their early deliberations, I am happy in the assurance, that the decision will be worthy the enlightened and patriotic councils of a virtuous, a gratis, and a powerful nation.
Having presented this view of the relations of the U.s.a. with Great Britain, and of the solemn alternative growing out of them, I go on to remark that the communications last fabricated to Congress on the subject of our relations with French republic, volition have shown, that, since the revocation of her decrees, equally they violated the neutral rights of the United States, her government has authorized illegal captures past its privateers and public ships; and that other outrages take been practiced on our vessels and our citizens. Information technology will have been seen, besides, that no indemnity had been provided, or satisfactorily pledged, for the extensive spoliation committed nether the trigger-happy and retrospective orders of the French government against the holding of our citizens seized within the jurisdiction of France. I abstain, at this time, from recommending to the consideration of Congress definitive measures with respect to that nation, in the expectation, that the result of unclosed discussions between our minister plenipotentiary at Paris and the French regime, volition speedily enable Congress to decide, with greater reward, on the grade due to the rights, the interests, and the honor, of our country.
JAMES MADISON.
Washington, June 1, 1812.
The message and documents therein referred to were read. And,
On motion, by Mr. Anderson,
Resolved, That they be referred to a select committee, to consist of 7 members, to consider and written report thereon by bill or otherwise.
Portrait:
James Madison
Gemälde:
Die Brandschatzung Washingtons
(2 Seiten)
U.S. Senate Journal, 12th Cong., 1st sess., 1 June 1812, 149-152.
Source: https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/gna/Quellensammlung/04/04_madisonwarmessage_1812.htm
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