§ 468]

LEWIS AND CLARK

393

yard, an American traveler, to attempt to reach the Pacific coast of America by way of Siberia and the ocean. There must be a great river, he argued, flowing from the western mountains into the Pacific, rising near

the head waters of the Missouri. The explorer could ascend this stream and descend the Missouri to St. Louis.

467. Ledyard was turned back by suspicious Russian officials. But in 1792 Captain Gray of Boston, in his ship Columbia, discovered the mouth of the prophesied river, and named it for his vessel. This was our first basis for future claim to the Oregon country. As soon as Jefferson became President, he secured from Congress an appropriation for an exploring expedition to that country, to be led by Meriwether Lewis (Jefferson's private secretary) and Captain William Clark (a

brother of George Rogers MERIWETHER LEWIS, in hunting cosClark). Before the expedition was ready, the purchase of Louisiana made much of the territory to be explored our own, and gave us possessions contiguous to the unoccupied and almost unclaimed Oregon district.

tume. From Winsor's Narrative and Critical History, after a contemporary drawing among the possessions of Lewis' companion, Captain Clark, the only known likeness of the explorer.

468. Lewis and Clark set out from St. Louis with thirty-five. men, in the spring of 1804. Sixteen hundred miles up the

Missouri, near the modern Bismarck, they wintered among the Mandan Indians. The next spring, guided by the "Bird Woman" with her papoose on her back, they continued up the river to the water shed, and followed streams down the western slope until they found a mighty river. When they reached its mouth in November, four thousand miles from St. Louis, this river proved to be Captain Gray's Columbia. This exploration was the second basis for American claim to Oregon; and the scientific observations, maps, and journals of the expedition revealed a vast region never before known to White men.

In 1811 Astoria was founded on the south bank of the Columbia, by John Jacob Astor, as a station for the fur trade. This occupation by American citizens made a third basis for our claim to the country.

When we sought to establish our claim, a few years later (§ 503), our government tried to strengthen its case by holding that Oregon was part of the Louisiana Purchase. There was really no ground whatever for arguing that "Louisiana ever extended beyond the Rocky Mountains; but our government maps kept up the pretense until 1901.

469. In 1805 part of the small army was again made useful in the interests of science and of peaceful expansion. Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, with a small company, traced the Mississippi from St. Louis practically to its source. Afterward he explored the Arkansas and Red rivers; and, in tracing the upper waters of these streams, he discovered the mountain now known as Pikes Peak.

FOR FURTHER READING. - Channing's Jeffersonian System, Ogg's Opening of the Mississippi, or Fish's American Diplomacy..

CHAPTER XLII

THE WAR OF 1812

470. Our foreign relations from 1806 to 1812 were disgraceful. After brief truce, the European war began again in 1803, and the commercial clauses of the Jay treaty (§ 404) expired soon after. Napoleon was soon master of the continent, with all the coast line from Italy to Denmark. His sole antagonist, England, ruled supreme on the sea.1 The only neutral power with any shipping interests was the United States. That shipping fattened on its monopoly; but each of the mighty combatants strove to force it into an ally, and to prevent its aiding his foe. English "Order in Council" followed French "Decree"; and whatever American shipping the one did not declare subject to capture, the other did. Meantime, our own government lacked decision to take sides, or power to defend its citizens.

The story is not a pleasant one. It is a tale of outrageous robbery by both European powers, and of American vacillation and disgrace. Jefferson and Madison, great in peace, were not suited for emergencies of this kind. Well-meaning, gentle, trustful, not particularly decisive, they were buffeted pitifully back and forth between the arrogance and indifference of English Pitt and Canning, and the duplicity and insolent greed of French Napoleon and Talleyrand.

471. If war is ever justifiable for any provocation short of armed invasion, we had abundant cause to fight both robbers or either, at any time between 1806 and 1810. Our government shilly-shallied, in impotent indecision, until the energetic part of the nation rose wrathfully to demand that we fight some one at once to win back self-respect. Then we chose the wrong time and, apparently, the wrong foe. Unfortunately, too, our choice 1 Modern Progress, pp. 316–318, or Modern World, §§ 612, 620, 621.

of a foe arrayed us on the side of the European despot against the only hope for European freedom. The rise of Napoleon had reversed the position of England and France, as compared with that of 1793 (§ 385).

Says Professor A. B. Hart (Foundations of American Foreign Policy, 27): "The United States waited till the European system.. was on the point of falling to pieces of its own weight, and then made war on the power which, on the whole, had done us the least harm." To the same effect, and with more carefully chosen words, Professor Channing says (Jeffersonian System, 200): "One may say that both parties were justified in seeking to distress their enemy by cutting off neutral trade . . . as a war measure. . . . The intention of the English government seems to have been to treat the neutral fairly, to give him ample warning, and to mitigate his losses by permitting him to seek another destination for his cargo.

The French administration of the decrees was peculiarly harsh and unjust. . . . In short the French seemed to have acted with the least consideration for the rights of neutrals; but the English confiscated so many more neutral vessels, owing to the activity and strength of their cruisers and privateers, that the greater hostility was aroused against the British."

To complicate the picture further, that section of the country

immediately interested-the section whose ships were being confiscated and sailors impressed - did not want war at any time, certainly not with England, and talked freely of preferring secession from the Union. In 1790, before the wars of the French Revolution began, 550 English merchant ships entered American harbors. In 1799, when the first series of wars closed, the number had sunk to 100. Meantime, New

§ 473]

THE EMBARGO OF 1807

397

England shipping had increased fivefold. During the second series of wars, until we ourselves became engaged, - American shipping continued to absorb the former English carrying trade with the world. Between 1803 and 1812, England seized a thousand American merchantmen, - many of them very properly, for violations of recognized principles of international law; and France captured more than half that number, — the greater part treacherously, after inviting them into continental harbors by special proclamation. But New England was willing to submit to all this, and to the impressment of her seamen, rather than lose her golden harvest of the seas.

472. Jefferson's second administration spent its chief energy in trying to maintain a policy of commercial non-intercourse with the warring powers, in order to compel them to respect our neutral rights. In 1807, to make the policy effective, Congress decreed an embargo upon all American shipping bound for foreign ports and no time limit was specified in the law. This was not a measure preparatory to war: it was war in commercial form.

The embargo caused great distress among workingmen and commercial classes in England, but those classes then had no voice in the English government. The landed aristocracy,

which did control the government, in death grapple with Napoleon, hardened its heart to the suffering of other Englishmen as an inevitable incident of the great war, and stubbornly refused to make concessions to America.

Meanwhile, the embargo caused hardly less distress at home; and the outcry from sailors out of work, from shippers whose vessels lay idle, and from farmers whose produce rotted unsold, could not long be ignored by Congress. In New Eng land, juries refused to convict on the plainest evidence, for violation of the embargo, and public opinion made it impossible to enforce the law. In the closing days of Jefferson's presidency it was repealed, as a failure. Its chief result had been a revival of the Federalist party in New England.

473. Jefferson had wished his lieutenant, Madison, to succeed him, and in 1808 Madison was elected by a vote of three