Revocation of Continental Decrees (1810-12)

These two American laws of 1809 and 1810 gave Napoleon an opportunity for a diplomatic game of hide and seek, the like of which has seldom been seen, and which completely fogged the Americans and finally led to the attainment of his object by making inevitable a breach between Great Britain and the United States. At first he took no notice of the Non-intercourse Act and pretended that he did not know of it, although a note to his minister of the interior, dated December 21, 1809, speaks of it in plain terms; and three weeks later a letter to his foreign secretary, Champagny, shows that he desired a settlement with America. But about a year after the American law was passed he suddenly proceeded to a measure of reprisal, the Rambouillet decree, dated March 23, 1810, but not published until about the middle of May. The least remarkable thing about this decree is that, on the ground of the Non-intercourse Act, it was ordered that all American vessels should be seized and sold for the benefit of Napoleon's caisse d'amortissement, although this was going a good deal farther than his earlier measures, which had not explicitly involved confiscation. What made this particular measure especially ruthless, was another feature, that it was given retroactive force as far back as the date on which the American law came into force, May 20, 1809. Thus it made Napoleon master of a number of vessels and cargoes (according to an American estimate, 100 vessels with cargoes representing a value of $10,00,000), which, suspecting no evil, had gone to the ports of France or her allies. But shortly afterwards, when the Emperor learned of the American law of 1810, he immediately saw in it a possibility for a most bewildering diplomatic action, namely, by means of an apparent concession concerning the Continental decrees, to drive the United States into putting the law into force against Great Britain. In a more than usually characteristic letter to Champagny (July 31, 1810) he rejects the idea of rescinding the Berlin and Milan decrees—which, he says, 'would cause disturbance and not fulfil my object,'—and simply charges Champagny to inform the American envoy in a diplomatic note that he might feel assured that the decrees would not be enforced after November 1, and that he should regard them as revoked. 'This method,' he says with calm effrontery, 'seems to me to be more in accordance with my dignity and with the seriousness of the case.' Two days later Napoleon sent a draft for such a note, which Champagny forwarded practically unaltered to the representative of the United States (August 5). The foreign secretary there says that he is authorized to declare that the Berlin and Milan decrees are revoked and that they cease to be enforced after November 1, 'it being understood, of course, that in consequence of this declaration the English must rescind their Orders in Council and renounce the new blockade principles that they had wished to establish, or else that the United States, in accordance with the law of which you have informed me, should make their rights respected by the English'. This note was inserted in Le Moniteur a few days later, and toward the end of the year it was followed by a letter from the minister of finance to the director general of customs, written by the Emperor's order, to the effect that the decrees should not be applied to American vessels; and this, too, was inserted in the official newspaper of France.

One can not be surprised, it is true, that the American statesmen and diplomats were at the first blush highly delighted with the French declaration of August and, on the strength of it, immediately requested a corresponding concession on the part of Great Britain. Nevertheless, the very form in which the 'fundamental principle' of the French Empire—the laws around which the whole of European politics had revolved for well-nigh four years—was revoked was so far peculiar that it might reasonably be expected to superinduce scepticism. And it proved almost immediately that the Continental decrees were applied just the same as before, not only in general, but also against American vessels. When this was pointed out to him, Napoleon declared that it was really due to the fact that the vessels had disobeyed his port regulations and not the international rules contained in the Berlin and Milan decrees. But in reality the fact of the matter was that the only vessels which were liberated were those which had not disobeyed the Continental decrees; and with regard to those which had disobeyed them, no change took place except that they were not, it is true, condemned to confiscation but were nevertheless detained by the French authorities. None the less, Napoleon did accord a limited amount of consideration to the trade and shipping of the United States in the autumn of 1810, inasmuch as he issued a number of licences to American vessels that wished to import into France certain American colonial goods, with French consular certificates written in cipher in order to provide security that the British should not appear in the guise of Americans. He also reduced to one quarter the enormous customs dues that the Trianon tariff of August 5, 1810, had imposed upon colonial goods when the importation had been directly effected by American vessels. A contributory motive behind this measure was the necessity of being able to appeal to the support of the United States in the pressure which Napoleon was now bringing to bear, though in vain, on Emperor Alexander of Russia in order to keep that country within the Continental System. But none of these things altered the fact that the system itself remained unchanged.

However, the American statesmen had already bound themselves to regard Champagny's August note as a genuine and already effective revocation and therefore were placed in an extremely awkward position when compelled to maintain this standpoint in their negotiations with the British. For they were at the same time exerting all their powers of persuasion to induce the French to make the revocation a reality. As the putting into force of the American law of 1810 was made dependent on the willingness of the one or the other of the belligerents to rescind his laws, there consequently arose a difficulty in applying the law against Great Britain, which had not taken any conciliatory steps; and it was therefore considered necessary, on March 2, 1811, to pass a new law which, irrespective of this question of interpretation, put the previously mentioned parts of the Non-intercourse Act into force again as against Great Britain. This was the Non-importation Act of 1811. Curiously enough, this law seems to have been very effective, so that the old methods of evading the prohibition on trade by shipping cargo via Amelia Island in Canada were but little used. Cotton accumulated more and more in Charleston in the course of 1811; and in the autumn no quotations could be published because there were no buyers. The whole situation was very peculiar from a commercial point of view, inasmuch as the claims of the cotton exporters on England could not be satisfied directly, in the natural manner, by the importation of British goods, since all such imports were now forbidden. Probably the triangular trade through other countries also offered great difficulties, for we find the cotton broker in Charleston whose reports Mr. Daniels has edited complaining of the fact that drafts on England were unsaleable, thanks to the new Non-importation Act; and similar complaints were registered on the British side in a petition from the cotton importing town of Liverpool.

However, it now became more necessary than ever for the Americans to convince the British of the genuineness of the French revocation; and this offered greater and greater difficulties, especially in the face of Napoleon's own utterances. In two great speeches delivered in March, 1811, one to deputies from the Hanse Towns and another to deputies from the French Chambers of Commerce (the second of which was not published officially, but was circulated in different versions), he repeated his old phrase about the Berlin and Milan decrees as the fundamental laws of the Empire, whose validity was coextensive with that of the Orders in Council. In the second of the speeches, it is true, he declared himself prepared to receive the Americans in French ports, on condition that they should uphold the same principles as he did; and if they could not compel England to respect them, that they should declare war on that country. But manifestly this implied something quite different from the idea that the decrees had been abolished as far back as the November of the previous year. Napoleon expressed himself in a still more unqualified manner in an unpublished message to his Conseil d'administration du commerce (April 29, 1811), after the passing of the American law of 1811. Inasmuch as that law forbade American vessels to go to England, it followed, he thought, in accordance with his old way of thinking, that a vessel which nevertheless went there was not American at all but English; and on this hypothesis one could quite well say that the Berlin and Milan decrees were revoked, at least so far as the United States were concerned!