Relations with Great Britain. the Berlin and Milan decrees are to be considered as still in force, unless Great Britain shall renounce these established foundations of her maritime rights and interests, the period of time is not yet arrived when the repeal of her Orders in Council can be claimed from her, either with reference to the promise of this Government, or to the safety and honor of the nation. I trust that the justice of the American Government will not consider that France, by the repeal of her obnoxious decrees under such a condition, has placed the question in that state which can warrant America in enforcing the non-intercourse act against Great Britain, and not against France. In reviewing the actual state of this question, America cannot fail to observe the situation in which the commerce of neutral nations has been placed by many recent acts of the French Government. Nor can America reasonably expect that the system of violence and injustice now pursued by France with unremitted activity, (while it serves to illustrate the true spirit of her intentions,) should not require some precautions of defence on the part of Great Britain. Having thus stated my view of the several considerations arising from the letter of the French Minister, and from that with which you have honored me, it remains only to express my solicicude that you should correct any interpretation of either which you may deem erroneous. If, either by the terms of the original decree to which the French Minister's letter refers, or by any other authentic document, you can prove that the decrees of Berlin and Milan are absolutely repealed, and that no further condition is required of Great Britain than the repeal of her Orders in Council, I shall receive any such information with most sincere satisfaction, desiring you to understand that the British Government retains an anxious solicitude to revoke the Orders in Council as soon as the Berlin and Milan decrees shall be effectually repealed, without conditions injurious to the maritime rights and honor of the United Kingdom. I have the honor to be, with great respect, &c. It was scarcely possible to speak with more moderation than my paper exhibits, of that portion of a long list of invasions of the rights of the United States which it necessarily reviewed, and of the apparent reluctance of the British Government to forbear those invasions in future. I do not know that I could more carefully have abstained from whatever might tend to disturb the spirit which your Lordship ascribes to His Majesty's Government, if, instead of being utterly barren and unproductive, it had occasionally been visible in some practical result, in some conces. sion either to friendship or to justice. It would not have been very surprising nor very culpable, perhaps, if I had wholly forgotten to address myself to a spirit of conciliation which had met the most equitable claims with steady and unceasing repulsion, which had yielded nothing that could be denied, and had answered complaints of injury by multiplying their causes. With this forgetfulness, however, I am not chargeable; for, against all the discouragements suggested by the past, I have acted still upon a presumption that the disposition to conciliate, so often professed, would finally be proved by some better evidence than a perseverance in oppressive novelties, as obviously incompatible with such a disposition in those who enforce them, as in those whose patience they continue to exercise. Upon the commencement of the second paragraph, I must observe, that the forbearance which it announces might have afforded some gratification if it had been followed by such admissions as my Government is entitled to expect, instead of a further manifestation of that disregard of all its demands by which it has so long been wearied, It has never been my practice to seek discussions, of which the tendency is merely to irritate; but, I beg your Lordship to be assured, that I feel no disposition to avoid them, whatever may be their tendency, when the rights of my country require to be vindicated against pretensions that deny and conduct that infringes them. If I comprehend the other parts of your Lordship's letter, they declare, in effect, that the British Government will repeal nothing but the Orders in Council, and that it cannot, at present, [Referred to in Mr. Pinkney's despatch of Jan. 17.] repeal even them, because, in the first place, the Mr. Pinkney to Lord Wellesley. GREAT CUMBERLAND PLACE, MY LORD: I have received the letter which you did me the honor to address me on the 29th of last month, and will not fail to transmit a copy of it to my Government. In the mean time, I take the liberty to trouble you with the following reply, which a severe indisposition has prevented me from preparing sooner. The first paragraph seems to make it proper for me to begin by saying, that the topics introduced into my letter of the 10th of December were intimately connected with the principal subject, and fairly used to illustrate and explain it ; and, consequently, if they had not the good fortune to be acceptable to your Lordship, the fault was not mine. French Government has required, in the letter of the Duke of Cadore to General Armstrong of the 5th of August, not only that Great Britain shall revoke those orders. but that she shall renounce certain principles of the blockade (supposed to be explained in the preamble to the Berlin decree) which France alleges to be new; and, in the second place, because the American Government has (as you conclude) demanded the revocation of the British order of blockade of May, 1806, as a practical instance of that same renunciation; or, in other words, has made itself a party, not openly, indeed, but indirectly and covertly, to the entire requisition of France, as you understand that requisition. It is certainly true that the American Government has required as indispensable, in the view of its acts of intercourse and non-intercourse, the Relations with Great Britain. son to Mr. Thornton of the 27th of October, 1803, already before you, were asserted in 1799 by the American Minister at this Court, in his correspondence with Lord Grenville respecting the blockade of some of the ports of Holland; were sanctioned in a letter of the 20th of September, 1800, from the Secretary of State of the United States to Mr. King, of which an extract is enclosed; were insisted upon in repeated instructions to Mr. Monroe and the special mission of 1806; have been maintained by the United States against others as well as against England, as will appear by the enclosed copy of instructions, dated the 21st of October, 1801, from Mr. Secretary Madison to Mr. Charles Pinckney, then American Minister at Madrid; and, finally, were adhered to by the United States when belligerent, in the case of the blockade of Tripoli. annulment of the British blockade of May, 1806; and, further, that it has, through me, declared its confident expectation that other blockades of a similar character (including that of the island of Zealand) will be discontinued. But by what process of reasoning your Lordship has arrived at the conclusion that the Government of the United States intended, by this requisition, to become the champion of the edict of Berlin, to fashion its principles by those of France while it affected to adhere to its own, and to act upon some partnership in doctrines which it would fain induce you to acknowledge, but could not prevail upon itself to avow, I am not able to conjecture. The frank and honorable character of the American Government justifies me in saying, that, if it had meant to demand of Great Britain an abjuration of all such principles as the French Government may think fit to disapprove, it would not put your A few words will give a summary of those Lordship to the trouble of discovering that principles; and, when recalled to your rememmeaning by the aid of combinations and inferen- brance, I am not without hopes that the strong ces discountenanced by the language of its Min-grounds of law and right on which they stand ister, but would have told you so in explicit terms. will be as apparent to your Lordship as they are What I have to request of your Lordship, there- to me. fore is, that you will take our views and principles from our own mouths; and that neither the Berlin decree, nor any other act of any foreign State, may be made to speak for us what we have not spoken for ourselves. It is by no means clear that it may not fairly be contended, on principle and early usage, that a maritime blockade is incomplete, with regard to States at peace, unless the place which it would affect is invested by land as well as by sea. The United States, however, have called for the recognition of no such rule. They appear to have contented themselves with urging, in substance, that ports not actually blockaded by a present, adequate, stationary force, employed by the Power which attacks them, shall not be considered as shut to neutral trade in articles not contraband of war; that, though it is usual for a belligerent to give notice to neutral nations when he intends to institute a blockade, it is possible that he may not act upon his intention at all, or that he may exeecute it insufficiently, or that he may discontinue his blockade, of which it is not customary to give any notice; that, consequently, the presence of the blockading force is the natural criterion by which the neutral is enabled to ascertain the existence of the blockade at any given period, in like manner as the actual investment of a besieged place is the evidence by which we decide whether the siege, which may be commenced, raised, recommenced, and raised again, is continued or not; that, of course, a mere notification to a neutral Minister shall not be relied upon as affecting with knowledge of the actual existence of a blockade either his Government or its citizens; that a vessel, cleared or bound to a blockaded port, shall not be considered as violating, in any manner, the blockade, unless, on her approach towards such port, she shall have been previously warned not to enter it; that this view of the law, in itself perfectly correct, is peculiarly important to nations situated at a great distance from the belligerent parties, and therefore incapable of obtaining other The steady fidelity of the Government of the than tardy information of the actual state of their United States to its opinions on that interesting ports; that whole coasts and countries shall not subject is known to every body. The same prin- be declared (for they can never be more than deciples which are found in the letter of Mr. Madi-clared to be in a state of blockade, and thus the The principles of blockade which the American Government professes, and upon the foundation of which it has repeatedly protested against the order of May, 1806, and the other kindred innovations of these extraordinary times, have already been so clearly explained to your Lordship in my letter of the 21st of September, that it is hardly possible to read that letter and misunderstand them. Recommended by the plainest considerations of universal equity, you will find them supported by a strength of argument and a weight of authority of which they scarcely stand in need, in the papers which will accompany this letter, or were transmitted in that of September. I will not recapitulate what I cannot improve, but I must avail myself of this opportunity to call your Lordship's attention a second time, in a particular manner to one of the papers to which my letter of September refers. I allude to the copy of an official note of the 12th of April, 1804, from Mr. Merry to Mr. Madison, respecting a pretended blockade of Martinique and Guadaloupe. No comment can add to the value of that manly and perspicuous exposition of the law of blockade, as made by England herself, in maintenance of rules which have been respected and upheld in all seasons and on all occasions by the Government of the United States. I will leave it, therefore, to your Lordship's consideration, with only this remark, that, while that paper exists, it will be superfluous to seek in any French document for the opinions of the American Government on the matter of it. Relations with Great Britain. right of blockade converted into the means of extinguishing the trade of neutral nations; and, lastly, that every blockade shall be impartial in its operation, or, in other words, shall not open and shut for the convenience of the party that institutes it, and at the same time repel the commerce of the rest of the world, so as to become the odious instrument of an unjust monopoly instead of a measure of honorable war. These principles are too moderate and just to furnish any motive to the British Government for hesitating to revoke its Orders in Council and those analogous orders of blockade, which the United States expect to be recalled. It can hardly be doubted that Great Britain will ultimately accede to them in their fullest extent; but if that be a sanguine calculation, (as I trust it is not,) it is still incontrovertible that a disinclination at this moment to acknowledge them can suggest no rational inducement for declining to repeal at once what every principle disowns, and what must be repealed at last. With regard to the rules of blockade which the French Government expects you to abandon, I do not take upon me to decide whether they are such as your Lordship supposes them to be or not. Your view of them may be correct, but it may also be erroneous; and it is wholly immaterial to the case between the United States and Great Britain whether it be the one or the other. As to such British blockades as the United States desire you to relinquish, you will not, I am sure, allege that it is any reason for adhering to them that France expects you to relinquish others. If our demands are suited to the measure of our own rights, and of your obligations as they respect those rights, you cannot think of founding a rejection of them upon any imputed exorbitance in theories of the French Government, for which we are not responsible, and with which we have no concern. If, when you have done justice to the United States, your enemy should call upon you to go further, what shall prevent you from refusing? Your free agency will in no respect have been impaired. Your case will be better in truth, and in the opinion of mankind, and you will be, therefore, stronger in maintaining it, provided that, in so doing, you resort only to legitimate means, and do not once more forget the rights of others while you seek to vindicate your own. Whether France will be satisfied with what you may do, is not to be known by anticipation, and ought not to be a subject of inquiry. So vague a speculation has nothing to do with your duties to nations at peace, and, if it had, would annihilate them. It cannot serve your interests; for it tends to lessen the number of your friends, without adding to your security against your enemies. You are required, therefore, to do right, and to leave the consequences to the future, when by doing right you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. As to the Orders in Council, which professed to be a reluctant departure from all ordinary rules, and to be justified only as a system of retaliation for a pre-existing measure of France, their foun dation (such as it was) is gone the moment that measure is no longer in operation. But the Berlin decree is repealed; and even the Milan decree, the successor of your Orders in Council, is also repealed. Why is it, then, that your orders have outlived those edicts, and they are still to oppress and harass as before? Your Lordship answers that question explicitly enough, but not satisfactorily. You do not allege that the French decrees are not repealed; but you imagine that the repeal is not to remain in force, unless the British Government shall, in addition to the revocation of its Orders in Council, abandon its system of blockade. I am not conscious of having stated, as your Lordship seems to think, that this is so ; and I believe in fact that it is otherwise; even if it were admitted, however, the Orders in Council ought, nevertheless, to be revoked. Can "the safety and honor of the British nation" demand that these orders shall continue to outrage the public law of the world, and sport with the undisputed rights of neutral commerce, after the pretext which was at first invented for them is gone? But you are menaced with a revival of the French system, and, consequently, may again be furnished with the same pretext! Be it so ; yet still, as the system and the pretext are at present at an end, so of course should be your orders. According to your mode of reasoning, the situation of neutral trade is hopeless indeed. Whether the Berlin decree exist or not, it is equally to justify your Orders in Council. You issued them before it was anything but a shadow, and by doing so, gave to it all the substance it could ever claim. It is at this moment nothing. It is revoked and has passed away, according to your own admission. You choose, however, to look for its re-appearance, and you make your own expectation equivalent to the decree itself. Compelled to concede that there is no anti-neutral French edict in operation upon the ocean, you think it sufficient to say that there will be such an edict you know not when; and in the meantime you do all you can to verify your own prediction, by giving to your enemy all the provocation in your power to resume the decrees which he has abandoned. For my part, my Lord, I know not what it is that the British Government requires, with a view to what it calls its safety and its honor, as an inducement to rescind its Orders in Council. It does not, I presume, imagine that such a system will be suffered to ripen into law. It must intend to relinquish it sooner or later, as one of those violent experiments, for which time can do nothing, and to which submission will be hoped in vain. Yet, even after the professed foundation of this mischievous system is taken away, another and another is industriously procured for it; so that no man can tell at what time, or under what circumstance, it is likely to have an end. When realities cannot be found, possibilities supply their place; and that, which was originally said to be retaliation for actual injury, becomes (if such a decision can be endured or imagined) retaliation Relations with Great Britain. for apprehended injuries, which the future may or may not produce, but which it is certain have no existence now. I do not mean to grant, for I do not think, that the edict of Berlin did at any period lend even a color of equity to the British Orders in Council with reference to the United States; but it might reasonably have been expected that they, who have so much relied upon it as a justification, would have suffered it and them to sink together. How this is forbidden by your safety or your honor remains to be explained, and I am not willing to believe that either the one or the other is inconsistent with the observance of substantial justice and with the prosperity and rights of peaceful States. [Referred to in Mr. Pinkney's letter of January 17.] MY LORD: After a lapse of many months since I had the honor to receive and convey to my Government your Lordship's repeated assurances, written as well as verbal, (which you declined, however, to put into an official form,) "that it was your intention immediately to recommend the appointment of a Minister Plenipotentiary from the King to the United States," the British Government continues to be represented at Washington by a Chargé d'Affairs, and no steps whatever appear to have been taken to fulfil the expectation which the abovementioned assurances produced and justified. Although your Lordship has slightly remarked upon certain recent acts of the French Government, and has spoken in general terms of" the system of violence and injustice now pursued by France" as requiring "some precautions of defence on the part of Great Britain," I do not perceive that you deduce any consequence from these observations in favor of a perseverance in the Orders in Council. I am not myself aware of any edicts of France, which, now that the Berlin and Milan decrees are repealed, affect the rights of neutral commerce on the seas. And you will yourselves admit that, if any of the acts of the French Government, resting on territorial sov-ican Legation in this country. ereignty, have injured, or shall hereafter injure, the United States, it is for them, and for them only, to seek redress. In like manner, it is for Great Britain to determine what precautions of defence those measures of France which you denominate unjust and violent, may render it expedient for her to adopt. The United States have only to insist that a sacrifice of their rights shall not be among the number of those precautions. In this state of things, it has become my duty to inform your Lordship, in compliance with my instructions, that the Government of the United States cannot continue to be represented here by a Minister Plenipotentiary. As soon, therefore, as the situation of the King's Government will permit, I shall wish to take my leave, and return to America in the United States' frigate Essex, now at Plymouth, having first named, as I am specially authorized to do, a fit person to take charge of the affairs of the Amer WILLIAM PINKNEY. The MARQUIS OF WELLESLEY, &c. MY LORD: I have the honor to inform you that it has been represented to me that two American vessels, (the schooner Polly and the schooner Mary,) laden with codfish, and bound from Marblehead to Bordeaux, in France, have, since the 1st instant, been captured and brought into Plymouth, as prize, for an imputed breach of the British Orders in Council. It is my duty to demand the restoration of these vessels and their cargoes to the American owners, together with compensation for their unjust detention, and liberty to resume the voyages which that detention has interrupted. I have the honor to be, &c. WILLAM PINKNEY The MARQUIS OF WELLESLEY, &c. In reply to that passage of your letter which adverts to the American act of non-intercourse, it is only necessary to mention the Proclamation of the President of the United States of the 2d of November last, and the act of Congress, which my letter of the 21st of September communicated; and to add, that it is in the power of the British Government to prevent the non-intercourse from being enforced against Great Britain. Upon the concluding paragraph of your letter I will barely observe, that I am not in possession of any document, which you are likely to consider as authentic, showing that the French decrees are absolutely revoked upon the single condition of the revocation of the British Orders in Council; but that the information, which I have lately Extract of a letter from Mr. Pinkney to the Secretary received from the American Legation at Paris, confirms what I have already stated, and I think proven, to your Lordship, that those decrees are repealed, and have ceased to have any effect. I will now trespass on you no further than to suggest that it would have given me sincere pleasure to be enabled to say as much of the British Orders in Council, and of the blockades, from which it is impossible to distinguish them. I have the honor to be, &c. WILLIAM PINKNEY. The MARQUIS OF WELLESLEY, &c. 12th CoN. 1st SESS.-55 of State of the United States. LONDON, Feb. 12, 1811. I received, a few hours since, a letter from Lord Wellesley, (a copy of which is enclosed.) in answer to mine of the 14th ultimo, respecting the British Orders in Council and blockades. [Referred to in Mr. Pinkney's despatch of Feb. 17.] The Marquis of Wellesley to Mr. Pinkney. FOREIGN OFFICE, Feb. 11, 1811. SIR: The letter which I had the honor to receive from you, under date of the 14th of January Relations with Great Britain. 1811, has been submitted to His Royal High-most important maritime rights and interests of ness the Prince Regent. the United Kingdom In communicating to you the orders which I have received from His Royal Highness on the subject of your letter, I am commanded to abstain from any course of argument, and from any expression, which, however justified by the general tenor of your observations, might tend to interrupt the good understanding which it is the wish of His Royal Highness, on behalf of His Majesty to maintain with the Government of the United States. No statement contained in your letter appears to affect the general principles which I had the honor to communicate to you in my letter of the 29th of December, 1810. Great Britain has always insisted upon her right of self-defence against the system of commercial warfare pursued by France; and the British Orders in Council were founded upon a just principle of retaliation against the French decrees. The incidental operation of the Orders of Council upon the commerce of the United States, (although deeply to be lamented,) must be ascribed, exclusively, to the violence and injustice of the enemy, which compelled this country to resort to adequate means of defence. It cannot now be admitted that the foundation of the original question should be changed, that the measure of retaliation adopted against France should now be relinquished at the desire of the Government of the United States, without any reference to the actual conduct of the enemy. I am commanded to inform you that His Royal Highness cannot consent to blend the question which has arisen upon the Orders of Council with any discussion of the general principles of blockade. This declaration does not preclude any amicable discussion upon the subject of any particular blockade, of which the circumstances may appear to the Government of the United States to be exceptionable, or to require explanation. I have the honor to be, &c. LONDON, Feb. 16, 1811. SIR: I received at a very late hour last night two notes from Lord Wellesley, (bearing date "February 15, 1811,") of which copies, marked No. 1, and No. 2, are enclosed. Taken together, (as of course they must be,) they announce the appointment of Mr. Foster, as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States, and set forth the reasons why an appointment has been so long delayed. circumstances, appeared originally to indicate. The intention has been repeatedly declared of repealing the Orders of Council, whenever France shall actually have revoked the decrees of Berlin and Milan, and shall have restored the trade of neutral nations to the condition in which it stood previously to the promulgation of those decrees. You will perceive, in the second and third parEven admitting that France has suspended the agraphs of the unofficial paper, a distinct disaoperation of those decrees, or has repealed them vowal of the offensive views which the appoint. with reference to the United States, it is evidentment of a mere Chargé des Affaires, and other that she has not relinquished the conditions expressly declared in the letter of the French Minister, under date of the 5th of August, 1810. France, therefore requires that Great Britain shall not only repeal the Orders of Council, but renounce those principles of blockade, which are alleged, in the same letter, to be new; an allegation which must be understood to refer to the introductory part of the Berlin decree. If Great Britain shall not submit to those terms, it is plainly intimated in the same letter that France requires America to enforce them. To these conditions His Royal Highness, on behalf of His Majesty, cannot accede. No principles of blockade have been promulgated or acted upon by Great Britain previously to the Berlin decree, which are not strictly conformable to the rights of civilized war, and to the approved usages and law of nations. The blockades established by the Orders of Council rest on separate grounds, and are justified by the principle of necessary retaliation, in which they originated. The conditions exacted by France would require Great Britain to surrender to the enemy the We are now told, in writing, that the delay in appointing a Minister Plenipotentiary was occasioned, in the first instance, not by any such considerations as have been supposed, but "by an earnest desire of rendering the appointment satisfactory to the United States, and conducive to the effectual establishment of harmony between the two Governments;" that, more recently, "the state of His Majesty's Government rendered it impossible to make the intended appointment;" and that Lord Wellesley was therefore "concerned to find, by my letter of the 14th of January, that the Government of the United States should be induced to suppose that any indisposition could exist, on the part of His Majesty's Government to place the British mission in America on the footing most acceptable to the United States, as soon as might be practicable, consistently with the convenience of affairs in this country." The two papers are evidently calculated to prevent me from acting upon my late request of an audience of leave; and they certainly seem to |