Page 46

King George of England was mastered by a con-

During the Christmas holidays the negotiations for a general peace were pursued with equal diligence and moderation by Vergennes and Shelburne; and France made sacrifices of its own to induce Spain to forego the recovery of Gibraltar and assent to terms which in all other respects were most generous. The Netherlands, though their definitive peace was delayed, agreed in the suspension of arms. Franklin shrewdly and truly observed that it would be better for the nations then possessing the West India islands to let them govern themselves as neutral powers, open to the commerce of all, the profits of the present monopolies being by no means equivalent to the expense of maintaining them; [2] but the old system was preserved. Conquests were restored, and England felt it to be no wound to her dignity to give back an unimportant island which she had

Chap.
III.
1782.
Dec.
5.

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"At last," wrote Vergennes to Rayneval, as soon as the meeting was over, "we are about to breathe under the shadow of peace. Let us take care to make it a solid one; may the name of war be forgotten forever." [1] In a letter to Shelburne on that same day, he expressed the confident hope that all ancient distrust would be removed; [2] and Shelburne replied: "The liberal spirit and good faith which have governed our negotiations leave no room to fear for the future either distrust or jealousy." [3] King George

  
Jan.
20.

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The restoration of intercourse with America pressed for instant consideration. Burke was of opinion that the navigation act should be completely revised; Shelburne and his colleagues, aware that no paltry regulation would now succeed, were indefatigable in digesting a great and extensive system of trade, and sought, by the emancipation of commerce, to bring about with the Americans a family friendship more beneficial to England than their former dependence. [2] To promote this end, on the evening of the eleventh of February, William Pitt, with the permission of the king, repaired to Charles James Fox and invited him to join the ministry of Shelburne. The only good course for Fox was to take the hand which the young statesman offered; but he put aside the overture with coldness, if not with disdain, choosing a desperate alliance with those whose conduct he had

  
Feb.
11.

Page 49

Pending the negotiations with France and Spain, Fox and Lord North remained quiet, from the desire to throw the undivided responsibility for the peace on Lord Shelburne; but when on the seventeenth of February, in a house of four hundred and fifty members, the treaties with the United States and with both branches of the Bourbons were laid before parliament, and an address of approval, promising a liberal revision of commercial law, was moved, the long-pent-up passions raged without restraint. No sooner had William Wilberforce, with grace and good feeling, seconded the motion and in the warmest language assured to the loyal refugees compensation for their losses, than Lord John Cavendish, the nearest friend of Fox, condemned the peace, though supporting its conditions. Lord North then pronounced against it most elaborate, uncandid, and factious invective. He would have deprived the United States of access to the upper lakes; he would have retained for Canada the country north and north-west of the Ohio; and, bad as is a possession which gives no advantage but powers of annoyance, he would have kept East Florida as well as the Bahamas, so as to compel the ships of America, in passing through the Florida channel, to run the gauntlet between British posts. He would have had no peace without the reinstatement of the loyalists, nor without securing independence to the savage allies of Great Britain. he enumerated one by one the posts in the west which by the treaty fell to America, dwelt on

  
17.

Page 50

On the same evening, to a larger number of peers than had met in their house since the accession of George III., Carlisle, the unsuccessful commissioner of 1778, Keppel, the inglorious admiral, and Stormont, the late headstrong ambassador at Paris, eager to become once more a secretary of state, Lord George Germain, now known as Lord Sackville, Wedderburn, now Lord Loughborough and coveting the office of lord chancellor, poured forth criminations of a treaty for which the necessity was due to their own incapacity. In perfect understanding with Fox and Lord North, they complained that the ministers had given up the banks of the Ohio, "the paradise of America," had surrendered the fur-trade, had broken faith with the Indians, had been false to the loyalists. Thurlow ably defended every article of the treaty that had been impeached, and then asked: "Is there any individual in this house who dares to avow that his wish is for war?" The interest of the debate

Page 51

"The fur-trade is not given up; it is only divided, and divided for our benefit. Its best resources lie to the northward. Monopolies, some way or another, are ever justly punished. They forbid rivalry, and rivalry is the very essence of the well-being of trade. This seems to be the era of protestantism in trade. All Europe appears enlightened and eager to throw off the vile shackles of oppressive, ignorant, unmanly monopoly. It is always unwise; but, if there is any nation under Heaven who ought to be the first to reject monopoly, it is the English. Situated as we are between the old world and the new, and between southern and northern Europe, all that we ought to

Page 52

On the twenty-first, resolutions censuring them were offered in the house of commons. In the former debate, Fox had excused the change in his relations to Lord North by the plea that his friendships were perpetual, his enmities placable; keeping out of sight that political principles may not be sacrificed to personal reconciliations, he now proclaimed and justified their coalition. "Their coalition," replied Pitt, "originated rather in an inclination to force the Earl of Shelburne from the treasury than in any real conviction that ministers deserve censure for the concessions they have made. [2] Whatever appears dishonorable or inadequate in the peace on your table is strictly chargeable to the noble lord in the blue ribbon," Lord North, "whose profusion of the public money, whose notorious temerity and obstinacy in prosecuting the war which originated in his pernicious and oppressive policy, and whose utter incapacity to fill the station he occupied, rendered peace of any description indispensable to the preservation of the state. The triumph of party shall never induce me to call

21.

Page 53

The eloquence of Pitt, his wise conduct, and the purity of his morals, gained him the confidence to which Fox vainly aspired. [3]

Page 54

While the imperfect agreement between the members of the coalition delayed the formation of a ministry, on the third of march, Pitt, as chancellor of the exchequer, presented a bill framed after the liberal principles of Shelburne. [2] Its preamble, which rightly described the Americans as aliens, declared "it highly expedient that the intercourse between Great Britain and the United States should be established on the most enlarged principles of reciprocal benefit;" and, as a consequence, not only were the ports of Great Britain to be opened to them on the same terms as to other sovereign states, but, alone of the foreign world, their ships and vessels laden with the produce of manufactures of their own country might

  
March
3.

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Pitt agreed that "the bill was most complicated in its nature and most extensive in its consequences," [1] and, giving it but faint support, he solicited the assistance and the information of every one present to mould it, so that it might prove most useful at home and most acceptable in America. "While there is an immense extend of unoccupied territory to attract the inhabitants to agriculture," said Edmund Burke, "they will not be able to rival us in manufactures. Do not treat them as aliens. Let all prohibitory acts be re-

Page 56

1.  Almon, xxvi. 439.

The necessity of accepting a ministry so composed drove the king to the verge of madness. He sorrowed over "the most profligate age;" "the most unnatural coalition;" [5] and he was heard to use "strong expressions of personal abhorrence of Lord North, whom he charged with treachery and ingratitude of the black-

Page 57

In the slowly advancing changes of the British constitution, the old whig party, as first conceived by Shaftesbury and Locke to resist the democratic revolution in England on the one side and the claim of arbitrary sovereignty by the Stuarts on the other, was near its end. The time was coming for the people to share in power. For the rest of his life, Fox battled for the reform of the house of commons, so that it became the rallying cry of the liberal party in England. A ministry divided within itself by irreconcilable opinions, detested by the king, confronted by a strong and watchful and cautious opposition, was forced to follow the line of precedents. The settlement of the commercial relations to be established with the United States had belonged to the treasury; it was at once brought by Fox within his department, although, from his ignorance of political economy, he could have neither firm convictions nor a consistent policy. He was not, indeed, without glimpses of the benefit of liberty in trade. To him it was a problem how far the act of navigation had ever been useful, and what ought to be its

Page 58

The coalition cabinet at its first meeting agreed to yield no part of the navigation act, [5] and, as a matter of policy, to put off the bill before parliament relating to commerce with America "till some progress should be made in a negotiation with the American commissioners at Paris." Thither Fox sent without delay,

Page 59

The avowed liberal opinions of Hartley raising distrust, Lord Sheffield, a supporter of the ministry, and, on trade with America, the master authority of that day for parliament, immediately sounded an alarm. "Let the ministers know," said he on the fifteenth, in the house of lords, "the country is as tenacious of the principle of the navigation act as of the principle of Magna Charta. They must not allow America to take British colonial produce to ports in Europe. They must reserve to our remaining dominions the exclusive trade to the West India islands; otherwise, the only use of them will be lost. If we permit any state to trade with our islands or to carry into this country any produce but its own, we desert the navigation act and sacrifice the marine of England. The peace is in comparison a trifling object." [1] But there was no need to fear lest Fox should yield too much. In his instructions to Hartley, he was for taking the lion's share, as Vergennes truly said. [2] He proposed that the manufactures of the thirteen states should as a matter of course be excluded from Great Britain, but that British manufactures should be admitted everywhere in the United States. While America was dependent, parliament had taxed importations of its produce, but British ships and manufactures entered the colonies free of duty. "The true object of the treaty in this business," so Fox enforced his plan, "is the

Page 60

The dignity and interests of the republic were safe, for they were confided to Adams, Franklin, and Jay. In America there existed as yet no system of restrictions; and congress had not power to protect shipping

Page 61

A debate in the house of lords on the sixth of May revealed the rapidity with which the conviction was spreading that America had no power to adopt measures of defensive legislation. There were many who considered the United States as having no government at all, and there were some who looked for the early dissolution of the governments even of the separate states. Lord Walsingham, accordingly, proposed that the law for admitting American ships should apply not merely to the ships of the United States, but to ships belonging to any one of the states and to any ship or vessel belonging to any of the inhabitants thereof. He was supported by Lord Thurlow, who

Page 62

1.  Hartley to Fox, 20 May, 1783. MS.

The blow fell heavily on America, and compelled a readjustment of its industry. Ships had been its great manufacture for exportation. For nicety of workmanship, the palm was awarded to Philadelphia, but nowhere could they be built so cheaply as at Boston. More than one third of the tonnage employed in British commerce before the war was of American construction. Britain renounced this re-

July 2.

Page 63

To Gouverneur Morris, Jay wrote: "The present ministry are duped by an opinion of our not having union and energy sufficient to retaliate their restrictions. No time is to be lost in raising and maintaining a national spirit in America. Power to govern the confederacy as to all general purposes should be granted and exercised. In a word, everything conducive to union and constitutional energy should be cultivated, cherished, and protected." [2] "The British ministers," answered Morris, "are deceived, for their

Page 64

The principle of trade adopted by the coalition min-

Page 65

In London it was a maxim among the merchants

Page 66

British statesmen had begun to regret that any treaty whatever had been made with the United States collectively; they would have granted independence and peace, but without further stipulations

  
Aug.

Page 67

The coalition ministry did not last long enough to exchange ratifications. To save the enormous expense of maintaining the British army in New York, Fox hastened its departure; but while "the speedy and complete evacuation of all the territories of the United States" [3] was authoritatively promised to the American commissioners at Paris, in the name of the kind, Lord North, acting on the petition of merchants interested in the Canada trade, [4] withheld orders for the evacuation of the western and north-western interior posts, although by the treaty they were as much

  
Sept.
3.

Page 68

An early and a most beneficial result of the American revolution was the reform of the British colonial system. Taxation of colonies by the parliament of Great Britain; treatment of them as worthless except as drudges for the enrichment of the ruling kingdom; plans of governing them on the maxims of a Hillsborough or a Thurlow, [1] came to an end. It grew to be the rule to give them content by the establishment of liberal constitutions.

Page 69

1.  Sheffield's Commerce of the American States, 175-180.