Include File

William Pitt, for the British, and John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, are the two principal figures in the Accommodation period. In 1783 Pitt, who, like his father, the great Earl of Chatham, was favourably disposed towards the Americans, introduced a temporary measure in the British House of Commons to regulate trade with what was now a foreign country 'on the most enlarged principles of reciprocal benefit' as well as 'on terms of most perfect amity with the United States of America.' This bill, which showed the influence of Adam Smith's principles on Pitt's receptive mind, favoured American more than any other foreign trade in the mother country, and favoured it to a still greater extent in the West Indies. Alone among foreigners the Americans were to be granted the privilege of trading between their own ports and the West Indies, in their own vessels and with their own goods, on exactly the same terms as the British themselves. The bill was rejected. But in 1794, when the French Revolution was running its course of wild excesses, and the British government was even less inclined to trust republics, Jay succeeded in negotiating a temporary treaty which improved the position of American sea-borne trade with the West Indies. His government urged him to get explicit statements of principle inserted, more especially anything that would make cargoes neutral when under neutral flags. This, however, was not possible, as Jay himself pointed out. 'That Britain,' he said, 'at this period, and involved in war, should not admit principles which would impeach the propriety of her conduct in seizing provisions bound to France, and enemy's property on board neutral vessels, does not appear to me extraordinary.' On the whole, Jay did very well to get any treaty through at such a time; and this mere fact shows that the general attitude of the mother country towards her independent children was far from being unfriendly.

Unfriendliness began with the new century, when Jefferson first came into power. He treated the British navigation laws as if they had been invented on purpose to wrong Americans, though they had been in force for a hundred and fifty years, and though they had been originally passed, at the zenith of Cromwell's career, by the only republican government that ever held sway in England. Jefferson said that British policy was so perverse, that when he wished to forecast the British line of action on any particular point he would first consider what it ought to be and then infer the opposite. His official opinion was written in the following words: 'It is not to the moderation or justice of others we are to trust for fair and equal access to market with our productions, or for our due share in the transportation of them; but to our own means of independence, and the firm will to use them.' On the subject of impressment, or 'Sailors' Rights,' he was clearer still: 'The simplest rule will be that the vessel being American shall be evidence that the seamen on board of her are such.' This would have prevented the impressment of British seamen, even in British harbours, if they were under the American merchant flag--a principle almost as preposterous, at that particular time, as Jefferson's suggestion that the whole Gulf Stream should be claimed 'as of our waters.'