The British government issued a series of Orders in Council that, along with the Berlin Decree and Milan Decree of Napoleon Bonaparte, severely restricted the trade of the United States. These measures became a major diplomatic irritant to Anglo-American relations and helped bring about the War of 1812 (1812-15).
With the war in Europe between France and Great Britain reaching a stalemate in 1806 and 1807, Napoleon decided to use commerce as a means of forcing the British to accept his domination of the Continent. On November 21, 1806, Napoleon issued his Berlin Decree, which proclaimed a blockade on Britain. The French did not have the navy to enforce this blockade, so Napoleon declared that any ship that stopped in a British port was forbidden access to the continent of Europe. Since his armies and allies controlled most of Europe, this decree made it impossible for a neutral power such as the United States to trade with both England and Napoleonic Europe. In retaliation, the British government issued an Order in Council on January 7, 1807, that prohibited a ship belonging to a neutral power from trading between ports controlled by Napoleon. This measure was passed by a Whig Party government in England, and from the British perspective was relatively mild. While complicating neutral trade, it did not prevent it.
British Tories thought the order was too weak, and when they came into power later in 1807, they sought to strengthen it. Moreover, Anglo-American relations worsened in the wake of the Chesapeake-Legpard affair (June 22, 1807). As a result, starting on November 11, 1807, a Tory government in Great Britain issued several new Orders in Council. Although these regulations were confusing, they were intended to restrict further neutral trade with Napoleonic Europe. They did allow, however, a neutral ship to stop in a British port and then sail to a French or allied port with British goods. The neutral trade of the United States was to be limited but not eliminated. Napoleon was not going to let the British have the last word, and on December 17, 1807, he issued the Milan Decree, which stated that any neutral ship that stopped at a British port or was searched by a British ship would be seized upon entering a European port controlled by France and its allies.
The British and French actions left the United States with few options. Thomas Jefferson sought a commercial policy that would compel both Great Britain and France to recognize its neutral rights; the United States implemented the Non-Importation Act (enacted in 1806) and passed the embargo of 1807, Non-Intercourse Act (1809) and Macon’s Bill No. 2 (1810). These laws appeared to have little effect on either belligerent. On April 26, 1809, the British adjusted their Orders of Council again, opening up trade to those countries such as Spain and Portugal, which had broken from the Napoleonic orbit. But this action was taken more in response to the changing European situation than to appease neutral complaints. The same orders prohibited all trade with those areas still controlled by Napoleon. Finally, in the spring of 1812, Britain moved toward repealing the Orders in Council completely since Napoleon had suggested he was canceling the Berlin and Milan Decrees, and the decline in trade with the United States was having a stifling effect on the British economy. The British government made the removal of the trade restrictions official on June 23, 1812. Unfortunately, and unknown to any one in Great Britain,
President James Madison had signed the declaration of war on June 18, 1812.
See also economy; foreign affairs; impressment.
Further reading: Reginald Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962); Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War, 18051812 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
Otis, Harrison Gray (1765-1848) politician Harrison Gray Otis was a leader of the Federafist Party who opposed the Democratic-Repubfican Party’s economic policies against French and English commercial measures during the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and he was against fighting the War of 1812 (1812-15). Otis came from a prominent Massachusetts family—his uncle was James Otis. He was a Harvard graduate (1783) and a member of the Massachusetts bar. He held many political posts throughout his life including seats in the Massachusetts lower house, the U. S. House of Representatives, the Massachusetts state senate (where he served as president), and the U. S. Senate. He also was mayor of Boston. A vocal opponent of the War of 1812, he is most well known for his sponsorship of the Hartford Convention, a meeting of delegates from the five New England states in December 1814 to protest the war with Great Britain. At the convention Otis was a moderate who hoped it would allow the New England states to obtain government “security against Conscription, taxes & the danger of invasion by being allowed to take care of ourselves.” Under Otis’s management the convention did not advocate secession but proposed amendments that would protect New England from being dominated by the Democratic-Republicans in the rest of the country. Although the Federalist Party fell out of favor after the Hartford Convention, Otis continued to defend his stance and the case for states’ rights.
Further reading: Samuel Eliot Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, 1765-1848: The Urbane Federalist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969).
Otis, James, Jr. (1725-1783) lawyer, statesman, writer
A renowned legal scholar and active pamphleteer, James Otis, Jr., contributed significantly to the debates surrounding law, parliamentary power, and sovereignty during the 1760s. Revered for his brilliance and impeccable attention to history and detail, Otis eventually lost popularity among radical Whigs because of his conciliatory views toward
Great Britain appeared outdated as the colonies and Crown engaged in the debates that precipitated the Revofution-ary War (1775-83).
Born in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, Otis graduated from Harvard in 1743, later studied law, and was admitted to the bar of Plymouth County in 1748. After moving to Boston, he married Ruth Cunningham and developed an expertise in common, civil, and admiralty law, as well as in classical English political theory.
When in 1760 Great Britain sought to enforce the Sugar Act of 1733, Otis served as the king’s advocate general of the Vice-Admirafty Court in Boston. The responsibility for issuing writs of assistance that would expedite the royal customs collectors’ searches fell upon him. In a surprising move, Otis resigned from his post and argued the merchants’ position against the writs of assistance. Although he lost his case in 1761, Otis provided a powerful rationale for the illegality of the writs. Harking back to the 17th-century notion that Parliament could only enact laws consonant with natural law, he drew a definite line between the colonial and British idea of parliamentary power.
Yet Otis did not heed the logical implications of his own argument. Rather, he grounded his polemics on the notion that Parliament was absolute but not arbitrary. Just and equitable laws derived from nature and reason, he argued, and only these could be codified by Parliament. If Parliament legislated an act that was unjust, it existed as only an aberration. And even in their opposition, the people were obligated to concede Parliament’s absolute power until that body, recognizing its error, made the necessary corrections. This line of argumentation informed political tracts such as A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives (1762), The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), and A Vindication of the British Colonies (1765).
Between 1761 and 1769, Otis played an influential role in Massachusetts politics as a member of its General Court. But the resistance movement (1764-75)—tested and transformed through crises such as the Sugar Act (1764), Stamp Act (1765), the Decfaratory Act (1766), Town-shend Duties 1767), and the occupation of Boston—outpaced his political thought. His view of natural law and its relationship to parliamentary power proved anachronistic and satisfied neither the British nor the radical Whigs of the resistance movement. The former argued that he sought to restrict the power of Parliament, while the latter accused him of countenancing passive obedience. The difficulty of maintaining such a position earned him tremendous scorn. Considered a traitor by the British administration, some radicals lambasted him as a “double-faced Jacobite Whig.” In fact, Otis was neither a traitor nor an apologist. Rather, he remained wedded to the idea that laws—based on principles of equity and justice—derived from God and nature.
Legal codification threatened to circumscribe these rights. Meanwhile colonists came to redefine the debate over parliamentary power not in terms of justice, but of legislative authority. Each of the colonies had their own miniature parliaments in the form of their colonial legislatures, radicals contended, legitimated through their contractual relationships with the king. Whereas Otis continued to retain his faith in common law, the nation’s founders set out to give fundamental rights a written form.
By the 1770s, most colonists had abandoned James Otis’s cautious, conciliatory position. A brawl with customs
Officials in 1769 left him beaten and cut short his active political career. A supporter of the United States after its inception, he died on May 23, 1783.
Further reading: Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); John J. Waters, Jr., The Otis Family, in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).
—Daniel M. Cobb
Paine, Thomas (1737-1809) political philosopher, revolutionary, writer
Paine was a transatlantic revolutionary and the most influential pamphleteer of his time. His essay, Common Sense (1776), had a profound impact on the course of the American Revolution.
Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, England, the son of a Quaker corset maker. His education was at best rudimentary and he began his apprenticeship with his father at 13. At 16 he ran way to join a privateer (see also privateering) but was returned home by his father. At 19, Paine left home for good and went to London, where he developed a passion for the natural sciences. Though he was not a practicing Quaker, his religious upbringing influenced his moral conscience and idealism, as did the inherent unfairness of his social station; his enthusiasm for Newtonian science and the Enlightenment convinced him of the power of reason and helped shape his animosity towards the prerogatives of hereditary privilege.
For more than a decade and a half Paine had little success in anything. His first marriage in 1759 to Mary Lambert ended a year later with her death in childbed. He gave up making corsets and began a new career as an exciseman (an official who collected internal taxes on liquor and tobacco). Paine was dismissed from his position twice, once for falsifying records and once for an extended absence from his post. (Paine had been away petitioning Parliament to raise the wages paid to excisemen; as a lobbyist in London he met Benjamin Franklin.) His second marriage, to Elizabeth Ollive in 1771, ended in a permanent separation three years later. Forced to declare bankruptcy, Paine decided to start afresh in North America.
Paine immigrated to Philadelphia in 1774, and with letters of introduction from Franklin, he began to associate with supporters of political rebellion. Paine at first sought work as a teacher, but soon was asked by the editor of Pennsylvania Magazine to try his hand at journalism. His interests were eclectic and he wrote on both science and politics. One of his early articles “African Slavery in America” was a powerful condemnation of slavery.
Paine arrived in the colonies when the quarrel with Britain was reaching a fever pitch. After the Battles of Lexington and Concord (April 19, 1775), Paine began to articulate the idea that the colonies should free themselves from Great Britain. In January 1776 Paine anonymously published Common Sense in which he argued for independence. Written in a plain and accessible style that reflected his artisan roots, the pamphlet was a huge success, selling more than 120,000 copies in its first year. In Common Sense Paine argued for the virtues of a republic over a monarchy and the equality of rights among all citizens. During the course of the war that followed, Paine published 16 “Crisis” papers. The first issue opened with the stirring words: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
With a talent for finding himself in the midst of major events, Paine returned to Europe in 1787, on the eve of the French Revolution (1789-99). His goal was to secure the funding needed to build an iron bridge across the Schuylkill River, but he became distracted by the political events. Incensed by Edmund Burke’s conservative treatise Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Paine published his Rights of Man in 1791. It was an even greater success than Common Sense had been. Paine’s analysis of the fundamental causes for popular discontent promoted republicanism and called for a break from the prison of heredity and privilege; indeed it called for nothing less than the overthrow of the British monarchy and the establishment of a republic. Charged with seditious libel, Paine fled to the Continent. Paine was tried and convicted in absentia and declared an outlaw in Britain.
Paine arrived in revolutionary France in 1792, was awarded French citizenship, and became one of the few foreign-born men elected to the National Convention. In the Convention, Paine voted for the formal abolition of the French monarchy, yet he deplored the terror being unleashed in France. Out of step with the radical Jacobins,
Thomas Paine (NationalArchives)
Paine spoke to the Convention against the execution of the Bourbon king and was arrested in late 1793. The U. S. minister, GouvERNEUR MoRRis, did little to secure his release and Paine remained imprisoned until late 1794. With the overthrow and execution of Maximilian Robespierre and the end of the Terror, Paine was released and readmitted to the Convention.
While in prison, Paine wrote his last great book, The Age of Reason (1794; 1796), which begins with the statement “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.” A tract on deism—Paine believed in a Supreme Being but opposed organized religion—it attacked the tenets of traditional Christianity, including the idea that the Bible is divinely inspired. Paine offended the clergy and the pious on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean with this pamphlet.
Branded as an atheist by the devout, upon his return to the United States in 1802 he was not celebrated as of old. Furthermore, the country itself had changed. The RATiEi-cation OE THE CoNSTiTUTiON had quelled the extreme enthusiasm of the Revolution. Though he continued his attacks on privilege and religion, Paine was largely forgotten. At his death, only six mourners attended the funeral. His obituary read in part, “He had lived long, did some good and much harm.” Recent scholarship has revised history’s assessment of Paine’s contribution; he is now regarded as “the English Voltaire.”
Further reading: Eric Foner, To-m Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press; 1976); Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel Press, 1945); David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
—Robyn Davis McMillin
World History
