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Updated: June 3, 2025
New instructions from President Madison now permitted the commissioners to drop the demand for the abolition of impressments and blockades; and, with these difficult matters swept away, the path to peace was much easier to travel. Such was the outlook for peace when news reached Ghent of the humiliating rout at Bladensburg.
Going up to London, he acquired the lingua aulica precisely at the happiest moment, just as it was becoming, in the strictest sense of the word, modern, just as it had recruited itself, by fresh impressments from the Latin and Latinized languages, with new words to express the new ideas of an enlarging intelligence which printing and translation were fast making cosmopolitan, words which, in proportion to their novelty, and to the fact that the mother-tongue and the foreign had not yet wholly mingled, must have been used with a more exact appreciation of their meaning.
When these Irish fishermen left us, and ran in-shore, we were thrown again altogether on our own resources. I had explained to Michael our want of hands, however, attributing it to accidents and impressments, and he thought he could persuade four or five young fellows to come off, as soon as the gale abated, on condition we would take them to America, after discharging at Hamburg.
He gave instructions to our minister to Great Britain, in relation to commercial restrictions, impressments, and orders in council violative of the law of nations; to our minister to France, in regard to the violations of neutral rights perpetrated by that government; and to our minister to Spain, concerning infractions of international law committed, chiefly by French authorities, within the Spanish jurisdiction.
That result is not yet known. If, on the one hand, the repeal of the orders in council and the general pacification in Europe, which withdrew the occasion on which impressments from American vessels were practiced, suggest expectations that peace and amity may be reestablished, we are compelled, on the other hand, by the refusal of the British Government to accept the offered mediation of the Emperor of Russia, by the delays in giving effect to its own proposal of a direct negotiation, and, above all, by the principles and manner in which the war is now avowedly carried on to infer that a spirit of hostility is indulged more violent than ever against the rights and prosperity of this country.
He was harassed by constant complaints of impressments and seizures. He was placed in an unfortunate position by the presumptions of Genet. Distressed by the license into which liberty in France was plunging he received small comfort in contemplating the British monarchical tendency in America.
Going up to London, he acquired the lingua aulica precisely at the happiest moment, just as it was becoming, in the strictest sense of the word, modern, just as it had recruited itself, by fresh impressments from the Latin and Latinized languages, with new words to express the new ideas of an enlarging intelligence which printing and translation were fast making cosmopolitan, words which, in proportion to their novelty, and to the fact that the mother-tongue and the foreign had not yet wholly mingled, must have been used with a more exact appreciation of their meaning.
Canning, the British Minister, at once offered reparation, but he objected to any reference to the general question of impressments from neutral vessels being mixed up with an affair so unfortunate. Mr. Munroe was not authorized to treat these subjects separately, and further negotiation between the two ministers was suspended.
The American commissioners, including the three original ones, Adams, Bayard, and Gallatin, to whom Clay and Russell of Massachusetts were now added, clearly understood the situation, and had already warned Madison that an insistence on the abandonment of impressments would result in the failure to secure any treaty.
The Americans had come to Ghent to settle two outstanding problems blockades and indemnities for attacks on neutral commerce and to insist on the abandonment of impressments as a sine qua non. Both commissions then agreed to appeal to their respective Governments for further instructions. Within a week, Lord Castlereagh sent precise instructions which confirmed the worst fears of the Americans.
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