Autograph Letter Signed. 3pp. To Joel Barlow, US ambassador to Napoleon’s France.
Warning of the British Government’s misunderstanding of American intentions and resolve – which would lead, in months, to the War of 1812.
Having been warned that his last dispatches to Barlow had been “intercepted by the French Government”, Russell entrusted this letter to Alexander Everett, John Quincy Adams’ trusted aide at the US embassy in Russia, to be hand-delivered to Barlow in Paris: “…We have no late news here from the United States. I feel much anxiety to learn how the news of the continuance of the old administration here with its order in council is received there. It must I apprehend make a strong sensation and probably produce an explosion. Here there appears to be a strange incredulity with regard to our real intentions to make war. If they thought we were in earnest, I believe they would adopt some modification of their system, but in doing so they would guard against the appearance of any concession to us or of an acknowledgement of our rights and whatever might be done would be ascribed to commercial expediency…”
During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain, in 1807, first introduced its “Orders in Council”, restrictions on neutral trade with its French enemies. The US, France’s largest neutral trading partner, denounced these restrictions as violations of international law. After five years of tension between the two countries, early in 1812, the British Government of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval reiterated the trade restrictions, despite the mounting crisis in relations with America which was widely blamed by the English populace for damaging the British economy. This in turn also caused an “explosion” of outrage in the United States and despite Britain’s belated reconsideration of the Orders in Council after the assassination of Perceval in May, the US Congress voted to declare war at the beginning of June – a consequence, as Russell astutely predicted, of England’s failure to understand America’s “real intentions to make war.”