Pierre Berton's War of 1812 by Pierre Berton Read Free Book Online Page B

until tempers calm down.
    He is an apple-cheeked young aristocrat of twenty-seven with the typical upper-class Englishman’s view of Americans. To describe them, in his letters home, he beggars the lexicon of every defamatory epithet. Americans are “consummate rascals,” “ragamuffins and adventurers,” “the scum of every nation on earth.”
    “Corruption, Immorality, Irreligion, and, above all, self-interest, have corroded the very pillars on which their Liberty rests.”
    Clearly, Foster was not bred for America. His father was a Member of Parliament. His mother, an earl’s daughter, lives with the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire in an amiable ménage à trois . His aunt is married to the Earl of Liverpool. After the London of Mrs. Siddons and Lord Byron, of Turner and Gainsborough, the tiny capital of seven thousand souls must indeed seem a sinkhole. Just seven years old, it has become the butt of jokes—a wretched community of bogs and gullies, broken tree stumps, piles of brushwood and refuse, ponds, potholes, and endless gluelike mud, which mires the carriages on Pennsylvania Avenue and makes sensible communication all but impossible. Paving is non-existent; the streets are mere ruts. Wells are the only source of water; there is no public supply. Petty thieves and burglars abound. Pigs and cattle wander the paths that pass for avenues. The climate is intolerable, the swamps malarial.
    Above this morass, each on its separate hillock, rise, incongruously, two jerry-built Greek temples yet unfinished: the Capitol and the Executive Mansion. The columns in the former are so weak they crack under the weight of the visitors’ gallery; the latter is still unplastered, its timber already rotting. The roofs of both are so badly constructed that they leak embarrassingly in every rainstorm. Even the politicians hate Washington. Some, if they had their way, would move the seat of government to Philadelphia.
    Foster cannot stomach the politicians. Why, there are scarcely five congressmen who look like gentlemen! He treats them all with an amused disdain, which the more perceptive must find maddening. But then, one legislator has actually urinated in his fireplace! Foster relishes that tale. And then there was the business of the caviar that he had his maitre d’ prepare from Potomac sturgeon. On serving it to his congressional guests, he found them spitting it out by the mouthful, having mistaken it for black raspberry jam. Is this what democracy has wrought? “The excess of democratic ferment in this people is conspicuously evinced by the dregs having got to the top,” he reports to Whitehall. It is unthinkable that these grotesque politicians would dare declare war on his country!
    Whitehall agrees. The outcry over the Chesapeake incident subsides, and by mid-October Foster feels able to escape from the country in which he believes he has sacrificed the four best years of his life. He would not return, he declares, were he to be paid ten thousand pounds a year. But return he will in 1811, a Yankeephobe, singularly blind to the impending war, the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    Foster’s smug views are typical. He is scarcely back in London, reporting the state of affairs in Washington, when the British make a second move to enrage the Americans. Having called Jefferson’s bluff, they proceed to tighten their blockade of the French ports. Spencer Perceval’s government issues new Orders in Council forbidding neutral ships on pain of seizure to trade with Europe except through Britain. Any vessel that tries to enter any port controlled by Napoleon without first touching at Britain (and paying the required duties and taxes) will be treated as an enemy.
    The British are clearly prepared to go beyond the accepted rules for dealing with non-belligerents. They will, if necessary, seize American shipping in the open seas as well as within territorial limits. In no other way can they hope to throttle the