I

Attempts to end the War of 1812 began at its outset and continued intermittently throughout its duration. The first occurred between June and September 1812. Within a week of the declaration, Monroe had communicated to the American chargé d'affaires in London, Jonathan Russell, the terms for peace, principally that Great Britain repeal the Orders in Council and cease the practice of impressment. The first goal would be achieved when Great Britain undertook by treaty to adopt more limited methods of blockade, and the second could be accomplished through a mutual understanding, to be written into American and British law, that the two nations forgo the employment of each other's seamen in their merchant marines. If Great Britain agreed, the United States would enter into an armistice pending the negotiation of a treaty that would return it to the status of a neutral. When it proposed these terms, the United States did not know that the British ministry, now headed by Lord Liverpool after the assassination of Spencer Perceval, had already lifted the Orders in Council. Consequently, in early September the ministry rejected the offer, not because it wished to fight the United States but because it assumed that Madison would not persist with his war, once he learned the Orders in Council had gone. Impressment was another matter. The British had no intention of renouncing the practice, but they had never supposed it would be a sufficient cause for war. From London's perspective, therefore, there was no need for the conflict to continue.

Madison thought otherwise. Having brought the nation to the point of war, he saw no reason to cease hostilities before all of America's grievances had been settled by treaty. The first opportunity for peace thus went by, a victim of the sorts of misunderstandings and accidents of bad timing that had characterized much of the diplomacy of the prewar years. That development troubled Alexander I of Russia, who did not want to see Great Britain divert resources to North America at the height of Napoleon's invasion of his empire and who also wished to preserve a significant Russian-American trade that, despite French efforts to end it, had been flourishing in the Baltic. The emperor tendered his services as a mediator. Madison lost little time in March 1813 in accepting, assigning a trio of negotiators to St. Petersburg as he did so. Shortly after their arrival in the Russian capital in July 1813, the American commissioners learned that Great Britain would reject the mediation, although many more months were to elapse before they were officially informed of this. In the interim, Adams, Bayard, and Gallatin struggled to accommodate themselves to the demands of the social scene at the imperial court and to endure the rigors of a Russian winter, to say nothing of the discomfort they inflicted on themselves by virtue of their personality conflicts and their differences over what sort of diplomatic strategies might end the war.