crushing severity upon New England, whose ships and seamen were thrown suddenly out of employment. Her old merchants tottered to ruin, without a general bankrupt law to relieve them. Breadstuffs and fresh provisions accumulated at the wharves, which, if not exported, would perish and be a dead loss. The high price of such supplies abroad, in comparison with the statute penalties, encouraged shippers to practice every artifice to get them out of the country, though at the risk of capture. The law was evaded by fraud or force; vessels slipped out from Machias, Portland, Nantucket, and Newport harbors; and so high-handed was the resistance to embargo on the Canada border at Lake Champlain, where an illicit traffic went on, that the national government had to equip vessels and send troops thither to maintain its authority. Flour was the chief commodity in these smuggling ventures. Much was got over the lines into Canada; barrels upon barrels were stored, too, at Eastport and in the southern ports of Georgia, ready to be conveyed, as opportunity might serve, into New Brunswick over the one boundary, and Florida over the other. On this account chiefly Congress had passed the third Embargo Act just before adjournment, under which the President was empowered to grant special permits for vessels to clear from ports adjacent to foreign territories, and make seizure and search of suspected vessels.* Collectors were accordingly directed not to grant clearances at all to vessels laden with flour. But some States finding it needful May. to import flour for home consumption, the President authorized the respective governors to grant merchandise permits for domestic convenience to those in whom they had confidence. This plan worked badly, for some of the State executives, in fulfilling their functions as "ministers of starvation," yielded too readily to the clamors of the merchants who pestered them, as did especially the easy-tempered Sullivan, whose official permits soon began circulating in cities as far south as Washington, where they were openly bought and sold. By a later circular the President advised the collectors * See act of April 25th, 1808. 1808. JEFFERSON'S EMBARGO. 175 not to detain coast wise vessels with unsuspicious cargoes, and this rule operated much better.* New York city felt embargo like the creep of death. In November that port was full of shipping. On the wharves were strewn bales of cotton, wool, and merchandise; barrels of potash, rice, flour, and salted provisions; hogsheads of sugar, tea, rum, and wine. Carters, sailors, and stevedores were busy. The Tontine Coffee-house was filled with underwriters, brokers, and merchants, all driving a brisk business, while the auctioneer on the front steps knocked off the goods which where heaped about the sidewalk. Carts, drays, and wheelbarrows jammed up the Wall and Pearl Street corner. But the next April all was quiet and stagnation; crowds and merchandise had vanished from Coffee-house Slip, and many commercial houses in the vicinity were closed up.† By midsummer the President and Secretary Gallatin were burdened with cases which required special instructions. They were tormented by personal applications for leave to transport. Against every loophole appeared the pressure of a besieging host. It was the most embarrassing law Jefferson had ever to execute; he had not expected such a sudden growth of fraud and open opposition. But he was resolved, nevertheless, that the convenience of the citizen should yield far enough to give the experiment a fair trial.‡ Massachusetts was the foremost State of this Union resolutely hostile to the embargo. Not only were her merchants placed directly under the descending screw of this new policy; but, allowing too little for the experimental workings of the President's mind, and taught to look upon him as a man of low cunning and French preferences, the secret foe of commerce, they ascribed every motive to the new restrictions sooner than the right one. The solid Federalist of Boston read his favorite newspaper in his counting-room. The tidings of the Chesapeake, which found that newspaper glossing over Burr's treason, set its writers first to arguing that war with England was not desirable; next, and after Canning had in * Jefferson's Works, 1807; Sullivan's Life; current newspapers. Jefferson's Works, July-August, 1808. formally disavowed the affront, to admitting there was a wrong, upon which, nevertheless, our government could insist no longer; and by the return of the Revenge persuaded that a triumph over Great Britain at this critical moment of her power would be more fatal to America than defeat.* Embargo was laid; and now suspicion stood for proof positive that Jefferson and the French Emperor had put their heads together to compass England's commercial ruin.t A packet, early in August, brought the news that Spain had revolted against Napoleon's attempt to put a Bonaparte on the throne. This new war promising an opportunity for renewing our trade with Spain and Portugal and their provinces and colonies, town meetings were held at Boston, Portland, and other Eastern seaports, praying the President to suspend the embargo sufficiently to permit of it. The President declined, upon present information, to do so. At some of these town meetings the embargo policy was upheld; in Salem, for example, where, in a patriotic speech, William Gray, the largest shipowner in New England, expressed his belief that foreign restrictions upon our commerce were too great for any honest merchant to attempt pursuing it. History must admit, that so far as embargo was used as a weapon for coercing Europe, it utterly disappointed expectation. The sacrifice required at home, in order to produce an impression abroad, proved of itself fatal in practice to the long endurance of any such experiment. If England bled, or France, under the operation, the United States bled faster. Jefferson miscalculated in supposing that the European struggle had nearly culminated, or that the nerveless Continental powers could organize an armed neutrality to protect their own interests. Instead of a sinking, vacillating, debt-ridden. England, he found a stubborn England making capital of * See Boston Centinel, July-December, 1807. Ib., January-June, 1808. The anti-embargo merchants, who were much chagrined by Gray's speech, imputed his approval of the President's policy to interest and the desire to crush his weaker rivals. This Gray publicly denied, and offered to prove that his own estate suffered like that of others. See Boston Centinel, August, 1808. 1808. JEFFERSON'S EMBARGO. 177 what it owed, its prodigious resources slowly uncoiling. He found a new ministry, hard as flint, with Parliament to brace it, bending with redoubled energies to the war, heedless of Liverpool remonstrances, marching the red-coats to break up meetings and suppress riots in Manchester and those other manufacturing towns where embargo and the Continental exclusion were most heavily felt. Next to making American commerce tributary to the British exchequer, the aim of those who framed the Orders in Council had been to drive it from the ocean, so that British merchants might absorb the maritime trade once more to themselves. This latter alternative embargo directly favored. Our non-importation act, which had now gone into effect against Great Britain, made it still less an object for that country to court a repeal of the embargo. By way, too, of partial offset to the loss of our market, a new one was opened to England by the outbreak in Spain. As if to exasperate us to the utmost, the Orders in Council were repealed as to that nation, but not the United States. Madison said, long years after, that a faithful execution of the embargo policy would have produced a crisis in the British West Indies that might have extorted justice from her without a resort to war.* This, however, one cannot readily believe. These colonies were at first in danger of starving for want of the necessaries of life, but it was soon perceived that the people could raise Indian corn for temporary subsistence. Cotton, too, a staple on which British manufacturers so greatly relied, was not long cut off because the American planter withheld it; but other places of production were tried, and Britain sent cargoes of the best cotton-seed to Africa for the purpose of supplying its necessities. The game of commercial restraints must be played quickly, or else denial is lopped into selfdenial; for productive energies, checked at one point, find quickly, like running water, a new outlet at another. Even now, to our people, the one solid, substantial, enduring advantage derived from this long-continued policy of European restraints was the impulse which a new necessity gave to American manufactures. 3 Madison's Writings, 444 (1824). England, on her behalf, now encouraged lawless evasions of the embargo by insidious favors to smuggling vessels. But Bonaparte, under the artful pretext of assisting Congress in its chosen policy, plundered American vessels wherever he could lay hold of them, openly applauding the embargo as a spirited resistance to the British Orders;* and his new Bayonne decree, against which Armstrong vainly remonstrated, directed that all American vessels arriving in France should be promptly seized and confiscated. The service of neutral carriers the Emperor had felt prepared to dispense with, because his Continental policy aimed to make Europe independent of the world, his colonies being left to shift for themselves. September. To both France and England Jefferson had offered, as originally intended, to take off the embargo in return for a repeal of obnoxious decrees. Each power assumed indifference to such a compact, while each charged that the other's first aggression had evoked its own action. Champagny, fostering the impression of friendship, evaded positive answer. Canning, on the contrary, arrogantly rejected the proposal, more than insinuating to Pinkney that the American policy had been expressly undertaken to help Napoleon, and that America was now the party most anxious to get rid of it. If embargo, he satirically observed, was intended for retaliation, it was partial; but if for mere municipal regulation, he had no complaint to make of it; and he hoped the present experiment might serve to teach that Great Britain was not so absolutely dependent on the trade of America as to be obliged to court a commercial intercourse.† Jefferson, in his anxiety to cover a retreat, dispatched Short with an autograph letter to the Emperor of Russia, asking him to interpose on behalf of neutral rights; but this secret mission came to nothing. Through the lines of Canning's caustic letters to Pinkney we may read a serene confidence on his part that events trans * Jefferson's Works, October 15th, 1808. + Executive Documents; Annals of Congress. Armstrong wrote from France, August 31st: We have somewhat overrated our means of coercion. Here it is not felt; and in England, amid the more recent and interesting events of the day, it is forgotten." Ib. |