ps of war could rightfully take from any
neutral merchant ship any seaman of British birth who was found on
board. In estimating this monstrous pretention, Americans have shown
little willingness to allow for the desperate struggle in which Great
Britain was involved, and the injury which she suffered from the number
of her seamen who, to escape impressment in their home ports and the
confinement of ships of war, sought service in neutral merchant ships.
Her salvation depended upon her navy; and seamen were so scarce as
seriously to injure its efficiency and threaten paralysis. This was
naturally no concern of the United States, which set up its simple,
undeniable right to the protection the neutral flag should give to all
persons and goods under it, which were not involved in any infraction of
belligerent rights. The straits of Great Britain, however, were too dire
to allow the voice of justice to override that of expediency. Had the
United States Navy been a force as respectable in numbers as it was in
efficiency, the same dictates of expediency might have materially
controlled the action of her opponent; might have prevented outrage and
averted war. As it was, right was set up against right--the right of the
neutral flag on the one hand against the right of a country to the
service of all her citizens on the other. The United States protested
and wrote with all the conviction of a state upon whose side justice
was. She resorted to measure after measure of peaceable coercion; but
she had no military force to show upon the sea, and her utterances were
consequently too uncertain to command respect. Great Britain continued
to take seamen from American merchant ships upon the plea of her right
to impress British seamen in any place; and, though the claim to detain
or search ships of war had been explicitly disavowed after the
Chesapeake affair of 1807, scant deference was shown to the vessels of a
power so little able to stand up for itself. In a day when most vessels
carried some guns for self-defense, it was a simple matter to ignore the
national character of an armed ship and to stop it unceremoniously. Of
such an insult Farragut heard during this stay in Havana. The brig
Vixen, of the United States Navy, had been fired into by a British ship
of war. "This," wrote Farragut in his journal, "was the first thing that
caused in me bad feeling toward the English nation. I was too young to
know anything about the Revolution; b